How does one characterize free choice in regard to our nature and our last end?
(or of any creature?)
Surely we don’t have the ability to defy our nature, so how can the ability to choose evil be reconciled with human nature?
I think it may go like this: truth and goodness exist in grades, human nature (rationality) is therefore like a magnet that is attracted to many different truths and so it is in keeping with man’s definition to be able to choose evil (lesser goods over higher ones).
Again, one has to distinguish between what human nature makes possible and what is rational for a creature with a human nature to do. For a creature with a vulturine nature it is both possible and rational to eat carrion, while for a creature with a human nature it is possible but not rational.
With regard to our last end (
telos), we know even from non-human nature that not everything reaches that which its internal nature is ordered towards. Not every acorn becomes a sexually mature oak tree- indeed only a tiny minority of them do, yet nothing supernatural has happened to the other acorns or sapling oak trees that did not reach maturity. Or to go back to animal behavior, a puppy is obviously “designed” to turn into an adult dog, but when it eats a fatal amount of chocolate it thwarts this natural end. In one sense the puppy acted not in accord with its nature, but in another sense it acted entirely in accord with it. Obviously every such non-human example is imperfect since these are not free creatures, but it establishes the distinction I wish to make between two ways something can be in or out of accord with something’s nature.
When it comes to humans, when we commit a sin, especially a mortal sin, we act in a way not in accord with the final end to which we are ordered, but nevertheless we act within the bounds of what our human nature permits. When we speak of something being according to a creature’s nature we could mean it in either sense, so we could say sin is in accord with human nature or is not, depending on whether we have in mind a human being’s natural abilities or his
telos.
When it comes to being attracted to different goods, the idea you’ve expressed has a lot of history in Catholic theology, but I’m not the biggest fan myself at least without some caveats. It’s true we always choose goods, but the language of goods “pulling” the will towards them can be problematic in my opinion. It can lead to the idea that whatever good is perceived to be the greatest will be the one that pulls the hardest, and so will invariably be the one chosen, and this position has indeed been taken by many Catholics throughout history. Since we recognize different degrees of goodness with our intellects, that would mean, first of all, that the will is always entirely faithful to the intellect, which is not only counterintuitive based on personal experience but would seem to eliminate any basis for moral fault, since you would always be doing what you honestly thought was best.
Dante (apparently basing himself on Aquinas if one can trust the footnotes in my copy of
The Divine Comedy) tried to get around this implication by saying that the will can choose how the intellect is applied, and so if the intellect is applied badly so as to misjudge the relative value of different goods it is still the person’s fault. But it seems to me that this doesn’t work since the choices the will makes regarding the application of the intellect is based on prior information gained by the intellect about the goodness of knowledge and understanding, and the pull of this perceived good would presumably be just as inexorable as any other.
This idea could also produce some serious problems when one applies it to the relationship between grace and free will, leading to an idea of irresistible grace for the elect (grace sufficiently strong to pull their wills to God) and insufficient grace for the reprobate (grace not sufficiently strong to pull their wills to God).
I would propose instead that instead of the goods perceived by the intellect actively pulling a passive will this way or that, we should think of the goods as the passive party and the will as the active one. The intellect presents various perceived goods and the will can choose from among any of them. By nature it can’t choose evil simply for the sake of evil, it always does choose some good, but it can choose lesser goods that exclude greater ones. Such a choice defies reason because it disregards the hierarchy of goods revealed by the intellect, and so it produces an internal injustice, with the will refusing to submit to its natural master (so to speak), the intellect. This internal injustice is the essence of moral evil, and when it extends to the rejection of God in favor of finite goods it thwarts man from his
telos.
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