Free-Will, Moral Evil, and Disposition to the Good
Martyrdom of St. John the Baptist
In The Matrix Resurrections (2021), Morpheus tells Neo: “People believe the craziest things these days. They think the world’s built on choice... when it's really just another system of control.” If you have the slightest ear to Hollywood news, then you have likely heard about the Lively v. Baldoni lawsuit and the petty attempts at control which are its foundations, and even the ubiquitous relationship-ending circumstances that concern attempts to control the other whether out of malice or fear. Another instance of this is the pro-choice woman lashing out by assaulting a pro-life reporter that has recently surfaced. In both these examples of the appeal to force fallacy, one may note that it reveals there is an absence of substance to claim to the contrary of better things. So the question arises a priori, "Is moral regulation proper or antithetical to freedom?" However, given these examples and the popular bend they are expressions of, perhaps the question is truly, "is the greater form of freedom the one where certain people have popular sway, everything is permitted, and nothing is forgiven, or the one that appeals to objective, universal concepts—more forgiving in light of transgression, yet grounded in truths that situate freedom within the responsibility to pursue the good?" I would argue that freedom is not the absence of rules, but the capacity to pursue the good through obedience to natural and divine order; when rejected, this order gives way to addiction and moral violence, even against the self.
The concept of natural necessity regards the understanding of freedom as accompanied by rules. Laws are not an absolutely oppressive thing, as the enemy would have us believe. We are not, as they say, "missing out" if we choose not the evil to which we are disposed or most desires of—acquiescing to it is a worse crime against our freedom.
This participation in evil not only further robs us of the goodness and harmony for which we were made (which are proper to our nature) and disposes us more deeply toward evil, but it also binds us to the means of achieving the good just as much as to the good itself—especially when the pursuit of the good is made absolute. This path disposes one less and less to do the good, removing the freedom once had to only pursue the proximate good for the self. By frequency and magnitude (of both means taken and destruction brought through ends attained), this proportionately decreases not only the end in goodness but also the ultimate good for all. This is what the virtuous call “addiction.”
This coercive necessity is that which man’s concupiscence, demonic suggestion, and cultures of sin and death utilize to remove one’s ability to make free use of the natural necessity to attain good ends using at least neutral means: first, in that which corresponds to the sin; second, in ways proportional to the goodness of ends desired; and third, toward other indirectly related goods.
Rather, obedience is traced as the maximization of both potency (the ability to accomplish good) and health (conditions that maximize potency through ideal psychological, moral, physical, spiritual, etc., harmonies). Natural obedience makes use of natural necessity (as regards spirituality and physicality).
This “natural obedience” is the proper operating environment in which grace and man’s will operate—apart from which no, or perhaps at best little or the wrong, good is attained. Acting outside of this environment—i.e., the context of what we know or once knew as safe/legal—is violence. Because if we neglect such objective boundaries (which in any case were once a key aspect of one’s inclination to the good, both ultimate and proximate, even should we think them arbitrary), then we are only guided by our mutable and easily corrupted subjective “boundaries.” “We call that violent which is against the inclination of a thing.”[1]
In conclusion, therefore, to use one’s freedom contrary to one’s conscience and the commandments of God is an act of violence that first destroys oneself—at least through separation from the path of good and relationship with God—and then others, as it corresponds to direct and indirect implications of (a) sin(s). If we are truly interested in the decline in violence (as many who posse religion claim to be in their atheism), then I would suggest that there is no religious violence like that of atheist religious violence, the kind that disbelieves even the concept of a moral framework rather than different priorities in its way (making the beheading of John the Baptist an appropriate depiction of this). Stop the attempts at control, stop the violence, and choose what is good, and WHEN you fail, ask God for help and do a little better tomorrow, if we all did this, the world would eventually improve exponentially, as we would likely find there is no real need for control out of fear as with Blake Lively or the aggressive pro-choicer because we would control ourselves with a joy and peace no evil or sociopathology can provide, and live a truly scientific existence with a reliable moral compass that cannot corrupt with the newest blatant evil, setting the new precedent of permission. the good is the best one can wish for one’s creation, therefore, is it not necessary that we are disposed to the good? Is it not freedom to be able to choose the best for oneself (and for at least those who we come to love if applicable)? It seems our woundedness makes us feel distaste at the idea of disposition to the good because we find the good difficult to choose in a world of dis-harmony and the only culprit is really us.
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