# Kwade gevolgen

Een verkeerde beslissing die geen kwade gevolgen heeft is niet werkelijk kwaad — als ik iemand met een mes steek, maar het mes blijkt een ongevaarlijk toneelmes te zijn is mijn kwade opzet verijdeld. Daaruit volgt dat een mens pas de vrije keuze heeft tot het doen van kwaad als dat kwaad zich ook uit als kwaad.

C
  Along another track, which is better: a person who is free, or one who is not free to choose his own way?
M
  The free one is better.
C
  So in a perfect world, men would be free to choose between good and evil?
M
  Yes, a world in which one cannot choose evil is imperfect.
Comment
  Again, this took some time.
C
  Now suppose that for every choice you make, I already decide the outcome. So you may freely decide whether to go to Sévaré or to Douentza, but whichever you chose, I would make you end up in Sévaré. Would that be free?
M
  No, it definitely wouldn't.
C
  Therefore, one wouldn't be free to do evil either if the evil effect wouldn't show up. If plunging a knife into someone would not kill that person, there would be no evil in stabbing, and I would not have the choice to do evil. In other words: if I did good, it would not be of my own choosing but from lack of alternatives. So in a perfect world, your choices would have real consequences. In particular, evil choices have evil consequences
M
  Yes, it must be so. A world that does not allow evil is not a perfect world.
Comment
  This took some going over.
C
  Well, then. The Bible teaches that God created a perfect world, inhabited by angels and men who had a free will, and that one of the angels, the devil, chose the evil way. After that, he seduced man into choosing against God as well. That made the devil perfectly evil, since he chose against God without any external cause, whereas man only sinned under the stress of seduction, so he is not fully and purely evil.
M
  Yes, that explains the situation well: God is perfect, yet the world contains evil, and man has both good and evil in him. I think this explanation fits in well with Islamic teaching. Thank you for explaining this to me.
C
  It was a pleasure. However, the facts we have brought up have some grave consequences.
M
  Tell me.
Comment
  This relatively quick explanation out of a dilemma gained me goodwill, especially as the answer was useful within the Islamic framework as well. This made him more willing to listen to other, longer and less Islam-like, arguments. Another result was that we had implicitly rejected the extreme kismet position that whatever we decide, God decides the outcome. If later on he were to appeal to that, I could reach back to the conclusions reached here to show that such a position would imply that God had created an imperfect world.