Was Leibniz An Egoist?

Recent scholarship is nearly unanimous in attributing some form of egoism to Leibniz’s moral philosophy. In this paper, I argue that there are substantive reasons to reject this status quo. First, I argue that any non-trivial form of egoism must take all of an agent’s ends to be self-directed, and that this is incompatible with Leibniz’s theory of justice. Second, I argue that a rational psychology is non-trivially hedonist only if it understands pleasure as a separately identifiable aim of all actions, and that this is incompatible with Leibniz account of pleasure.