Free to be Moral
by Joseph Rowlands

It is common for advocates of freedom to point out that you can't really be moral unless you have the freedom to act on your own judgments. If you are forced to act in a particular way, like forced to give a part of your wealth to charity, you aren't really acting morally. You are submitting to force. It is the wielder of force that is responsible for the outcome, and not you. The only way to really act morally is to be left free and to make the choice on your own.

This isn't exactly true. It may be that the act you are forced to do is actually the one most consistent with your moral beliefs. If you are an altruist, and the government forces you to give money to a charity, it may be that the choice really was the most moral under those circumstance. Similarly if you a rational egoist, and someone forced you communicate your feelings to someone you love, the action may actually be in your best interest.

It isn't that without freedom, you can't act morally. Instead, it is that without freedom, you can't express your moral conviction. Maybe you were going to give to that charity anyway, or would after more consideration. Maybe you were going to communicate your feelings to the one you love. But when someone is putting a gun to your head and forcing you to take that action, it is not apparent whether you were going to or not. Nobody but you can know how you might have acted, and you might not know.

So without freedom, you cannot express your moral convictions through your choice of actions. This is a huge problem in many moral systems because it is expected that you will say one thing and do another if you could. Sacrificial moralities, like altruism, demand that you take actions that hurt your own interests. It would be far easier to simply state that you agree with that than to have to act on it. Action is where the cost is seen, and so action is the measure of your moral conviction. Talk is cheap, but actually making sacrifices shows that you really mean it. If you're willing to incur personal cost to achieve the moral ends, then it proves that you take them seriously. And the greater the cost, the greater the proof.

And this is why this defense of freedom is not a very good one. Freedom is being promoted as a way of expressing your moral convictions. It is a way to prove to others (or to God or even yourself) that you are willing to sacrifice for the sake of doing what's right. Freedom is promoted as a way for you to achieve moral status by getting the moral credit for your actions. If you are forced to do 'the right thing', you get no credit for it. If the government taxes your income and gives it to the poor, you will never be praised for your generosity.

One of the reasons this is a poor way to defend reason is that it assumes that others care more about you being able to prove your moral status than they do about actually helping other people. If you try to convince an altruist politician that without freedom we can't see who is moral and immoral, he might just reply that he doesn't care. His goal is to help the needy. That's his moral agenda. Why would he sacrifice that for the sake of letting other people prove their moral worth? Why would that be important to him at all?

Another problem is that arguing that you should be free in order to get recognition and thanks for your actions of generosity is a kind of selfishness. Your seeking credit for your self. And the strange part is that this is still within the realm of altruism. The altruist who wants to donate and get credit appears to be subverting the altruism for his own benefit. If the politician were not interested before realizing this, he'll be even less inclined after.

Another big problem with this view is if you don't accept the altruistic/sacrificial morality. This defense of freedom rests on the idea of morality as a test, and argues that freedom is necessary in order to express your convictions so people can see the results of the test. And since sacrifice is necessary for the test, free action is required in order to determine the motivations of the action. If you do it because someone points a gun at you, it doesn't prove moral conviction. However, if you are free, it presumably does.

But a rational egoist does not see morality as a test of your willingness to sacrifice. There is no expectation that you'll say one thing is moral and act another way if you can get away with it. A morality of rational self-interest does not allow you to 'cheat' and get ahead. If you cheat, if you go against what you know is true, you suffer accordingly. The need to see whether you'll actually follow through on your words is a holdover from sacrificial moralities.

So the idea that we need to be free in order to prove our morality is just bizarre in a morality of self-interest. Proving our morality is not the goal. Living our lives well is. The justification for freedom should never revolve around a need to prove how moral we are, since that isn't a real thing or a legitimate goal. The case for freedom should always revolve around living our lives well, and that means being able to act on our best judgment.

The altruist who argues for freedom to prove his morality essentially argues that he shouldn't be forced to give to the poor because he might do it anyway, and he should get the credit he deserves. But the rational egoist doesn't defend freedom by saying he would have acted that way anyway. He defends it by saying that is not how he would have acted.

The real problem with force is that it negates your judgment, and not because it obscures your motivations or robs you of moral credit. It impedes your ability to act by your mind. It prevents you from doing what you think is in your best interest. The defense needs to be that it negates your judgment, and not that it robs you of credit by overlapping with your judgment.

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