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Witches can be right.

Giants can be good.

You decide what’s right.

You decide what’s good.

—”No One Is Alone” from Into the Woods

As I understand it, the main point of Stephen Sondheim’s magnificent musical, Into the Woods, is that moral decision making is hard. The scripts that our culture gives us are wrong. But they aren’t always wrong, or wrong in entirely predictable ways, so we can’t just reject them and do the opposite of what they say. We have to muddle through and make our own moral decisions, even though that means we will make mistakes.

This argument resonates with me a lot because, as a Latter-day Saint, I believe that this is also the main point of the founding myth of the Judeo-Christian world—the story of Adam and Eve—and a reasonably good description of the moral universe that we inhabit.

As I wrote recently in a review of Stephen Greenblatt’s new book about Adam and Eve, Mormons interpret the story radically differently than just about anybody else who considers it scripture. We break with about 3,000 years of tradition in seeing the choice that Adam and Eve made to eat the forbidden fruit as the right choice—the only choice consistent with God’s intentions, and the only choice that permitted the human race to exist.

Augustine actually considered this possibility in his book on Genesis, but he rejected it because he did not believe that God could possibly have given Adam and Eve conflicting commandments—to multiply and replenish the earth, on one hand, and to avoid doing the only thing that would allow them to do any multiplying and replenishing on the other.

But Latter-day Saints believe that this is exactly what God did. He gave Adam and Eve conflicting commandments and then sat back and watched them to see what they did. And when Satan came along, not everything he said was wrong. The fruit really would open their eyes. It actually was something that they needed to become as the gods (witches can be right). This was not a Kobayashi Maru type test, though. There actually was a right answer. But God needed Adam and Eve to find that answer themselves. And he needed it to be hard.

I believe that this is because God needed to teach us something about agency, which is that exercising it well is extremely difficult, and it is precisely because it is difficult that we have to go through this whole come-to-earth-and-get-a-body exercise to learn how to use it. We reached a point in the pre-existence where we could no longer progress because there, the only moral choice we ever had to make was to follow God or not to follow God.

Following a simple decision rule (obey God/don’t obey God) was not a good enough exercise for our moral muscles. It simplified moral reasoning down to just being good followers, which, ultimately only taught us to be good children. We needed the experience of making hard choices because that is what spiritual grown-ups do. And we needed a way to overcome the consequences for making bad ones.

Unlike most of the Judeo-Christian world, we do not see Adam and Eve’s choice as a simple moral test that they failed. We do not believe that they chose the pleasures of the flesh over the things of the spirit. We believe that they thought seriously about the multiple commandments that they were given, realized that they could not keep them both, prioritized one of them, made the right choice, and accepted the very real consequences for their actions. In other words, they were not disobedient children; they were morally competent adults.

Latter-day Saint scripture provides the basis for a very profound moral theology—one that recognizes the importance of meaningful agency and the inadequacy of simple cultural scripts and dualistic decision rules. It strikes me as starkly ironic, therefore, that we have developed a culture of simple cultural scripts and dualistic decision rules. If our own version of the Adam and Eve story tells us anything, it tells us that we cannot simply reduce all moral choices to a yes-or-no decision to obey stuff.

There are, of course, some moral choices that are easy: should I steal this watch or not steal this watch? Should I microwave this puppy or not microwave this puppy? That sort of thing. But these are not the ones that teach us how to be gods. Those decisions are much more difficult. They involve competing goods, partial evils, fine distinctions, and conflicting loyalties. And they involve consequences, sometimes very serious ones, no matter what we do.

Anybody can make a moral decision when only one principle is involved. But in the real moral universe that we inhabit, multiple principles are almost always involved. Witches are right (sometimes). Giants are good (occasionally). And our capacity for moral decision making has to be up to the task of determining when they are. That is largely what this life is all about.