THERE WOULD BE NO SENSE AT ALL in saying that we are entitled to have a free will or freedom of choice. That is a good conferred on us by nature—or by God. The lower animals are deprived of it, but we cannot say that they are deprived of something they are entitled to.
It would be equally devoid of sense to say that we are entitled to the moral freedom that consists in being able to will as we ought and to refrain from willing as we ought not. We either acquire or fail to acquire such freedom through choices we have ourselves freely made. It is entirely within our power to form or fail to form the virtuous disposition to will as one ought that constitutes an individual’s moral freedom. No other human being, and certainly no organized society, can confer such liberty on us or withhold it from us.
According to Christian dogmas concerning man’s original sin and man’s redemption through Christ’s saving grace, fallen man cannot, without God’s help, acquire the moral virtue required for moral liberty. That is why Christian theologians refer to moral freedom as the God-given liberty enjoyed only by those whom God has elected for salvation.
On the secular plane of our social lives, it remains the case that we can make no rightful claim upon others or upon society to grant us a freedom that is entirely within our power to possess or lack.
The only liberties to which we can make a claim upon society are the freedom to do as we please within the limits imposed by justice and that variant of circumstantial freedom that is the political liberty enjoyed by enfranchised citizens of a republic.
Whether we have political liberty or not and the extent to which we have a limited freedom to do as we please depend largely, if not entirely, on the society in which we live—its institutions and arrangements, its form of government and its laws.
This being the case, two questions confront us. The first is, Why are we entitled to a limited freedom to do as we wish? Why do we have a right to it? The second question is, Why are we entitled to political liberty? Who has a right to it—every human being or only some?
Answering these questions requires us to discover the basis of entitlements that take the form of natural rights—rights we can demand that a just society should secure for us because they are rights inherent in our human nature, unalienable in the sense that a legal deprivation of them must be justified by special considerations.
Our understanding of the things that are really good for a human being because they fulfill needs that are inherent in human nature provides us with the basis we are looking for.
We are under the moral obligation to pursue happiness, which means trying to make good human lives for ourselves by seeking whatever, corresponding to our natural needs, is really good for us. We have a right to whatever we need to lead good human lives.
Our natural needs provide the basis not only for distinguishing between real and merely apparent goods, but also for distinguishing between the real goods to which we have a natural right and the apparent goods to which we do not have a natural right, but to the acquirement of which we may be privileged on condition that our seeking them does not interfere with anyone else’s acquirement of real goods.
Real goods are those to which we have a natural right, not merely a privileged possession. We cannot fulfill our moral obligation to pursue happiness by making a good life for ourselves unless we can make a rightful claim upon society to confer on us the real goods that we need for a good life. Some of these are not entirely within our own power to acquire, because they are, in part at least, goods of fortune, bestowed by beneficent external circumstances.
Thomas Jefferson’s too brief and, therefore, too elliptical statement of this truth in the Declaration of Independence yields its full significance only when rephrased and expanded. We are endowed with certain unalienable rights, he wrote, and we are all equally endowed with them because we are by nature equal. Among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, which are secured only by just governments and just laws.
The unalienable and natural right to life consists in our entitlement to all the economic goods that we need to sustain life, for without life we cannot live well. Beyond the economic goods indispensable to sustaining life itself are economic goods that we need to live well, above the level of mere subsistence, such as ample time for the pursuits of leisure.
Other things that we need to live well, not mentioned in the Declaration, are health and knowledge. We need them as much as we need a moderate possession of wealth in the form of economic goods, not just to live but to live well. To some extent these goods are within our power to obtain for ourselves; but to the extent that they are not entirely within our power to obtain, we have a right to the help that organized society can provide for obtaining them. That help comes in the form of whatever may be instrumental in obtaining them, such as schooling in the case of knowledge and a healthful environment in the case of health.
How about the right to liberty, a good that is mentioned in the Declaration as one of the principal goods to which we have a right because it is indispensable to our pursuit of happiness—to our living well?
To answer this question, let us first consider liberty of action—the freedom, within limits, to do as we wish. Our natural right to such freedom flows from our natural possession of a free will and a power of free choice, which we exercise in making the decisions that we must make, either rightly or wrongly, in our pursuit of happiness.
What good would it do us to make decisions that we cannot carry out? Without liberty of action, our freedom of choice would be rendered totally ineffective. We would be exercising it without achieving the ultimate good we are under an obligation to seek, if our freedom of choice is thwarted by unjust limitations on our liberty of action, or is nullified by the deprivation of such freedom. Lacking free will and freedom of choice, the lower animals have no rightful claim on liberty of action. Zoos do not exist in violation of rights. However much we may sympathize with caged or confined animals, we are not moved by a sense of injustice done to them.
We feel differently about Epictetus in chains and Boethius in prison. They could exercise their freedom of choice to will as they ought and so they enjoyed the moral freedom that is the prize of virtuous human beings. But virtuous human beings are not always able to lead good human lives. Moral virtue alone is not sufficient. Good fortune, in the form of beneficent external circumstances, is also indispensable to the successful pursuit of happiness.
Man’s natural freedom of choice and his obligation to make a good life for himself by making right choices is the basis of his entitlement by natural right to liberty of action. What about his entitlement to that variant of circumstantial freedom that is political liberty?
The reasoning here runs parallel to that in which we have just engaged. Again, human nature provides the answer. But here, in place of man’s natural freedom of choice as the basis of the entitlement to liberty of action, is man’s nature as a political animal.
To be a political animal involves more than being the kind of social animal that bees, ants, wasps, wolves, and other gregarious organisms are. Social or gregarious animals need to live in association with others of their kind. Man, too, is a social or gregarious animal in this sense. He naturally needs to live in association with other human beings in organized societies.
Unlike the organized societies of the social insects, which are entirely determined by the instincts of the species, human societies are voluntarily formed and conventionally instituted. They are natural societies only in the sense that man, being gregarious, needs to live in association with other human beings. They are at the same time conventional in the sense that the shape they take—the forms of government, the laws, the institutions, and other arrangements that constitute their organization—are products of rational and free, not instinctive, determination.
A political community is a society that is thus constituted. To say that man is by nature a political as well as a social animal is to say that he is by nature inclined to live in political communities and to participate in political activity—to be a self-governing citizen in a republic.
In short, being political by nature means that man by nature needs political liberty—the freedom of an enfranchised citizen—in order to live humanly well. This is the basis of man’s entitlement, by natural right, to political liberty.
Deprived of political liberty, as slaves are or as are the subjects of a despot no matter how benevolent, human beings cannot fulfill all their natural propensities and lead fully human lives. They are deprived of a real good to which they are by nature entitled. The same is true of those who, living under constitutional governments or in republics, are nevertheless disfranchised and thus deprived of political liberty.
Are there any grounds to justify the disfranchisement of human beings who are by nature political animals? Only two: infancy and pathological disablement by amentia or dementia—by a degree of feeblemindedness or of insanity that calls for hospitalization and medical care.
In addition, criminal behavior justifies a deprivation of political liberty, as well as liberty of action, either for a period of time or for life. The criminal, by his own behavior, has himself forfeited the exercise of a right that is unalienably his as a human being. The exercise of that right, temporarily in abeyance, is restored in full measure when he has served his term, if that is anything short of life.