It waits somewhen in the dark infinity of time. Perhaps the past. Perhaps the future. Perhaps now. The worst thing.

Whenever something bad happens to me, such as that full quadriceps tendon tear, people helpfully remark “it could have been worse.” After that tendon tear, I wrote an essay on the worst thing focused on possibility and necessity. This is the issue of whether it could be worse. While the tendon tear was the worst thing to happen to me (as of this writing), bad things do happen and people tell me things could have been worse. Logically, there can only be one worst thing or, perhaps, there could be a tie for worst. What would be the worst thing? That which nothing worse can be conceived.

I am confident there must be such a thing (or things). Just as there must be a tallest building, there must be the worst thing. But, of course, this would not be much of an essay if I did not argue for my claim.

Conveniently, arguing for the worst thing is like arguing for the existence of a perfect thing. This is usually God. Thomas Aquinas used his Five Ways to argue for the existence of God and most of these arguments rely on a combination of an infinite regress and a reduction to absurdity. For example, Aquinas argued from the fact that things move to the need for an unmoved mover on the grounds that an infinite regress would arise if everything had to be moved by something else. A regress argument with a reduction to absurdity will serve quite nicely in arguing for the worst thing.

Take any thing. To avoid the usual boring philosophical approach of calling this thing X, I’ll call this thing Don. If Don is the worst thing, then the worst thing exists. If Don is not the worst thing, then there must be another thing that is worse than Don. That thing, which I will call J.D., is either the worst thing or not. If J.D.  is the worst thing, then the worst thing exists and is J.D. If it is not J.D, there must be something worse than J.D. This cannot go on to infinity so there must be a thing that is worse than all other things—the worst thing. I’ll call it Elon.

The obvious counter is to throw down the infinity gauntlet: if there is an infinite number of things, there will not be a worst thing. After all, for any thing, there will be an infinite number of other things. As Leibniz claimed, the infinite number cannot be said to be even or odd, therefore in an infinite universe a thing could not be said to be worst.

One might be inclined to reject the infinity gauntlet—after all, even if there were an infinite number of things, each thing would stand in a relation to all other things and there would thus still be a worst thing.

Another obvious counter is to assert that there could be two or more things that are equally bad—that is, identical in their badness. This would be the tie situation mentioned earlier. In the case of a tie, there would not be a single worst thing.  A counter to this is to steal from Leibniz again and argue that there could not be two identical things—they would need to differ in some way that would make one worse than the other. This could be countered by asserting that the two might be different, yet equally bad. In this case, the response would be to follow the model used in arguing for the best thing (God) and assert that the worst thing would be worst in every possible respect and hence anything equally as bad would be identical and thus there would be one worst thing, not two. I suppose that this would have some consolation value—it would certainly be a scarier universe that had multiple worst things rather than just one.

Of course, this just shows that there is something that is worse than all other things that happen to be—which leaves open the possibility that it is not the worst thing in another sense of the term. So now I will Oversimplified, the ontological argument begins with the claim that God is that which nothing greater can be conceived. If God only existed as an idea in the mind, a greater can be conceived, namely God existing for real. Thus, God must exist.

In the case of the worst thing, it would be that which nothing worse can be conceived. If it only existed as an idea in the mind, a worse thing can be conceived, namely the worst thing existing for real, perhaps in your basement or the White House. Thus, the worst thing must exist.

Another variant on the ontological argument can also be used here. One variation is that since God is perfect, He must exist. This is because if He did not exist, He would not be perfect. But He is, so He must. In the case of the worst thing, the worst thing must exist because it is the worst. This is because if it did not exist, it would not be the worst. But it is, so it does. This worst thing would be the truly worst thing (just as God is supposed to be the best thing).

This approach does, of course, inherit the usual difficulties of an ontological argument as pointed out by Gaunilo and Kant (that existence is not a quality). It would certainly be better for the universe if there is no worst thing, but that is just wishful thinking.

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