Freedom, Morality, and Ethics: Exploring the Foundations of Human Action
Freedom: A Requirement of Morality
The Meaning of Freedom
Freedom is a necessary requirement for moral action. Without freedom, there can be no morality or responsibility. To say that we are moral implies that we are free. However, defining freedom is complex.
Types of Freedom
Physical or External Freedom
This refers to the absence of physical impediments. It is never absolute but always subject to some degree of limitation.
Moral or Internal Freedom
This is the ability to choose one thing when another could have been chosen.
Spontaneous Freedom
The person decides with utter indifference, demonstrating the absolute character of their liberty, choosing at random.
Freedom as the Will of a Person with Identity
A person cannot do whatever they want, but rather what they are. They must choose according to their nature: a rational and social being. Freedom is our own humanity.
Decisions are subject to reason, which constitutes a limitation of free will.
Freedom of Reason or Thought
The mind is free to think. Hence, freedom of thought is a necessity for freedom.
Freedom can be understood as a gradual release.
Freedom and Responsibility
Advancing freedom is interpreted as a recovery of an active subject in an open society, as a political and social liberation.
It involves overcoming civic apathy and indifference to others.
The responsibility of the individual becomes that of a citizen, someone who participates in the collective discourse on justice and contributes their values and ideals. This participation is a virtuous practice of civility and citizenship, a synthesis between self-affirmation and respect for others.
Methods of Ethics: Material and Formal
Moral Autonomy and Heteronomy
All ethics tends towards the ideal of autonomy. This is a person’s ability to provide the foundation and reason for their actions. Its opposite is heteronomy: the standard of action comes from outside the individual or from God.
Heteronomous ethics are material because the content of moral norms is predetermined from the outside. Independent ethics, it seems, can only be formal, empty of content.
Absolute autonomy is impossible.
Material Ethics
Eudaemonism (Aristotle)
The ultimate goal of humanity is happiness, which consists of actualizing the natural tendency that characterizes human beings: reason.
Happiness requires a certain level of physical and social well-being, as humans also have other needs as living beings and social creatures. The greatest good is social justice and civic harmony, or friendship.
Hedonism (Epicurus)
The good and happiness consist in the pursuit of pleasure and avoidance of pain.
Utilitarianism (Bentham and Stuart Mill)
Moral value resides in the practical effects of the action, achieving the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people.
Formal Ethics
Kantian Formalism (Kant)
Kant rejects the previous ethical systems because they cannot establish universality and necessity.
A universal and material moral may not be necessary. It must be formal, devoid of empirical content. The goodness of an action lies in the way of acting, which individuals will decide for themselves with absolute rectitude, considering nothing but the line of duty (autonomy).
A person can do things against duty, or consistent with it.
Categorical imperatives are judgments that necessarily mandate a duty to act, based on the universalizable principle that the action can be performed by any human being.
Existentialist Formalism (Sartre)
Sartre believes that human existence is not determined by any value. There is no human nature, no absolute value to define what a person is and what they should do. Individuals choose first, and then their being is composed of that choice.
The goodness of the action lies in its being radical and absolutely free.