John Russell Roberts' Nice New Paper on Why There is Something Rather Than Nothing

Roberts, John Russell. "Axiarchism and Selectors", Faith & Philosophy 31:4 (October 2014), pp. 412-421. The mention of the notion of selectors reveals that it interacts in crucial ways with Derek Parfit's important paper, "Why Anything? Why This?". Here's the abstract:

This essay offers a defense of Axiarchism’s answer to the question, “Why does the world exist?” against prominent objections leveled against it by Derek Parfit. Parfit rejects the Axiarchist answer while abstracting from it his own Selector strategy. I argue that the abstraction fails, and that even if we were to regard Axiarchism as an instance of a Selector hypothesis, we should regard it as the only viable one. I also argue that Parfit’s abstraction leads him to mistake the nature and, thereby, the force of Axiarchism’s claim to being an ultimate explanation. Finally, I defend the Axiarchist’s claim that the good could not fail to rule.