The Free Will Defense Reconsidered

 

We diagrammed the Free Will Defense like this:

  

1. God would permit the types of evil and suffering necessary for free will in the world.

2. Any world with free will is better than any world without it.

3. God had a choice between making an all-good world in which we didn’t have free will, and a world with evil and suffering in which we did have free will.

4. God can’t grant us free will without permitting its misuse, and the consequent evil and suffering.

                                                                       

4

    B     |

                        2          +          3

     A    |

                                    1

 

Once again, let’s focus our immediate attention on premise 4, which restricts God’s ability to act. When we first thought about this argument, we wondered whether or not this restriction upon God was appropriate, and now that we’ve examined omnipotence more thoroughly, we’re in a better position to decide. Is it the case that God can’t grant us free will without permitting its misuse? Is there some contradiction in terms involved in this?

 

It’s impossible for us to say whether there’s a contradiction in terms here without getting a little clearer about what free will is supposed to be. Free will is a sprawling and important topic within philosophy, but for our purposes we can say that free will is the ability to choose between actions without having that choice determined by factors outside ones control. For example, if you shoplift a candy bar because you decide to shoplift the candy bar instead of paying for it or leaving it alone, you’re exercising free will, but if you shoplift a candy bar because you’re being directed by a mad scientist who’s implanted a computer chip in your brain and is piloting your body by remote control, then you’re not exercising free will.

 

One of the reasons that free will is such an important issue in philosophy is that we seem to be morally responsible for our actions if and only if they are a product of our free will. You’d be to blame for stealing the candy bar, for instance, in the first case but not the second. Similarly, if you save a lost kitten out of your own free will, you’ve done a good thing, but if you save lost kitten because the mad scientist is directing you to do so, via that remote control hook-up, then you haven’t done a good thing – the scientist has.

 

So, loosely speaking, free will is the ability to choose between actions. But it isn’t the ability to choose between all conceivable actions.  I can’t decide sprout wings and fly, for example, but my free will is none the worse for that. I can decide to order pizza for dinner, to call a friend this evening, and to cheat or not cheat on my taxes, and my ability to pick and choose among those sorts of activities is enough, it seems to me, for me to have free will. In short, free will appears to be the ability to choose, not between all actions, but between the actions in some relevant, finite, set of possible actions.

 

And if this is right, couldn’t God have restricted the set of options available to us in such a way that shoplifting, cheating on our taxes, and doing other things that are evil or cause suffering, are just as impossible for us as sprouting wings and flying? We’d still have free will, since we’d still have the ability to pick and choose among particular actions; the set of options and actions would simply be restricted to include only morally neutral actions. You could decide what color socks to wear, but not to shoplift or save kittens. I could decide what font to use, but not cheat or be honest on my taxes. There’s no contradiction in terms involved here, is there? If God exists, it looks like he could have created a world like this, so it looks like premise 4 is false. God could grant us free will, of this type, without permitting its misuse, and the consequent evil and suffering.

  

1. God would permit the types of evil and suffering necessary for free will in the world.

2. Any world with free will is better than any world without it.

3. God had a choice between making an all-good world in which we didn’t have free will, and a world with evil and suffering in which we did have free will.

4. God can’t grant us free will without permitting its misuse, and the consequent evil and suffering.

                                                                       

4 L

    B     |

                        2          +          3

     A    |

                                    1

 

But can this argument be repaired? Can you think of any way that we can modify idea 4?