Just Thomism

Sin is not a perfection of free choice, but why not? The following is attractive:

a.) Any free action is a perfection of freedom.

b.) Every sin is a free action.

So sin is a perfection of freedom.

If “free action” means the absence of control by non-rational desire, that is, acting out of a deliberate or habitual decision about what is rationally best, then (a) is true but (b) is false. We frequently act after setting aside the deliberate or habitual rule about what is rationally best. I can just cry humbug at reason and act anyway, or simply dive into the act without consulting its proper rule at all. This is perhaps the best short definition of sin.

Freedom is a power to control non-rational desire, or subordinate it to rational goals. This should be clear from any of the arguments against free choice, which all assert that “reason” is post-hoc justification of a fundamentally non-rational process. On these sorts of accounts, (b) becomes false in an utterly new way, as the whole discussion of freedom is counterfactual. Sam Harris seems to pitch this as a reason for tolerance and acceptance, and perhaps it is, though not a tolerance we could rationally impose on non-rational desire.

Act is undefinable. Understood by its less intelligible opposites, it is what stands to potency as its fulness and that whose loss is always in some way evil. Still, act is understood prior to potency or evil, in fact its precisely what is understood in them.

Acts are first known to us as motions, but motions are imperfect realizations of the immobile.

Immobile means neither in motion nor at the term of its motion. Immobile and restless.