The Foundations of Morality

The words liberty and freedom are used both in the legal-political and in the moral realm. In the legal and political realm the truest, or at least the most useful and fruitful concept, seems to me to be the one set forth by John Locke in The Second Treatise of Civil Government (sec. 57):

The end of law is not to abolish or restrain, but to preserve and enlarge freedom. For in all the states of created beings, capable of laws, where there is no law there is no freedom. For liberty is to be free from restraint and violence from others, which cannot be where there is no law; and is not, as we are told, “a liberty for every man to do what he lists.” For who could be free, when every other man’s humour might domineer over him? But a liberty to dispose and order freely as he lists his person, actions, possessions, and his whole property within the allowance of those laws under which he is, and therein not to be subject to the arbitrary will of another, but freely follow his own.

Now when we apply this political conception of freedom in the moral realm we see that it is both an end-in-itself and the necessary means to most of our other ends. All men and all animals rebel at physical restraint just because it is restraint. Hold a baby’s arms, and it will begin to struggle, cry, and scream. Put a puppy on a leash, and it will have to be dragged along by the neck with all four paws scraping the ground. Release a dog that has been tied up, and he will leap and bound and tear around in circles of frenzied joy. Prisoners, schoolboys, soldiers or sailors will show unrestrained glee in the first moments or hours of release from jail or school or barracks or shipboard. The value attached to liberty is never more clearly seen than when men have been deprived of it, or when it has been even mildly restricted. Liberty is so precious an end in itself that Lord Acton was moved to declare that it is “not a means to a higher political end. It is itself the highest political end.”

Yet though liberty is beyond doubt an end-in-itself, it is also of the highest value, to repeat, as a means to most of our other ends. We can pursue not only our economic but our intellectual and spiritual goals only if we are free to do so. Only when we are free do we have the power to choose. And only when we have the power to choose can our choice be called right or moral. Morality cannot be predicated of the act of a slave, or of any act done because one has been coerced into doing it. (The same does not apply, of course, to immorality. If a man flogs someone else because he fears that he will otherwise be flogged himself, or murders someone else, under orders, to save his own life, his act is still immoral.)

Liberty is the essential basis, the sine qua non, of morality. Morality can exist only in a free society; it can exist to the extent that freedom exists. Only to the extent that men have the power of choice can they be said to choose the good.