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
