An Impossible Freedom

[A reprinted article, because Tim took the week off.]

“While they promise them liberty...”

Today the idea of 'moral' freedom is popular. It's the age of liberty from the oppressive constraints of imposed morality. There's no need for an absolute standard of right and wrong – like the Bible. There's a promise of liberty.

If we will be free from a moral standard, then what will determine behavior? Some would say it's up to the individual. You determine what is right. You are truly free to determine your own morality.

You're even free to change your mind – if there's not a standard of morality there's no need for consistency. Perhaps what you thought was right yesterday isn't what you feel is right today. That's fine - as long as it was right at the time, then it's okay. It's situational ethics; self-determined morality is flexible. We have the freedom to change morality based on the given situation.

But what about regret? What about those things that you believed were right at one point, but now wish you would have believed differently. You've changed your view of the same situation. Yes, you may be 'free' to make your own moral judgments, but regret indicates that self-morality is inherently flawed.

The scope of self-morality also complicates this 'liberty' from a moral standard. While both you and your neighbor may define your own morality, there are times when your moralities collide. His morality has no problem with loud parties late at night, yours does. Your morality sees nothing wrong with friends parking in any open spot on the street, his does. It's all simply petty problems until he sees nothing wrong with destroying your car and you have not qualms about spray painting his house.

“While they promise them liberty...”

After an absolute standard of morality is removed, what will replace it? Certainly not some type of self-morality. Perhaps it is mob-morality. Majority rules. The morality of the masses. Morality is simply put to a vote. Is it right to steal? The majority says no. At least for now. If everyone else is doing it, it must be alright.

But essentially the majority is simply made up of individuals. Individuals who inevitably contradict themselves and each other. If the individual is by definition corrupt could the sum total be somehow less corrupt? I think not.

“While they promise them liberty...”

Maybe the solution could be found in an enlightened-morality. The morality of the few and the powerful. Morality would be determined by those who know better than the rest – the enlightened. It's the morality of Hitler and Stalin. But who determines the enlightened. Those with political power? Those with financial power? Those with military power? That's the great flaw of enlightened-morality.

I am not trying to prove that there is only one standard of absolute morality, although that is my belief. I am simply showing that freedom from a moral standard is an impossible freedom. If you seek to be free from the constraints of an absolute standard of morality, you must in some way subject yourself to another standard. That standard might be you as an individual, society in general, or any combination of non-absolute morality, but it is still a moral standard.

There is no freedom from a moral rule – there is only the freedom to choose what moral rule you will subject yourself to. Personally, I chose a moral standard higher than myself, higher than my peers, higher than society. I may be promised liberty from an absolute standard of morality, but all other options are – at the very least – corrupt.

“While they promise them liberty, they themselves are the servants of corruption: for of whom a man is overcome, of the same is he brought in bondage.”
-- the Bible