Freedom and the problem of evil › The kind of freedom doing the work

Plantinga's defense uses freedom with respect to a particular action. In the relevant sense, a person can perform the action and can refrain from performing it; antecedent conditions and causal laws do not determine which she does. This is a libertarian conception of freedom. The defense does not establish that this conception is the only acceptable account of human agency.

An action is morally significant when performing it would be wrong and refraining right, or the reverse. Choosing between two equally harmless refreshments need not involve that kind of significance. Keeping a serious promise ordinarily does. The defense concerns the value of morally significant freedom, rather than simply having many available options.

Consider the promise again as a hypothetical illustration. If a person's decision is causally determined by a controller to be the right one, it lacks the freedom Plantinga is invoking. That remains true even if the controller produces a pleasant feeling of independence. Being unaware of control would not remove the control.

But if she freely keeps the promise, nothing in the definition requires her to break a different promise later. A capacity to do wrong is not the same as actually doing wrong. Nor does freedom require a particular frequency of mistakes. This distinction is essential: the defense cannot infer the necessity of evil simply from the definition of freedom.

Plantinga proposes that a world with significantly free creatures who freely do more good than evil can be more valuable, other things equal, than a world without free creatures. This is a proposed evaluative premise. Its inclusion helps construct the defense; it does not establish a general rule that freedom outweighs any amount of suffering.