Does free will allow us to *choose* to be evil?

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Hey @Rabbi I wish you a good Sabbath, God bless.

So I’ve been thinking for 1 week about what it is I wanted to tell you, and I finally figured it out:

‘‘A Catholic, a Rabi, and a Metaphysics Scholastic Economist walk into a bar…The issue is raised:“Evil is only the absence of good.” The Catholic say:“Off course evil exist”; The Rabi says:“Forgetting already?!”; And the Scholastic economist says:“Evil is just a quantitative deficit that can be derivatively leveraged through qualitative easing”.’’

[btw @Magnanimity, I liked your last post, I thought that one was cool.]
 
If I understand what I’ve learned from St Thomas Aquinas, there is no one who will ever do what is subjectively (that is, by their judgement) evil, but will always do what is subjectively good. The problem thus with sinning is one’s free refusal to align their subjective good with the objective (that is, what is truly) good. This could be the reason why the Bible calls sin by using the term meaning “missing the mark”. This is also why pride is the source of all sin: “My way or the highway!” Lastly, this is the reason why some psychological defects decreases guilt of sin: one must be able to freely distinguish and choose or deny what is objectively good to be able to sin.
 
Edwyn said:
This is also why pride is the source of all sin: “My way or the highway!”
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It seems that pride would not be the source of all sin, but of all culpability?
 
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Hmm, I think you’re right:
Pride is said to be the most grievous of sins because that which gives sin its gravity is essential to pride. Hence pride is the cause of gravity in other sins. Accordingly previous to pride there may be certain less grievous sins that are committed through ignorance or weakness. But among the grievous sins the first is pride, as the cause whereby other sins are rendered more grievous. http://www.newadvent.org/summa/3162.htm#article7
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Edwyn said:
there is no one who will ever do what is subjectively (that is, by their judgement) evil, but will always do what is subjectively good. The problem thus with sinning is one’s free refusal to align their subjective good with the objective (that is, what is truly) good. This could be the reason why the Bible calls sin by using the term meaning “missing the mark”.
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This is interesting because I was going to ask about sin’s being “missing the mark.” Now the idea seems clearer to me.

I guess what it means is that people are not aiming for what they think is evil, so they are not trying to be evil.

So I has to look up my original question, and I must say that the answer seems to be a bit slippery.
 
Just remember that for St Thomas Aquinas, goodness equals being: the goodness of something is what is proper to that thing. A human’s goodness is to maintain and ultimately improve their humanity. Therefore, any good act is an act that makes one more human, and an evil act makes one less human. This kind of thinking is apparent in our language, where we define people by their sins, suggesting that they somehow lost something of their humanity: murderer, adulterer, glutton, animal, etc. On the other hand, when somebody achieves all that is good, then they become perfect, and we call them saints, and even in our minds we think of them as people that are extraordinary, even superhuman.

Now one of the things that defines humanity is their free will, the ability to choose. Choosing is never about between what is good and what is bad, but it is always between goods. The thing about humans though is that we have different powers inside us and each may have different ideas on what is good. To cut the story short, our highest power is our reason. Reason is the one power that makes us closest to God, defines our humanity, and it is the power that we use to navigate the world. I have read somewhere that reason is our communion with reality. Sin then is to not follow the judgement of reason but rather to choose the lesser goods suggested by our other powers.
 
I need to think this over to get the full ramifications, but you explained it really well!
 
Edwyn said:
our highest power is our reason
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Henry James said: “Kipling strikes me personally as the most complete man of genius, as distinct from fine intelligence, that I have ever known.”
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George Orwell saw Rudyard Kipling as “a jingo imperialist”, who was “morally insensitive and aesthetically disgusting”
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@Annie, looking back on history…Or at our present…I’m actually glad I answered through anticipation the “reason fallacy” before it was ever posted on your thread 🙂

@Rosie11
 
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If Kipling’s reason makes him less connected with reality then that is not the reason St Thomas Aquinas was talking about and thus a strawman fallacy.
 
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Wow, you are getting all the homeruns here @Annie!
CCC 1778 Conscience is a judgment of reason whereby the human person recognizes the moral quality of a concrete act that he is going to perform, is in the process of performing, or has already completed. In all he says and does, man is obliged to follow faithfully what he knows to be just and right. It is by the judgment of his conscience that man perceives and recognizes the prescriptions of the divine law:
Conscience is a law of the mind; yet [Christians] would not grant that it is nothing more; I mean that it was not a dictate, nor conveyed the notion of responsibility, of duty, of a threat and a promise. . . . [Conscience] is a messenger of him, who, both in nature and in grace, speaks to us behind a veil, and teaches and rules us by his representatives. Conscience is the aboriginal Vicar of Christ.
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What do you mean? Everything about a human, including reason, serves their capacity to love. Man is a loving machine. All of a man’s emotions, actions and thoughts pour out of love. Love is man’s most primal act.

Love is man’s desire for what is good.
 
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I guess that sometimes I see people applying reason to an issue and doing something other than what love would suggest. I imagine that this would go against God’s will one way or the other, but it seems kind of cold to me to just use reason.
 
Are you sure you are not equating “reason” with “logic” or “science”? Because the latter two are different from the former. “Reason” in this case is more akin to “wisdom”.
 
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