It seems instrumentally good, being required for many good things.
For example, in the context of eternity, these are some especially valuable goods:
• John Hick: “[Virtues] which have been formed within the agent as a hard won deposit of her own decisions in situations of challenge and temptation, are intrinsically more valuable than virtues created within her ready made and without any effort on her own part.” ["An Irenaean Theodicy," reprinted in Mesle, John Hick's Theodicy, xxii.]
• John Hick: “[One] who has attained to goodness by meeting and eventually mastering temptations, and thus by rightly making responsible choices in concrete situations, is good in a richer and more valuable sense than would be one created ab initio in a state either of innocence or virtue … [It] is an ethically reasonable judgment, even though in the nature of the case not one that is capable of demonstrative proof, that human goodness slowly built up through histories of moral effort has a value in the eyes of the Creator which justifies even the long travail of the soul-making process.” [Evil and the God of Love (Harper and Row, 1977), 255-56.]
Our being in the “image of God” is good. This is relevant because being in the image of God refers at least to our ability to have dominion on Earth and to reflect God as his viceorys and representatives, where we exert some power and have responsibility.1
Our natural intuition seems to recognize effective free will as intrinsically good. The intuitiveness of this is relevant because our philosophical intuitions should generally be trusted.
The ability to freely choose between right/wrong courses of actions is already good by itself.
Consider a few arguments for this:
This is relevant because if free will in general is good, then this specific kind of free will should also be good.