Is the desire to sin sinful?

This raises some interesting issues:

http://spirited-tech.com/COG/2020/04/07/impeccability-and-temptation/

1. One issue was whether Jesus was impeccable or merely sinless. My own position is that by virtue of the hypostatic union, he was impeccable because the divine nature exerts control over the human nature. In that respect, it isn't possible for Jesus to succumb to sinful temptation.

2. However, the post is raising a different, albeit related issue. Not whether it was possible for Jesus to give into sinful temptation, but to feel sinful temptation. 

3. I'd add that we don't have to answer the question directly. We can address the question at a more generic level. As a general or universal principle, is it necessarily sinful to desire sin? The question in reference to Jesus will answer itself depending on the general principle. So we can bypass the specific application to Jesus and focus on the question of whether, in principle, it's intrinsically sinful to desire sin?

4. I'll explore that momentarily, but before doing so draw two distinctions unique to Jesus:

Whether or not it's always sinful to desire sin, certain desires are intrinsically sinful. For instance, sexual desire for prepubescent children is intrinsically sinful. You must already be morally twisted to have that kind of desire.  There has to be a prior moral derangement for some things to be desirable. So I'd say Jesus can't desire intrinsically sinful things. That doesn't follow from the stronger principle of impeccability but the weaker principle of sinlessness.

5. In addition, there are second-order desires where committing sin engenders a desire to sin that contingent on committing sin. For instance, there's a subculture of faux vampirism where people drink each other's blood. To my knowledge, humans have no natural appetite for human blood. But if you experiment, I suppose that could become an acquired taste. I don't know that for a fact. I haven't studied the issue. But it will suffice as a hypothetical illustration. 

For the same reason as (4), Jesus can't have a second-order desire to sin. That doesn't follow from the stronger principle of impeccability but the weaker principle of sinlessness.

6. Back to the main issue. It may seem like a tautology or truism or self-evident that it's necessarily sinful to desire sin. Perhaps. But I think the plausibility of that intuition relies on keeping it on an abstract plane. When, however, we consider concrete examples, it may lose plausibility. What we find intuitively compelling or plausible is often dependent on paradigm-examples; it may break down in the face of counterexamples. It's not that the examples are necessarily wrong. The fallacy is overgeneralizing from certain kinds of examples. 

7. Let's begin with a cliche example. A normal man sees a beautiful woman. That automatically triggers sexual desire. Indeed, it may trigger sexual arousal.

Since premarital and extramarital sex are sinful, it might seem self-evident that his desire is sinful. Sexual desire is shorthand for desiring to have sexual relations. 

Yet it's hard to see how that can be true. If straight men didn't have a sexual desire for women, they'd lack a sufficient motivation to get married. So you might say the illicit desire is a necessary condition to incentivize the licit outlet of marriage. You must have sexual desire when you're still single to want marriage.

It also seems implausible to think that kind of sexual desire is a result of the Fall. But I won't argue the point. 

BTW, I'm not suggesting sex is the only motivation for marriage. But realistically, and in most cases, it's a sine qua non. 

8. Let's consider cases where there's a psychological conflict between altruistic duty and self-preservation. Take a situation where your odds of survival are enhanced if you leave an ailing friend behind but diminished if you stay behind to care for him. Suppose on a camping trip he comes down with a contagious, life-threatening illness. He might die, and even if he survives, he will become incapacitated during the cycle of the disease. And he will certainly not survive if you abandon him when he's incapacitated. His only shot at survival is if you provide for his needs while he's unable to provide for himself.

But the more direct contact and prolonged contact you have with him, the greater the odds that he will infect you, so that you may die in the process. Hence, your altruistic duty is in tension with your instinctive fear of death. A part of you has a hardwired aversion to risking your own life to save his. You have an inclination to desert him. If it's sinful to desert him, is it sinful to desire to do so? 

Yet we could turn around. The fact that moral heroism may conflict with natural desire affords an opportunity or test to do the right thing when it's costly. If the sacrifice didn't cut against the grain, it would be morally cheap. So in situations like that, having a desire to sin seems to be an instrumental good. It draws forth a second-order virtue. 

So my provisional conclusion is that it's not inherently sinful to desire sin. Rather, that's context-dependent. And that in turn answers the question about Jesus.