Liberty of Indifference
The surprising thing about this account of freedom, to the modern mind, is that it defines freedom in terms of purpose, and not in terms of choice. The modern conception of freedom was born when freedom to choose between alternatives was changed from a consequence of freedom to the essence of freedom, and separated from the notions of purpose and end. This happened in the middle ages, and was the work of William of Ockham and those who followed him. This conception of freedom is appropriately described as “liberty of indifference”. For Ockham, freedom is simply the power to choose between alternatives. Anything that would incline one towards one alternative or the other limits one’s freedom; perfect freedom is complete power to choose any alternative, and complete indifference towards these alternatives. Not all actions have to be done for the sake of good, because we are free to choose whether or not to seek the good. The good, in any case, does not mean what it meant in the previous conception of freedom. The good for man is not founded on the purpose of human existence, but simply and solely on God’s command. God, being perfectly free, can command whatever he wants. If he were to command murder, adultery, hatred of neighbour and of himself, these things would become good and their opposites would become evil.
The understanding of freedom as liberty of indifference has persisted from Ockham’s time up to the present day. The main innovation has been that his explanation of the good in terms of divine commands has been dropped, and our inclinations towards the good and reasons for action are understood on the model of physical desires. Physical desires, like a pang of lust or a thirsty feeling, are not true or false. Thus, statements about what it is good to do are not thought to be true or false. Nor can physical desires be mistaken, in the sense of being directed towards something that will not satisfy them. If you want food, you want food, and if you want sex, you want sex. Thus, it does not occur to people that a want could be mistaken, and that gratifying a want might not bring satisfaction or fulfilment. It does not make sense to them to hold that a desire for fame, or money, might not bring the satisfaction it promises. Freedom is thought of as something that has no essential link to the truth.
No freedom without virtue
A brilliant article — my deep gratitude to Dr. Lamont.
I have been showing my students for years now that the great poets of the Renaissance did not follow Ockham in this important regard. They did not define freedom as non-interference. They all affirm, and often in the most dramatic ways, that freedom without virtue is a contradiction in terms; that freedom always has a natural end, the goal that human beings as such are ordained to seek; that if you are talking about freedom but not talking about love, even the love made manifest in obedience, you are not talking about freedom at all but license. And license not only is not the same thing as liberty; license enslaves.
You can see this in Dante’s Divine Comedy, in Milton, in Shakespeare, in Spenser, in Sidney, in Cervantes, in Tasso, in Petrarch, in Chaucer … In fact, if you cannot see the connection between freedom and charity, you simply will not understand what is going on in Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale, or The Tempest, or Measure for Measure, or Macbeth, or King Lear …
Anthony Esolen
Professor of English
Providence College
Providence, Rhode Island, USA
Consequentialism
Very interesting article. I’m inclined to think that our irresponsible desire for sexual freedom explains most of the support for abortion – except perhaps for a few radical feminists who may have darker motives – and the ease of its justification lies mostly in the widespread acceptance of consequentialism today, even (at least in the U.S.) by those who pride themselves on being orthodox Catholics, although in reality they are usually conservative Catholics. This point about consequentialism has been made by Daniel Nichols of the Caelum et Terra blog, and I think he is right. In the U.S. if you argue that the mass bombing of World War II was wrong, you will immediately find yourself confronted by consequentialist arguments, very similar to those which are used to justify killing children in the womb.
Thomas Storck
Westerville, Ohio, USA
Justice as non-discrimination
I think another important reason for the widespread acceptance of abortion needs to be emphasized as well as the false idea of freedom highlighted by Dr. Lamont in this article.
It is the false modern idea of justice, which equates this virtue with “equal” treatment for all. Instead of the classic principle of the ‘perennial philosophy’ that sums up justice as “suum cuique” – “his own to each”, i.e., awarding to each person what is due to him (and, therefore, “different strokes for different folks”) – justice is now popularly equated with “non-discrimination” – powerfully helped along by the US 14th Amendment and interpretations given to it by a secularized Supreme Court.
Thus, a very powerful ideological motivation behind the push for abortion – one pretty much independent of our innate aggressivity and violence lurking in our subconscious “id” – has been the ‘gut-level feeling’ among radical feminists and their fellow-travellers that justice for women demands that they have the same freedom over their bodies as men have. Men’s activities are not hampered by pregnancy, therefore women must be given “equal” opportunity with men to be ‘un-pregnant’. Paradoxically, “emancipation” for women is thus seen in terms of a new form of male domination: modelling female life-style ideals on a distinctively male paradigm.
The same distorted understanding of justice as “equal treatment” is seen right now in the assumption that any form of “profiling” is self-evidently unjust, and in the push for “gay marriage”. The most powerful propaganda tool in the militant homosexuals’ armory is not an attempt to defend the moral acceptability of sodomy as such, but rather, their constantly trumpeted demand for “marriage equality”, and its corollary – the claim that the traditional definition of marriage is “discriminatory”.
Paradoxically, this new, absolute and inviolable “11th Commandment” now getting carved in stone in courthouses by activist judges – “Thou shalt not discriminate!” – itself springs from moral relativism: if all substantive “values” and moral codes are just subjective opinions, then it seems that the only option remaining for public policy is to be ‘neutral’ toward all of them, without “imposing” any of them. So in practice “non-discrimination” itself becomes a new ethical absolute to “imposed” remorselessly on those who still hold to a traditional Aristotelian/Judae-Christian ethic.
Fr Brian Harrison OS
St Louis, Missouri, USA