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The Thomist 74 (2010): 105-41 ORIGINAL JUSTICE, ORIGINAL SIN, AND THE FREE-WILL DEFENSE PAUL A. MACDONALD JR. Bucknell University Lewisburg, Pennsylvania THE "FREE-WILL DEFENSE" is one of the most enduring and powerful approaches Christian philosophers and theologians have employed in addressing the problem of evil. According to this approach, in its most basic form, God created human beings with intellect and will so that we could enter into loving relationships with God and with one another, as well as enjoy the broader privilege (which other nonrational inhabitants of the world do not enjoy) of making and exercising rationally contemplated as well as genuinely free choices. Such choices, however, cannot be constrained by other agents or causes influencing us to act in certain ways; even God, via an exercise of omnipotence, cannot create human beings such that we always freely choose to do what is good.1 Consequently, we human beings freely have chosen and continue to choose to do what is not good; that is, we make morally deficient choices with negative 1 Pace J. L. Mackie, who famously argues that it does remain within the scope of omnipotence to create human beings such that we always freely choose the good (see J. L. Mackie, "Evil and Omnipotence," Mind 64 [1955]: 200-212). Proponents of the free-will defense obviously disagree with Mackie on this point. See, for example, Stephen T. Davis, "Free Will and Evil," in Stephen T. Davis, ed., Encountering Evil: Live Options in Theodicy, 2d ed. (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2001), 77; and Peter van Inwagen, The Problem of Evil (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 75-77. John Hick argues that while God could have created human beings such that we always freely act rightly in relation to one another, he could not have created human beings such that we always freely act rightly in relation to God (see John Hick, Evil and the God ofLove, 2d ed. [1977; reprint, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007], 271-75). 105 106 PAUL A. MACDONALD, JR. consequences, most notably, inducing harm in others.2 Thus, as it is often described, the free-will defense shows how the existence of God is compatible with the existence of evil because (1) human beings, rather than God, are the cause of evil, or at least a significant class of evils, what are called "moral evils"; and (2) the existence of moral evils and all their negative consequences are still insufficient to outweigh the great good that free will is-that good again, being the fundamental ability, which all human beings possess, to make genuinely free choices and carry out those choices unimpeded.3 Construed in this most basic form, the free-will defense still suffers from significant defects. First, it cannot account for the existence of "natural evils" such as sickness, disease, natural disasters, and even death that do not necessarily result from the choices of moral agents. Second, it remains ambiguous at best whether free will really is the sort of good robust enough to outweigh all instances of its misuse, particularly when we reflect on the most heinous instances of its misuse on both an individual and a global level. Of course, whether free will in fact constitutes such a good is something only God, or an omniscient mind, could know; thus, for all we know, the very existence and exercise of free will does (or will) outweigh all instances of its misuse. Furthermore, it fully remains within the scope of omnipotence to bring good out of evil, whether moral or natural.4 Yet it still 2 We also fail morally insofar as we refrain from doing what we ought to do. Such failures to act rightly also can induce harm in others (and in ourselves). 3 In other words, essential to the goodness of free will is the ability to bring about states of affairs in the world, whether good or bad. Thus, by continually intervening and preventing us from bringing about bad states of affairs by way of our free choices, which presumably God could do, God also would be violating an important aspect of our freedom. For an elaboration of this point, see Michael J...

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