The mere ability to choose between good and evil is the lowest limit of freedom, and the only thing that is free about it is the fact that we can still choose good.
To the extent that you are free to choose evil, you are not free. An evil choice destroys freedom.
We can never choose evil as evil: only as an apparent good. But when we decide to do something that seems to us to be good when it is not really so, we are doing something that we do not really want to do, and therefore we are not really free.
~ Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation, ch. 27 (1961).
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Tags: Quotes
How very Platonic/Christian of Merton.
Of course, there’s no reason to believe that either Merton or Plato is correct — why can’t people choose to do evil knowing that it is evil? Certainly if you define evil such that no good can come from an evil action, even to the person who acts, then choosing to do evil does not serve the actors’ self-interest. So what? People knowingly do things that do not serve their self interest all the time — powerful feelings, like spite, get the best of us all the time.