The Love that Binds

You can't value freedom if you hate disobedience

One of the common arguments for why God allows evil is that God fundamentally values free will. This defense worked for me for many years, but I think it is fundamentally flawed.

I'm a novelist, I create characters and I write their stories. I have the ability to either force a character to do what I want them to do in order to forward the plot, or to give them the freedom to act in ways that surprise me. Because I have limited processing power, major characters have freedom, minor characters don't. Presumably God does not have this limitation.

Giving a character freedom, means allowing them to make decisions I disagree with, perhaps decisions that are self-destructive or that require me to make major plot changes. Once that gift is given, however, I see it as sacrosanct. I will not force the actions of a character that has "come alive." I may go back, edit, change some aspect of the situation so that they are more likely to choose to go in a productive direction, but to compel their behaviour would be, in essence, to kill them – to reduce them to a doll acting out stories in accord with my will and my values.

But I can't have it both ways. Either I want my characters to be other than myself, to have all the freedom that I am capable of bestowing on them, or I want them to be dolls. Respecting their freedom/otherness specifically entails respecting that freedom is the freedom to not do my will. To create a character  who has freedom and then throw a fit when they "disobey" me would be fundamentally contradictory. It would mean not understanding the gift that I have given, or the responsibility that it entails on my part.

So if the reason that there is suffering in the world is that God respects and loves our freedom – our otherness from God – then it follows that our freedom and otherness from God, and thus our "disobedience" are greater goods than if we were just obedient instruments of God's will. And if that is true, then it is nonsense to say that “sin” consists in not-doing God’s will, that God is offended by the inherent logic of the gift God chose to give.

Preferential vs. Moral Freedom

It might be said that there is not a strong analogy: my works are limited and constrained, Gods are not. However, the same basic principle applies regardless of context.

To see why, it helps to distinguish between two possible forms of freedom.

a) the freedom to choose between morally neutral alternatives (strawberry vs. vanilla ice cream; whether to study psychology or physics)

b) the freedom to make morally significant decisions.

If b is valuable, it has to be valuable for a reason. That reason is usually given as "love." But why does love have to involve morally significant freedom? 

Clearly, love can involve preferential freedom . As a limited being, I have a supply of effective love that is essentially delimited by my resources, including emotional and attentional resources. If I choose to spend the evening hanging out with one friend and watching Star Trek vs. choosing to spend the evening hanging out with a different friend and playing Mage, in both cases, I am preferentially allocating resources that communicate love, affection, etc. No human has sufficient time/energy to equally prioritize relationships with all other humans, so we make preferential choices about who we will love in a concrete, practical way.

There is also a kind of morally obligatory, base-level love that we owe to all other conscious beings. This is love in the sense of "willing the good of the other" or "respecting the other as a person." We see no ethical difficulty with using compulsive or coercive methods to enforce this kind of universal love. These forms of love are morally obligatory: there is no value in the fact that people can choose not to practice fundamental consideration for others. For this reason, we have no problem using coercive means (operant conditioning in childhood, legal penalties, etc.) to force people to engage in basic prosocial behaviours. Nor is there any philosophical justification that I can see for equivocating between this kind of obligatory love, which can rightly be imposed on a person with or without their consent, and the kind of voluntary love which requires free will.

Theodicies based on freedom invoke a strong relationship between love and free will. But this relationship is only operative for forms of love which one party desires, but is not entitled to. Freedom in this case is tied to love because love involves respecting the freedom and otherness of the other person, including their right to want a different kind of relationship than you want.

But you can't have it both ways. Either we are entitled to be other than God, which means we are entitled not to do God's will because God values our otherness, or God does not value our freedom, in which case the alleged value of freedom doesn't provide a basis for theodicy. 

Eros, born of Poverty and Plenty

Humans struggle with this because we see that love means valuing the other in their otherness, but we often feel the need to be able to control or appropriate the person that we love. This contradiction within the human psyche is explicable because we are simultaneously needy and capable of attending to other people's needs. When we apply our limited attentional, emotional and practical resources to a relationship, we are making a gamble: if the other person does not reciprocate, then we suffer an unredeemed loss. In order to mitigate this risk, we establish relationships of mutual obligation: we make contracts, covenants and commitments. 

None of these things are necessary in cases where we are able to love without counting the cost. In such cases we consider it morally superior to offer love with “no strings attached.” So, for example, in a social context where children need to start helping with farming chores at an early age in order to prevent the starvation of the entire family, people will generally see it as obligatory for children to obediently contribute their labour. But as soon as a society, or individual, becomes sufficiently affluent we switch to a model where parents are obligated to provide for a child’s basic needs without demanding anything in return.

Similarly, if I am in a position to offer someone in need an interest-free loan, there is no problem with drawing up a contract that will allow me to specify terms of repayment. But we assign greater moral goodness to an act of generosity in which I make a free gift with no expectation of repayment.

We could argue about whether these are or are not appropriate ways of construing virtue, but if we’re talking about Christianity, we have to acknowledge that the idea of the moral superiority of the free gift comes largely from Christ. If Christianity is true, then God places a high moral value on giving to those who cannot repay (Luke 14:13-14).

This makes sense insofar as we generally posit that God needs nothing. If God does not need us to reciprocate, there is no reason why God needs to feel threatened by the possibility that we will not. Allowing us to freely choose whether to preferentially love or not love God makes perfect sense within this context. It makes sense that God would value freely given love, and it makes sense that God would therefore value the free will that makes us capable of loving God freely.

Valuing Consent Means Valuing Refusal

But it only makes sense if we recognize that the relationship between love and free will is founded on the fact that love, on the side of lover, consists in recognizing the right of the beloved not to reciprocate. I don’t, for example, value my son’s ability to say “no” when I tell him to put his shirt on and get ready for school, I do value my son’s ability to say “no” when I ask him whether he wants to cuddle. 

These are both manifestations of his free will, but I evaluate them differently. In the morning, my ability to freely pursue my projects depends on my son’s cooperation with those projects, and I will, if necessary, use heavy-handed and coercive methods (like threatening to take away his YouTube privileges) if he refuses to get dressed. I don’t particularly care whether he freely and enthusiastically consents to wear boots in the snow, or whether he has the right kind of interior dispositions towards getting in the car. Superficial compliance will suffice.

However, when I invite him to share a moment of intimacy and affection, I do care about his preferences and dispositions. I care about him as another person. And this means that if he says “No, I’d rather play Roblox,” I prefer for him to go and play Roblox. My love is for him; it’s not a desire for him to exist for my sake. 

Love, in this case, values the fact that the other person is an independent being. This kind of love does demand free consent because it consists in loving the other as other, not merely as a reflection of myself. Our intuition that God values morally significant free will is founded in our intuition that love is not consistent with narcissism.

To value freely-willed love, however, is also to value the other person’s “no.” Insofar as my love is not self-interested, I want the other person to make independent decisions, I want them to do what they want to do rather than what I might prefer. To value another person’s free will is to actively will that they be free – not to will that they would freely come to the conclusion that they should conform to my plans for them.

If You Value My Freedom, You Can’t Hate It When I Use It

Freely given love is inconsistent with notions of obedience and servitude. If I see any deviation from my set plan as “sin” or “evil” or “disobedience,” I do so because I do not actually value the freedom of the other. In cases where I am willing to punish disobedience, it is because, in those cases, I do not actually want the other person to be free to make their own decisions. Maybe I want them to have limited, preferential freedom (the freedom to choose the Spiderman shirt vs. the Mario shirt), but I don’t value their freedom to refuse to do as I say.

It is inconsistent and incoherent (not to mention abusive) to attach a high value to someone’s free consent, and then also punish them for not consenting. If God sees any deviation from God's will as "sin" then God does not value morally significant free will. God loves only God's reflection.

If you want to say that God is all goodness, and only what is good is lovable, then I suppose that in this sense God is stuck: God’s nature requires God to love only that which is like God. Such a God cannot love the other in their otherness, because to be other-than-God is to be unlovable by God.

But in this case, the purported value of morally significant free will has no foundation. If God is the only real good, the ultimate "end in itself," then all value derives from God. So if God sees the application of morally significant free will as hateful, as "sin," then such freedom has no value. In which case, the value of moral freedom cannot be appealed to to explain the existence of evil.

Photo by Rebecca Li on Unsplash