Let’s turn now to the third challenge to free will and responsibility: the cases of Jesus and Mary,.
First, I need to say something about supererogation. A human action can be morally significant two distinct and non-overlapping ways: by fulfilling or failing to fulfill our all-things-considered moral duties (that is, by being sinful or not sinful), and by going beyond what is merely required to a greater or lesser degrees (being more or less supererogatory, above and beyond the call of duty).
Although neither Jesus nor Mary could have committed sin, both did engage in genuine deliberation and choice with respect to innocent actions, and these choices shaped their characters (see Luke 2:40). Granting that every choice involved supererogatory merit, still there are many different, incompatible and incommensurable forms of such merit, and so Jesus and Mary were able to make ontologically and morally significant choices that shaped their respective virtues in contingent ways. On these suppositions, both Mary and Jesus made many morally responsible choices.
What about the blessed in heaven?
One important way of being ontologically responsible for one’s moral character is by choosing to cooperate with God’s grace. Hence, the sinless choices of the blessed in heaven involve moral responsibility.
This account has the further advantage of explaining why our moral responsibility typically grows as we become more mature. The growth is both in terms of extent (more and more of our choices fall within the scope of moral responsibility) and degree. We acquire higher degrees of responsibility as we become morally (and not just ontologically) responsible for the state of our character.
Let me turn now to the third challenge: how do the cases of Mary and Jesus affect the free will theodicy?
The Free Will Theodicy
Why didn’t God give everyone (starting with Adam and Eve) the same fulness of grace received by Mary and Jesus?
As the cases demonstrate, free will does not entail the possibility of sinning. So, why not free will without sin at all?
Standard free-will theodicy (as found, for example, in recent work by Plantinga or Swinburne) presupposes a greater good principle: any evil in the world must be such that it was impossible for God to prevent it without losing some greater good.
The GGP in turn presupposes: (i) there are possible worlds (feasible for God to actualize) that maximize the total net good in the world, and (ii) a perfectly good and reasonable God would actualize one of those worlds. So, the actual world must be a maximally good feasible, a world that God could not have improved upon (by, for example, preventing some inessential evil).
I, following Thomas Aquinas, reject that first assumption. There is no best possible world. For any world God could have actualized, there are still better worlds He could have actualized instead. So, there is no reason to suppose that every evil is necessary for some greater good.
Aquinas affirms a much weaker principle: every actual evil is such that God will use that evil as raw material for some good, a good that is not overwhelmed by the permitted evil. Let’s call this the evil as material cause of good or MCG principle.
There are two crucial differences between GG and MCG principle: (i) MCG makes no claim that the evil is a absolutely necessary condition for the subsequent good—merely that it is being used by God as a means to the good. (ii) MCG makes no claim that the good produced is at least equal to the evil—-the good and evil could be mutually incommensurable.
Universal grace at conception was feasible for God to arrange but would have been inappropriate, given human nature. Jesus and Mary are exceptional cases, and the fullness of grace they received at conception was necessary for their particular roles in the economy of salvation. It is more appropriate in general that we should first encounter grace after having obtained the age of reason, when we can choose whether or not to cooperate with that grace. God is able, in a variety of ways, to bring some good out of cases of temporary or even obstinate non-cooperation, and that is all that is required.
Free Will is Important
To conclude this three-post sequence, let me return to three rationales for free will and see how they fare.
First, the legal and quasi-legal uses of moral responsibility. Free will (in the Aristotelian model) is necessary for moral responsibility, and moral responsibility is a necessary condition for deserved punishment. So, desert can continue to play its limiting role
Second, we can consistently deny that sin is essential to human beings, or even a necessary consequence of human nature. God created human beings in a condition of innocence, and their bad characters are fully the result of ontologically contingent choices.
Does this amount to Pelagianism? Is anything left of the Fall and original sin? We can say that the objective probability of a fallen human being’s avoiding sin without grace is essentially zero, while maintaining that such sinless life was a bare metaphysical possibility. That suffices to set aside Pelaganianism as a practical matter.
Finally, on the question of theodicy, we can assert that human evil is a by-product of two things that are essentially good, namely human nature and human freewill. We don’t have to claim that this is the best of all possible worlds.
