Praise & Blame

Genesis 20

Abraham and Abimelech

1 From there Abraham journeyed toward the territory of the Negeb and lived between Kadesh and Shur; and he sojourned in Gerar. 2 And Abraham said of Sarah his wife, "She is my sister." And Abimelech king of Gerar sent and took Sarah. 3 But God came to Abimelech in a dream by night and said to him, "Behold, you are a dead man because of the woman whom you have taken, for she is a man’s wife." 4 Now Abimelech had not approached her. So he said, "Lord, will you kill an innocent people? 5 Did he not himself say to me, 'She is my sister'? And she herself said, 'He is my brother.' In the integrity of my heart and the innocence of my hands I have done this." 6 Then God said to him in the dream, "Yes, I know that you have done this in the integrity of your heart, and it was I who kept you from sinning against me. Therefore I did not let you touch her.

Usually free will theorists contend that only relevantly free agents, free in the libertarian way, are proper subjects of ascriptions of praise and blame. That moral praise and blame presuppose the relevant type of control over your actions that only a libertarian account can afford. But in Genesis 20 not only do with have the passage implying that Abimelech made a choice, we have him saying that he cannot be blamed for his actions. But also contained is the presupposition that it was God who kept Abimelech from sinning. That God could have allowed him to sin, and then blamed him. Abimelech’s not sinning was not in his control in the libertarian sense. He had a possible alternative closed off. Whether Abimelech sinned or not, it was up to what God allowed.

Assume that there are two doors in front of you, doors 1 and 2. Now, assume that in front of door 2 is an invisible force field. Thus you would be “kept from” entering door 2. 2 is not a live option for you in the sense that you can instantiate that choice. Say you enter door 1. Would we say that this person was not free? If so, then was Abimelech not free? Then why the comment of his integrity? That he shouldn’t be blamed? And, could it not just as easily be that Abimelech sinned while God “kept him” from not sinning? And, if so, the passage intimates that he would have been blamed.

So, either Abimelech was not free in this passage (which is not at all clear from the text, and seems to presuppose that he was), or he could have been blamed for doing something he didn’t have the ability to actually refrain from doing (assuming that if God "keeps you" from Xing, you cannot nevertheless X by overriding his power). He would have been “kept from” entering that first door. And, just sticking with the passage, to say, “I cannot be blamed for I am morally in the clear. The actions I chose to do are not worthy of ascriptions of blame,” seems to imply freedom not robotics (as the dichotomy is often posed). But he didn’t have an alternative possibility. He was “kept from” instantiating one of them.

Thus we see that (i) libertarian freedom is not required for blame (given what easily could have transpired), (ii) Abimelech made choices and was free but was “kept” from being able to instantiate an alternative possibility, and (iii) to say that Abimelech was not free here goes against the presuppositions of the text. It seems to me that Genesis 20 militates against libertarian freedom as long as the conjunction that the Bible is authoritative on that which it speaks is also presupposed. In other words, if one accepts the orthodox assumption that if Scripture says X, and your position says ~X, then ~~X.