Why Liberty is Necessary for Morality
by Tibor R. Machan
It is often taken to be a feature of a free society that it rests on the belief that no one can tell what is morally right or wrong. That is supposed to be why people are not imposed upon with strictures the government forces them to follow. If, however, we could determine what is right and wrong, then, the idea follows, government could just proceed to force everyone to behave right.
A sad result of so explaining the merits of a free society is that it begins to look like liberty is the enemy of morality. And it is just this way that a good many people have understood the Western tradition of liberalism. They have come to believe that if you accept the Western idea of a free society, you must not care about morality at all. Indeed, arguably a great many enemies of the West hold such a view. Love the West, reject morality; love morality, reject the West.
Yet this is completely wrong. In point of fact precisely the opposite is true. The reason the Western idea of a free society makes a great deal of sense is that unless people make their moral choices and act on them freely, there cannot be anything morally praiseworthy in what they do.
A person who does the right thing because it is commanded, forced upon him, isn't acting morally. Such a person is acting from fear, not the conviction that what he is doing is morally right. Indeed, it is only in substantially free societies that men and women can be morally good. If one is regimented to praise Allah or God or give to the poor or defend one's country, there is absolutely nothing praiseworthy about that. One is then being a mere puppet, certainly not a morally responsible human agent.
Of course, there have been some who have defended the individual's right to liberty on the ground that no one can tell what is right or wrong. Some very famous people have done this. Yet their defense of human liberty is a weak, ineffectual one. That's because if one cannot tell what is right or wrong, one cannot tell whether violating someone's right to liberty is right or wrong. So, a moral skeptic simply has no consistent reason to complain if the right to liberty is violated.
Those, however, who insist that they do know right from wrong have no justification for opposing the free society. For adult men and women to be morally praiseworthy - or, alternatively, blameworthy - for something they do, they have to do it freely, of their own initiative, not because they are coerced to do it.
No one is morally improved by being forced to be generous, just, kind, courageous, prudent, honest, charitable, moderate, humble or the like. The paternalistic motivations behind many governmental measures that ostensibly aim to make people good are hopelessly misguided.
I would even question the motivation of those who promote coercive governmental measures aimed to reduce vice and increase virtue - since coercion kills personal responsibility, and does this very obviously, it is more likely that advocates of coercively getting people to be good are power seekers, not promoters of morality at all. They merely use morality as an excuse to rule other people. In the name of such allegedly good intentions, they perpetrate the most dehumanizing deed toward people; namely, they promote robbing them of their liberty to choose.
Of course, the laws of a free society cannot guarantee that the citizenry will choose the right way to act. That is something in the hands of the citizens themselves and their fellow citizens, friends, community leaders, teachers, writers, and others who urge us all to do what's right, not officers of the law whose task is to keep the peace, not to make people good! But in a free society, where no one is authorized to dump the results of his or her misdeeds on others' lives, people are more encouraged to do the right thing than in societies where personal responsibility is missing because of the lack of individual liberty. So, critics of the free society who want more emphasis on morality than on liberty would do better if they first stood up to defend liberty. From that the prospects for genuine, freely chosen morality are far greater than they are wherever men and women aren't free.
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