Connolly, John - Augustine, the Will, and Original Sin

10/02/2009

DRAFT

This paper tries to sort out the complexities and possible contradictions that Augustine finds himself in when trying to combat both Manicheanism and also Pelagians. Author lays out the difficulty:
-The Manichees believed that good and evil were two forces in the universe, essentially that god had an evil equal. Augustine needed to establish there was only one god, a good one. But then the problem of the origins of evil arises. The solution was to claim that humans are stuck with Original Sin from the primal sin of Adam & Eve eating from the tree.
-The Pelagians believed that one could improve herself enough so that she could turn against sin on her own, thereby overcoming the weakened human condition brought on by primal sin. Augustine found this contrary to requiring Jesus for salvation and therefore had to argue that primal sin could not be overcome without god's grace.

Augustine's conception of primal sin was important to bolster his defense against both Manicheanism and the Peligians. However it has been argued previously that primal sin seems troubling: it must originate with the first humans, but not from any defect in their wills, or their characters, since that would mean that their maker (god) was partially at fault for their sin. But from whence does it come, if not from their ill will (pushing the problem one step back) or from a fault in their character? MacDonald has suggested that the answer lies in an act of negligence, of failing to attend to good reasons you have for doing something. This paper is largely a review of MacDonald's theory of Primal Sin; the conclusion is that this theory isn't enough to underwrite primal sin.

Author makes a comparison to MacDonald's theory of primal sin to the case of Aiden Quinn, the relatively upstanding individual who absent-mindedly text-messaged as he was driving a MBTA trolley, and ended up hitting another one. The intuition here at first bolsters MacDonald: this is a case of a careless act without ill-will, and yet we are very much inclined to blame Quinn for this negligence-- in short: it is sinful negligence without ill-will.

But author argues that we have a yet further analysis of this event if we are to consider it truly blameworthy-- that the actor failed to exercise the caution of the 'prudent man'. The standard we hold someone to prior to punishing her for gross (sinful) negligence is the standard of what a prudent person would take note of and account for in her decisions. The problem is that we do not believe that Adam & Eve could have failed that test, a hypothesis that MacDonald asks us to believe if his theory of primal sin is correct. It doesn't make sense that they would fail this test, thus making MacDonald's theory of primal sin implausible. This leaves the primal sin still in the difficult situation of being a sin ex nihilo, and remains a problem for Augustine.