Moral Obligation and the Free Society

Freedom is a contested concept. Tell the wizened babushka on the streets of Moscow’s poorest district that she is free, now that the Soviet Union has disintegrated, and she turns on you with incredulity: “I was nearly to retire…. My pension was guaranteed…. That would have been freedom. Now I have nothing!” But just a few doors down, young men brazenly enter and exit a garish brothel, loud music spilling grotesquely into the street each time the door opens. With adolescent enthusiasm they exult, “We used to work, but we all got paid the same and had no fun. Today we make American dollars, do what we please, and enjoy ourselves. Life is hard for some, but that’s luck. We have a free country now!”

Which view is more depressing: life without hope or life without meaning? Both portraits caricature the free society because both fail to understand that society should be more than economic rationalism; it should provide answers to the fundamental questions of citizenship: What is my place in society? Why am I here? What is the moral basis for behavior, and what laws derive from this ethical system?

This essay addresses this set of issues. I argue that freedom cannot be defined as license, or society will explode as member conflicts with member. Rather, freedom can best be understood as opportunity, and society must have a shared set of enduring standards that provides common rules for all. Consequently, a citizen’s duty is best informed by religion because therein are found eternal standards for behavior and justice that do not bend to the wills either of elites or of the masses.

The idea of freedom is controversial. By definition, the word freedom, and its synonym, liberty, are misleading in that they imply a certain absence of restraint, whereas there is no real situation of unconditional liberty. In the natural world we are subject to certain immutable laws, but the strictures of the moral and social realms are no less real, placing boundaries on us. Consequently, freedom is best understood as opportunity, not license.

Thus, perhaps the question, “What is freedom?,” is secondary to the question, “What is a free society?” There are three contenders in political theory for the title of “free society.” The first is some form of libertinism, whether it be a Darwinian struggle between the fit and the weak or a Roussean state of nature. In any of its interpolations, such anarchy is not truly free. Anarchists and advocates of a primitive epicureanism fantasize an oasis where the individual does whatever he or she pleases. However, the state of nature is a mirage replete with constraints: the search for food and shelter, the constant need of vigilance against attack, the problem of scarce resources, and so forth. Complete libertinism is not really free; in anarchy, the license to do something does not ensure the ability to make it so. Consequently, most philosophers and ordinary people reject the idea that the state of nature is either free or desirable.

The second understanding of a free society comes from the opposite end of the political spectrum and is associated with much of contemporary Western, social liberalism. This worldview defines a free society as resulting in certain normative outcomes, the so-called positive freedoms such as freedom from want and freedom from discrimination. In other words, this vision of a free society holds as its central tenet an egalitarian principle of positive freedoms (better termed activist freedoms) to which all citizens are entitled.

Judge Robert Bork recognizes the irony of such a society where the state must create and implement such “freedoms”: “The egalitarian tendency is then to coerce equality of result by law.”¹ In short, the egalitarian notion of freedom is a thinly veiled attempt to restrict and redirect the individual liberties of some in pursuit not of individual opportunity but of equal outcomes.

The third conception of the free society balances individual liberty with social constraints. This notion, espoused in John Locke’s social contract, is that individuals protect their property and personal liberties by voluntarily submitting to just authority. Here freedom is defined as individual opportunity to think and act, and is best understood as the opportunity to choose or disavow moral behavior. This conception of freedom recognizes the moral equality of individuals but makes the conscience, not governmental coercion, the starting point for social justice. Moreover, such freedom resists the attempt of any group or institution, even the state itself, to elevate itself to a position above objective morality. The free society recognizes that its citizens are free moral agents, and it depends on their conscious deference to norms of justice.

Therefore, the free society balances personal liberties in the social context. But such a society, based on objective standards and moral equality, still must have its enforcer. Who or what will enforce the guidelines of the free society? The answer is either the state or the citizens. The individual liberty of citizens can best be asserted and protected by personal, internal compliance with the law and morality, or “obedience to duty.”

Duty is best defined as moral obligation, but this begs a series of other questions, such as, “Where does this obligation originate?” and “How do we apply the concept of duty to our daily lives?” We must conceptualize duty in two ways: as virtue and as justice. Duty is an internalized system of moral obligations that provides a practical framework for evaluating right and wrong and for prompting action. In other words, the moral obligation to act in certain ways is rooted in virtue. Education is critical to virtuous motivations and behavior, as it is incumbent upon the family, the church, and society at large to reinforce this set of values, both to prevent law breaking and to maintain the contiguous identity of the community, as expressed in its values, over time.

Whereas the first conception of duty is internal accord with virtue, the second conception of duty as moral obligation is more overt. Duty in this sense is allegiance, or at least acquiescence, to the concept of ultimate justice—that there will come a reckoning and eternal consequences for behavior. As Daniel Webster argues, “In every person who enters court as a witness … there must be a firm conviction on his mind that falsehood or perjury will be punished either in this world or the next or he cannot be admitted.”² Webster is asserting that any individual who does not believe in ultimate consequences for his or her testimony lacks credibility. Likewise, duty consists of recognizing that deeds are not done in an ethical vacuum but in the context of moral obligations to an objective standard to which we must submit in all ethical matters.

The free society is based on duty understood as virtue and justice anchored in a universal value system. The assailants of this conception of duty have clamored a consistent accusation for millennia: “Who are you to reify your system of values as the objective measure of universal justice?” This position is exemplified by Pilate’s query to Christ: “What is truth?”

Their argument is simple and compelling, and it strikes to the very heart of Western democracy and the Judeo-Christian faith.³ If one holds, as the Judeo-Christian tradition does, that there is only one way to God, that it can be known through the Scriptures, and that all other bases for morality and meaning do not measure up, then there can be only one basis for duty—the Judeo-Christian understanding of the moral obligation to God and our neighbor. On the other hand, if one believes that there is no God, and, therefore, that there is also no objective basis for moral obligation based on transcendent truth, then duty beyond superficial social convention is hollow. Duty—responsibility to God and our neighbor—proceeds from standards of virtue and justice.

What of other faiths? Most other religious belief systems in our world grudgingly allow that there are multiple ways to God, or even multiple gods. Therefore, there is a certain ambiguity of valuation that is impracticable for a free society based on shared ethical standards. In short, whether one is a naturalist, pantheist, or deist, there is no objective standard for values in society and also, therefore, no definitive set of norms and values structuring duty. A world without a religious conception of duty is an anarchy of values, relying on coercion to implement civil order.

A more specific charge against the Christian principle of duty is the multiplicity of religions available: Is Christianity the only possible basis for a free society? It is beyond the scope of this paper to analyze every religion on the world stage,⁴ but there is an interesting answer to which we are led by observation: There are, today, no stable, legitimate democracies in countries not historically moored to the Judeo-Christian worldview.⁵ In other words, the empirical data indicate a strong correlation between the free society and Judeo-Christian philosophy.

In contrast to societies based on fear and repression, a free society, I have argued, is possible due to the ethical internal mores of its citizens. Those norms must be based on objective truth. In other words, the citizen’s duty is best informed by religion.

As Samuel Adams’s mentor, James Otis, wrote,

What is the alternative to the free society based on duty? Imagine a society where all conceptions of morality and social obligation are liberated—the scene is either one of authoritarianism, anarchy, or one in which the basic institutional framework consists merely of the outdated institutions of the past that have gone unchallenged as they continue to play their formal roles in a society that no longer recognizes their moral basis for existence.

One type of society is the postmodern one, inhabited by the institutions of its forbears, which are based on the objective principles of a bygone era. The institutions, such as the laws and judiciary, continue to exist because of their usefulness, not because they are perceived as founded on truth. In such a scenario, the values of one and all are in various states of latent or open conflict without the leveling influence of an absolute standard.

Unfortunately, this brand of moral relativism is currently becoming the twisted understanding of law and morality throughout much of the post-Christian West. Worse yet is how the concepts of democracy and freedom can be perverted further by notions of subjective standards such as, “It is okay if it is legal,” and, “If the majority says it is so, then it is so.” This has been the historic justification for a litany of crimes, from the executions of Socrates and Christ to the lynchings of American blacks for much of the twentieth century. Thus, even under relatively benign social conditions we are describing a society that is a fragmented collection of individual value statements held together, in part, by the coercive arm of the state. Such a society will increasingly call upon the apparatus of the state to mediate conflicts in the absence of shared values, and individual liberty will be systematically undermined, as the government grows in authority and responsibility. This path ultimately leads to centralization of power as well as authoritarianism.

The second type of liberation is not society at all; it is anarchy, or radical libertinism. This scenario is one of no restraint. However, this state of nature is essentially theoretical and has almost never existed because human beings are social creatures. In addition, the few times that an analogous openness existed—for instance, in the early American West or the deserts of Asia—the result was not a pastoral Eden but, rather, the law of tooth and claw. As stated above, such a condition is not desirable.

There is a third path to order in society: fear. Whereas duty is an internalized system of values influencing behavior, fear is the apprehension of negative sanctions. A social order based on fear not only mandates a high level of coercive power on the part of authorities but also implies the calculated use of terror to maintain dread and compliance among the subjects.

There are numerous problems with a civilization based on fear. The first is the lack of an objective standard. A society based on fear is also based on the subjective whim of its leaders and, therefore, is in a state of constant flux. Moreover, such a society requires that the inhabitants be kept afraid; consequently, the rules of conduct and punishment must fluctuate or be applied arbitrarily. This second point really means that power and force must be used regularly—not to protect the civil order but to maintain the social order of repression. Consider, for instance, the calculated application of violence by Stalin and Mao, which was designed to institutionalize the civil order by terrorizing the populace.

Finally, there are insidious moral consequences for the subjects of this society. The worst is that they live under a code of situational ethics: “It is okay as long as I do not get caught.” This worldview proceeds from the appraisal of authorities as cruel and capricious, but it errs in rejecting all law as manipulative.

It is saddening to recognize that most civilizations have been based on the capricious use of force. It is maddening to watch the contemporary West relinquish both its ethical center and the liberties that duty produces for a postmodern path “back to the future.”

In sum, a free society is governed primarily by the internal enforcement of moral obligation within its citizenry. This system works only when the ideals of the community are generally shared. Therefore, religion is the best foundation for corporate duty, for it transcends temporal events, partisan feeling, and fluctuating opinion. Nonetheless, the tragedy is that individuals around the globe yearn for the liberty and security of the free society but often disdain the fundamentals of virtue and justice upon which it is founded. No group of people can be socially and politically free without eternal principles inscribed upon their hearts to motivate and restrain their thoughts and deeds. As Lord Acton wrote, “No country can be free without religion. It creates and strengthens the notion of duty…. The greater the strength of duty, the greater the liberty.”