Saturday, July 1, 2023

Blake Ostler on on 2 Nephi 2:16-17, 23, 26-27

 This scripture makes several salient points relevant to the Mormon understanding of free agency. First, free agency requires that beings must be able to rationally estimate the relative merits of possible course of action in choosing. Free agents are minimally the sorts of beings that can appreciate the consequences and moral significance of their actions. For example, I fa person thinks that by puling the trigger he will cause a flower to be planted rather than a person killed, we excuse the person for the results of the act because that person cannot appreciate ethe moral consequences of his act. Similarly, the mere fact that a spider has power to move its legs this way and that way does not mean that the spider acts morally. Only beings that have moral beliefs and expectations regarding their acts are morally responsible beings. I will refer to this as the “appreciation of the consequences” condition of free agency.

 

Second, persons are not free if they are merely acted upon and do not act for themselves. Principle (CC) entails that a person is not free unless she can control the causes of her decisions by herself causally initiating the act of decision. If the power to do an act or causes which give rise to an act, arise wholly outside of me, then I am a mere conduit for some other force or agent’s power. It follows form (CC) that if the person’s choices are caused by factors over which the person has no control, then the person is not blameworthy for the results of such choices. It also follows that God cannot insure that persons will always choose to accept him or follow his fill consistent with free will. This is because God cannot consistently cause persons to always do what is right. If the Augustinian/Calvinist notion of hypothetical free will were accepted, God could consistently cause persons to always freely do what is right. If God is good, then why doesn’t he cause persons to always do what is right? The Book of Mormon opens the way for a free-will defense to the problem of evil because it rejects the notion of hypothetical free will as an adequate notion of free will.

 

Third, free will, if genuine, requires a choice among alternatives that are “enticing” or live options and genuinely open to the agent in the moment of free decision. For example, a choice between being slugged in the head and revealing to mafiosi the location of a person hiding from the Mafia is not a genuine choice—at the very least, external coercion seems relevant to whether an act is done freely. Actions done in the absence of choices may be morally innocent, but they are not morally significant. It appears that a person must be free to do otherwise in the sense that it is genuinely within a person’s power to do good or to refrain from doing good and thereby to do evil. Moreover, they are able to do good or evil not merely if conditions were different than they actually are, but actually have such power in the actual circumstances that obtain in the moment of free decision.

 

Finally, a person cannot be free if she is merely acted upon. Human free will arises when persons are free to act for themselves independently to a degree of all other events which might causally contribute to a person’s act, including God’s influence. Mormonism rejects the notion that free will is possible if causal determinism is true.

 

Blake T. Ostler, Exploring Mormon Thought: The Attributes of God (Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford Books, 2001), 209-10

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