A questioner once asked Maimonides: How is it that the punishment for Adam’s sin (i.e., eating from the forbidden tree) resulted in the granting to mankind of that unique faculty which gives us precedence (فوقیت) over all other created beings, i.e. the ability to distinguish between good and evil?

… it thus appears strange that the punishment for rebelliousness should be the means of elevating man to a pinnacle of perfection to which he had not attained previously.

Maimonides uses this question as a starting point to discuss several issues that are of great importance in the GP. His answer to the questioner is that Adam was endowed intellect before the Fall, and so he considers the question misguided at best.

Maimonides explains that when he speaks of intellect as mankind’s great distinction among all of creation, and the faculty which brings us in close connection with God, he is not referring to the faculty of distinguishing right (حسن) from wrong (قبيح) — i.e., morally ‘good’ vs. morally ‘bad’ — but to the faculty of distinguishing true (haqq حق) from false (baatil باطل). He explains the differences between these two axes of distinction by giving the example of the statements “the heavens are spherical” and “the earth is flat”. He says that it is not correct to say that these are “good” and “bad” statements, respectively, but that they are “true” and “false”.

In Maimonides’ account of the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve already had “intellect”: they were endowed with the ability to distinguish the true from the false, but they did not (yet) possess any idea of “right” and “wrong”; not because they were deficient in some way, but for precisely the opposite reason. They had no reason to think that appearing in a state of nakedness is “bad” and that modesty is “good” because those categories did not make sense in that sublime state.

When Adam and Eve transgressed God’s commandment in the Garden, they were in a sense ‘punished’ by being given this additional faculty of distinguishing the “good” and the “bad”, categories that simply did not exist for them before this. For Maimonides, this is the reason why the fall of Adam is a “fall”, a demotion to a lower plane of existence. Because after the fall,

he was wholly absorbed in the study of what is proper and what improper. Then he fully understood the magnitude of the loss he had sustained, what he had forfeited, and in what situation he was thereby placed.

Mankind, in its current fallen state, has no choice but to be embroiled in the perennial thorny questions of “apparent truths” (المشهورات) of the human sort as opposed to “necessary truths” (المعقولات) of the divine sort.