Is Freely-Given Love Worth Anything? _A Qualified Defence of the Axiological Premise in Free-Will Responses to Evil_

Free-will responses to the problem of evil rest on an axiological premise: that freely given love is a good worth its cost. Laura Ekstrom has argued that this premise is asserted throughout the literature and defended nowhere, concluding that the claim that hard-won traits exceed divinely implanted ones "would need significant further defense." This paper supplies part of that defence, in a narrowed and conditional form. I argue that the deficiency in caused love is neither modal nor epistemic but relational: a lover whose love was arranged by the beloved is a locus of rational activity but not an origin, so that the relation lacks a genuine second term — a good lying on the beloved's side, which a survey of the properties of a lover's love could not detect. I distinguish being lovable from being loved, and defend a constitutive rather than evidential reading of the claim that love held against resistance exceeds love never tested. The central inference is explicitly conditional on a source-incompatibilist notion of ownership, which I locate but do not defend. It does not establish that this good is worth what the world costs — and argues that no weighing could — but it shows that Ekstrom's negative verdict was reached without the relevant good in view, so that what any defence of the premise must answer to has changed.