Beyond the New Morality

The Responsibilities of Freedom, Third Edition

Germain Grisez, Russell Shaw

• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Year: 1988
• ISBN:
  9780268075552
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Teologia cristiana

First published in 1974, with a second, revised edition in 1980, Beyond the New Morality, third edition, retains the best elements of the earlier versions, including the authors' clear, straightforward presentation and use of nontechnical language. Although the basic approach, content, and organization remain substantially the same, the new edition does develop and amend some aspects of the theory. For example, the community dimension of morality is brought out more clearly and the first principle of morality is now formulated more accurately in terms of willing in line with integral human fulfillment.

We are proposing an ethics. But what is ethics? As we use the word, it means a philosophical study of morality, of the foundations on which morality is based, and of the practical implications of a systematic moral outlook. We believe ethics must start by clarifying the fundamental notions of freedom, action, and community. Then it can go on to examine the question "What is the ultimate distinction between moral good and moral evil, between action which is right and action which is wrong?" An answer becomes useful in practice, however, only after one has worked out a satisfactory way of thinking through concrete moral issues—"Should I do this or that?" Thus we next turn to the problem of establishing basic moral principles. Finally, once one is in a position to take a reasoned view of moral issues, it is possible to ask and try to answer the question "To what extent can I close the gap, in my life and in society, between the way I think things ought to be and the way they are?"

History studies human actions, but it looks at particular actions which have actually taken place; ethics is concerned with human action in general or with possible kinds of actions. Psychology and the social sciences also have somewhat the same subject matter as ethics, but they arc mainly concerned with how human beings actually do act and societies actually do work; ethics concentrates on how persons ought to act and societies ought to be formed and reformed.

Chapter 1

Freedom Means Responsibility

Freedom. Everybody wants it. Poets praise it. Politicians promise or proclaim it. Some people have given their lives to win it for themselves or others.

But what is it?

The word “freedom” can have many different meanings. It can refer simply to the lack of physical restraints. It can mean the absence of external social pressures and demands. And it can signify that capacity by which individuals are able to form their own lives—in a sense, their own selves—through their choices.

It makes a difference what kind of freedom one is talking about. True, there are common elements: for example, as applied to persons the meaning of freedom includes at least someone acting, the activity, and something else—a factor potentially in opposition to the activity. Common elements aside, however, the various meanings of freedom are significantly different. Furthermore, the freedom to determine one’s self by one’s own choices is the freedom most proper to a human being. It is the freedom with which ethics is most concerned.

Because there are different kinds of freedom, and because some are more properly human than others, it is worth looking at them in some detail in order to see where they are different and in what each consists.

A. Freedom Is Physical Freedom

The simplest kind of freedom is the absence of physical coercion and constraint. This is what is called physical freedom. Even inanimate objects can have it: we speak, for example, of “freely falling bodies.” It is also the kind of freedom enjoyed typically by wild animals in contrast with those in captivity. However, a prisoner in a cell does not have freedom in this sense (or else possesses it only to a limited degree and in a highly circumscribed way) because he is physically prevented from doing many things, including leaving the cell. Someone forced to perform a physical action, or physically prevented from doing so, is not acting freely in performing or not performing the action.

Physical freedom corresponds to the simplest kind of action, that which can be performed even by an animal or a small child. A dog chases a rabbit. A baby crawls across a room to get a red ball. In such action the meaning of the behavior comes from its culmination. And the behavior and the meaning are closely united. The behavior only makes sense in terms of the culminating performance (catching the rabbit, getting the ball).

Freedom is present in such action in the sense that the behavior cannot take place unless the individual is not physically constrained. Where there is constraint, there can be no action; where there is no constraint, the action can be performed. The latter situation represents physical freedom.

This kind of freedom is always a matter of degree. Some measure of physical freedom is essential if one is to act morally. (Acting morally here does not mean doing what is right. It only means acting in a way that counts as right or wrong in moral terms.) At the same time, however, absolute physical freedom is not required for moral responsibility. In fact, it is nonsense to speak of “absolute physical freedom.” Everyone is subject to some constraint; the law of gravity would see to that if nothing else did. Freedom in the sense of physical freedom is always more or less.

B. Freedom Is Doing As One Pleases

Freedom can also mean doing as one pleases in the absence of social demands and restrictions. A slave’s basic condition is not one of freedom in this sense, because what the slave does and does not do is determined by someone else, his or her master. (Slaves may also be deprived of physical freedom, though this need not be the case.) By contrast, Robinson Crusoe was totally free to do as he pleased until Friday’s appearance on the scene injected social obligations into his situation. Since there was until then no one else to impose societal demands and restrictions on Crusoe, he enjoyed complete freedom to do as he pleased.

As is the case with physical freedom, so freedom to do as one pleases corresponds to a particular sort of action. This kind of freedom is proper to action performed as a means to some end which is separate from the performance itself, an end not included in the culmination of the behavior. An example of this kind of action is planting seed in order to obtain a crop. Obtaining the crop is the end which is sought, but it is very widely separated, not only in time but in other ways as well, from the performance of sowing seed.

At this level of action persons are free to do as they please to the extent that they desire the end to be achieved and that certain means are necessary to achieve the end. The grain-crop example clearly meets the second condition because there will be no crop unless the seed is planted; as for the first (desiring the end) it is fulfilled in the case of a farmer who plants seed because he wants a crop; it is not fulfilled in the case of a slave who plants seed only because his master tells him to.

Several things are characteristic of action at this level. Calculation—reflection on what means to employ in order to achieve particular ends—is both possible and necessary. Also, it is clear that at this level doing as one pleases and responsibility are in opposition to each other. Responsibility in society is something which is imposed on one by other people. Freedom to do as one pleases lies in the absence of such imposition. Individuals would be totally free at this level of action if they had to do only those things necessary to achieve the ends they wanted to achieve.

Immature people tend to think that this is the highest kind of freedom. Adolescents seeking to shake off the requirements imposed on them by authority typically are seeking freedom of this sort. Doing what one pleases appears to be the very highest expression of what freedom is, and this is the opposite of doing as one is required by parents, teachers, or others in authority.

A more mature view of the matter, however, suggests that merely doing as one pleases is neither the final word on freedom nor an unqualified good. Some degree of freedom to do as one pleases is certainly essential to moral responsibility. But unlimited freedom of this sort is impossible—and would be undesirable even if it were somehow possible—for anyone living in social relationships with others. Even animals live in groups and are moved by instinct to care for their young. As for human beings, we understand that we can hardly pursue, serve, or enjoy any good except with other people. Thus once we begin to do anything to fulfill ourselves, we must take into account what pleases others, and this inevitably limits our freedom to do as we please.

More important than unrestricted freedom to do as one pleases is that individuals be able to participate in appropriate ways in setting up and directing their relationships and the communities which make demands and place restrictions on them. People have a right to a voice in setting the rules of the societies in which they live. But this is a very different thing from, practically speaking, opting out of societies and the demands they make in order to have maximum freedom to do as one pleases.

C. Ideal Freedom, Creative Freedom, and Political Freedom

Before passing on to the kind of freedom most important to ethics, it is worth mentioning several other kinds of freedom: ideal freedom, creative freedom, and freedom in the political sense.

“Ideal freedom” refers to the freedom possessed by individuals and societies which are able to act in accord with an ideal. This is the sense in which the word “freedom” is used by such different thinkers as St. Paul and Freud.

St. Paul considered the sinner not to be free because on account of sin he or she is bound to fall short of the ideal of uprightness. By contrast, he held Christians to be free because their redemption from sin by Christ freed them for uprightness. Similarly, for Freud the neurotic is not free, but the cured patient, who has been liberated from neurosis, is to that extent free to behave in accord with an ideal of psychological health.

Ideal freedom and freedom to do as one pleases may sound at first like complete opposites—shaping one’s actions to conform to an ideal as against acting without constraint—but they can be compatible. Ideal freedom means that the individual is not blocked from doing what ought to be done; freedom to do as one pleases means that the individual is not blocked from doing as he or she wishes to do. But underlying most ideals of behavior is the assumption that, once reached, they will be found easy and pleasant to fulfill, and people will actually wish to fulfill them.

Not all ideals, of course, are equally valid. The validity of various versions of ideal freedom depends on the truth of the worldviews underlying them. Although passing judgment on the truth of worldviews is not the task of ethical theory, we shall have something to say about this matter in the final chapter.

In practice, in any case, the content of ideal freedom varies widely. There are diverse conceptions of the ideal condition of the human agent and diverse views of the obstacles to the fulfillment of the ideals. Karl Marx, for example, considered the ideal human condition to be attainable not by isolated individuals but only by society as a whole. Yet whatever the particular content, the general concept remains the same: human beings will have ideal freedom when they can act as they ideally ought to do. And if one’s ideal for human beings includes their realizing themselves by their own free choices, then ideal freedom will be closely related to freedom of self-determination, to be discussed below.

“Creative freedom” refers to the freedom present when circumstances and factors which tend toward repetition are overcome and that which is new emerges. This is the freedom peculiar, for example, to a creative artist, inasmuch as the artist does not merely repeat what has been done before but creates a work possessing an element of genuine newness. Some philosophers have gone so far as to liken the whole of reality to the creative process of art, seeing reality as an ongoing process in which there regularly emerge novelties which are not attributable to antecedent conditions and laws.

Freedom in this sense is distinguishable from physical freedom, since the latter resides in the agent able to engage in a behavior, whereas creative freedom can involve the emergence of something new and distinct from the agent. Creative freedom is also different from freedom to do as one pleases: the latter can be as repetitive and noncreative as the desires which shape the content of what “one pleases,” but new desires can be part of freedom as the emergence of novelty. Finally, creative freedom is not the same as ideal freedom, for the latter takes for granted the prior existence of an ideal of behavior, while creative freedom can involve the emergence of novel ideals and principles.

“Political freedom” suggests a kind of freedom to do as one pleases which applies to peoples rather than to individuals. In this sense a colony revolts and fights for its freedom.

There is, however, another sense of political freedom: namely, the participation of individuals in directing their own polity, which we mentioned at the end of the previous section. This concept is sometimes expressed by the phrase “government by the consent of the governed.”

Although political freedom in this sense is closely related to individual freedom to do as one pleases, the two things are not identical. The difference is one of emphasis. In individual freedom to do as one pleases, the emphasis is on the absence of requirements set by others. In political freedom the emphasis is on the fact that persons act according to laws which they somehow share in making. In this sense children in a typical Western democracy are not politically free, but virtually all adult citizens are. In addition, political freedom is concerned, not with the whole of one’s life, but only with that part of it in which one acts as a citizen.

D. Freedom Is Self-Determination

As we have suggested, freedom also refers to self-determination—the shaping of one’s life, one’s self, by one’s choices. This is the kind of freedom most closely related to questions of morality. To the extent that we can determine for ourselves who we shall be, we are responsible for our lives.

This kind of freedom does not assume or require the absence of all external pressures and prior causes. Self-determination refers instead to the state of affairs in which, despite external pressures and prior causes which can and do influence our choices, we retain at least some options of choosing or not choosing, of choosing one thing rather than another.

In cases where there is no such option there is no real choice and no self-determination. In such cases it is not a question of “moral” action at all. When people do things without really having chosen to do them, they are not acting either morally or immorally; their action simply has no moral quality in itself. (People may, however, have considerable moral responsibility for previous freely chosen acts by which they placed themselves in the position of being unable to choose freely and so have some responsibility for the consequences of their unfree behavior.)

It is certainly possible to act in this way—without choosing to act—and in fact people often do. But it is also possible for people to act on the basis of real choice and, in doing so, to be self-determining.

The experience of free choice is a familiar one. It begins in conflict, the awareness that one is in a situation where it is not possible to pursue all the goods one is concerned with. This leads to conscious deliberation about the alternatives. Even so, choice may not be necessary; this happens when, upon deliberation, only one alternative seems really appealing. But deliberation commonly leads to the conclusion that one is confronting real and incompatible possibilities. At this point one says in effect, “It’s really up to me to choose.” As that suggests, one does not encounter choices; one makes them.

Like physical freedom and freedom to do as one pleases, self-determination corresponds to a particular kind of action. Action at this third level derives its meaning from a good in which one participates by performing the action. The meaning does not come from the completion and consummation of the action (first level: physical freedom) or from a specific goal which the action is meant to achieve (second level: freedom to do as one pleases). Instead the meaning comes from a good in which one hopes to participate precisely through performing the action. The purpose of sharing in the good is not achieved at the end of the action or sometime after it but is present in the performance throughout, at every stage, and one realizes such a good by participating in it.

Consider an example: studying simply for the sake of learning. Studying is the action. Learning is the good. Learning is not something which occurs or is achieved only at the end of studying. It goes on all the time one is studying. One participates in this good for as long as one performs the action.

From this same example it is apparent how one and the same action can, simply by a change of perspective—or, more accurately, a change of intention—move from one level to another.

All actions, even the most complex, can be broken down into their individual first-level components. In studying—reading a chapter in a book, for instance—the eyes move from one line of print to another, and from one page to the next. This simple process of looking at words on a page is activity at the first level of action.

The same act of studying can also be an action at either the second or the third level. It will be an action at the second level if one is studying simply as a means to an end, for example, to pass an examination. But it will be an action of the third level if it is done not merely to achieve an ulterior objective (passing a test) but for the sake of participating in a good (learning) which is intimately and inextricably linked to the action itself. Furthermore, as the example makes clear, the same act can simultaneously be an action at the second level and at the third level if, for instance, while studying for an exam, one is also learning for learning’s sake and is concerned about both purposes at the same time.

E. Determinism

Some theories of human behavior, which go by the general name “determinism,” hold that there is really no such thing as freedom of self-determination. They argue that all behavior is determined by factors prior to choice. Many philosophers of the past three centuries, and especially of the nineteenth century, considered belief in self-determination unscientific. Many thought that a free choice would violate the physical laws articulated by Newton.

Determinists in the English-speaking tradition have generally been identified with what is called “soft determinism” or “compatibilism.” In this view human acts can be attributed to the person who performs them, inasmuch as he or she is not coerced, yet the acts are determined by a cause and are not expressions of self-determination.

Determinism of one kind or another has had great impact—for example, the psychological determinism associated with Freud and his followers and the sociological determinism of Marx. Starting with the basic idea that there are fixed laws of nature which exclude the indeterminacy required for freedom, Freud and Marx claimed to find in the psyche and society mechanisms analogous to those found by Newton in the realm of physical nature. Determinism is still influential in sociology and psychology; and most compatibilists are in fact psychological determinists who hold that people necessarily choose the alternative which seems best to them. However, this way of th...