Why Freedom is the Foundation of Morality (The Social Contract Part 2)
Or why ought implies can
TL;DR: Morality exists only within the boundaries of freedom. First, the experience of freedom is a certainty. Second, freedom is the standard for judging moral claims. Conscious experience also sets the inherent boundaries of our moral community.
It’s time to step back and ask why morality should start with freedom. Why not the moral sentiments, rationality, a preference for utility, identity, or any of the other countless grounds philosophers have used to justify morality?
Freedom has become a dirty word. Left-leaning thinkers might consider the term too closely associated with right-wingers and libertarians, who use it to justify a minimal state. Meanwhile, determinism has gone mainstream. Even saying the phrase “free will” can motivate the citation of studies that show the causality of our supposedly conscious thoughts.
Philosophers may prefer the term “autonomy” or “agency” Fine—although they still remain divided on what autonomy means.
I’ll be using freedom to convey both autonomy and agency, as I explain here.
And what is this idea? As provided by Gerald Dworkin, freedom (or autonomy) is the second-order capacity to reflect on one’s first-order preferences and modify them in accordance with higher-order reflection.
Simply, freedom is the power to reflect on our desires and change them based on abstract principles—including morals.
Freedom as a First Principle
Moral theories grounded on our inborn sympathy or our desire to maximize the world's utility rest on inherently shaky grounds. Yet the firmest foundation of moral philosophy (and philosophy generally) is our first-person experience. If the world turned out to be a lie, our subjective experience of that lie would remain true.
As I’ve argued previously, free will only exists as a subjective experience. Therefore, this first-person experience of freedom is significant for moral philosophy. It carries both factual certainly and moral weight.
Rene Descartes began his philosophy by considering the possibility that all of his impressions were mere illusions. Yet his single certainly was his power of reflective thought. His famous cogito “I think, therefore I am” was the first principle of his epistemology. To clarify my point, we can edit this for ethics to “I think, therefore I am free.” It’s this undeniable experience that places us within a moral universe.
Throughout history, philosophers have distinguished the world of appearances from the world of metaphysical truth, leading to sharp disagreements over the nature of the non-physical universe. As a result, there have been many competing bases for morality, leading to widely differing moral conclusions.
However, it was the phenomenologists who took the first-person experience seriously and made it a starting point for their philosophy. Despite ongoing disagreements within the discipline, sense experience served as a firm basis of their thought.
And it was only recently that researchers have been able to study first-person experience properly. Consciousness is becoming less and less of a mystery and must be taken seriously.
Freedom, in this sense, requires more than a response to a stimulus. It requires first-person reflective thought and a sense of agency. Only when humans had obtained this capacity over their evolutionary history could morality become possible. And with this power came ethical responsibility.
Ethical Implications of Freedom
Freedom is not only the basis of morality but also the standard for judging moral systems. An ethical system cannot impose moral praise or blame on actions beyond our capabilities.
We cannot be held morally liable for our failure to go back in time and kill Hitler or single-handedly solve world hunger. There is no obligation to do the impossible. We also cannot be morally responsible for aspects of ourselves that cannot change, like our birthplace and physical characteristics. All moral duties must be within our autonomous powers. Otherwise, they can’t be moral duties.
Similarly, this is why laws aren’t laws unless they can control human conduct.1 Government commands that are inconsistent or impracticable lack the actual force of law. In Kantian terms, ought implies can.
Additionally, all normative claims, including morality, must also take freedom as the standard for its reasons to outweigh. Moral beings can freely choose their beliefs and actions, and this power of choice has inherent value to these beings. Therefore, every normative claim must answer the question, “What justifies this argument overcoming another’s freedom to do or act otherwise?”
A normative claim isn’t justified solely because the speaker prefers the listener to obey, the speaker believes that the reason is inherently good for the listener, or the reason is somehow part of being a human. It must fundamentally be a reason that justifies restricting another’s freedom. There is a cost to every should.
The Boundaries of Freedom
With freedom as our basis of morality, non-free beings are excluded from our moral community. These beings include biological life lacking in consciousness2 (viruses, bacteria, etc.), inanimate objects, and mental fictions. As a result, it is not morally wrong for us to get vaccinated, sit on our furniture, or refrain from having children. Our duties only extend to autonomous beings, including humans and other conscious life.3
Free beings also include humans in a minimally conscious state, vegetative state, and even those with locked-in syndrome. Being free only requires a capacity for reflective thought and an understanding of self.
While this would exclude brain-dead humans and some form of early fetal life, this would not exclude the fact that science is still far from having explored the boundaries of consciousness. For example, we have only recently discovered the underlying thought process of people in a vegetative state, and discovering animal consciousness is even more difficult.4 It is better to expand our notion of consciousness before violating others' freedom.
We can still have a trustee relationship with non-conscious beings, despite their lack of inherent moral status. For instance, pregnant women may act as trustees for their unborn and still-unconscious fetuses.5 Just because consciousness sets the inherent boundaries of the moral community doesn’t mean we can’t welcome others in. So if we find that our pets lack consciousness, we may still distinguish between dognapping and theft of only property.
I’m willing to argue that no moral theory is worthy of consideration without being grounded in freedom. Its factual basis and ethical implications are obvious to the point of tautology. However, one can still read an entire paper on moral philosophy with hardly a reference to personal agency. Engaging in moral philosophy without acknowledging freedom is like studying aquatic animals while ignoring water. Freedom is too often overlooked because it is too often taken for granted.
If anything comes from this article, I hope the reader is more willing to ask a proselytizer of one or another ethical theory, “Where does freedom fit into your moral philosophy.”
See Lon Fuller’s eight principles of the “inner morality of law.” Among these eight requirements are prospectivity and practicability, meaning within a person’s freedom.
The study of animal consciousness is ongoing and controversial. But its conclusive findings do have moral implications. Although, it’s
Although, there are still reasons to refrain from burdening the future, which will be discussed in a later post. Yet see John Rawls’s Just Saving Principle.
See Adrian Owen’s findings on consciousness among vegetative patients and Frans de Waal’s “Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?” for a review of researchers' limitations when studying animal cognition.
When this trustee relationship ends and inherent moral value begins is still unsettled.