Viewing a single comment thread. View all comments

apriorian t1_ir4htzs wrote

Freedom is not moral and in fact is a nonsense (meaningless) term. To start with it is relative and often incompatible. My free speech is your hate speech. This is why every nation pays lip service to freedom while bounding it and containing it with innumerable laws.

If you wish to argue freedom is an average state of a population, you are faced with the moral dilemma that those who allocate and distribute the freedom packets must be superior in freedom compared to the average.

Ought may imply can but you would have to convince me duties can be moral and that might be a task you would prefer to forgo. You have no duty to attempt it and no moral obligation to demonstrate ought is a moral factor.

NOTE: My argument is not restricted to or by known social systems. In a system in which administrative hierarchies exist, moral duties must exist and be free to exercise.

1

contractualist OP t1_ir4rdug wrote

Thanks for the comment. I’ve addressed how we get to actual morality from freedom elsewhere.

https://open.substack.com/pub/garik/p/why-should-i-be-moral?r=1pded0&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post

Summary: we don’t have morals with freedom alone. Rather we need reason as an authority over our freedom.

Freedom by itself does not create morality, yet the starting point for any moral system must be personal agency.

Let me know if there are necessary points of clarification and I’ll write about it in the future.

1

apriorian t1_ir4tpp1 wrote

I prefer to understand the moral problem as being one in which morality and duty are incompatible. But in freedom we claim rights and rights cannot exist unless duties are imposed on others. All regulations and laws are duties imposed on us by those with the right.

I agree we cannot have morality without freedom but the barrier to freedom is duty and duty in the way i see it is another mans freedom. A plain example is the duty of the slave is the freedom of the master.

1

contractualist OP t1_ir4u9wg wrote

I’ll be discussing reason, the authority over freedom, in a later post.

Some people have expressed concern that morality is a restriction on freedom, as if we are slaves. Yet normativity is the exchange of freedom for reasons. Any time there is an “I should” there is a reason that justifies restricting one’s freedom to do otherwise (see Kants hypothetical imperative).

Only when we get to morality do these reasons that restrict freedom take the form of universalizable moral principles (categorical imperative).

2

TMax01 t1_ir7couu wrote

>Some people have expressed concern that morality is a restriction on freedom, as if we are slaves.

Slaves are not morally bound, they are physically bound. Morality is a restriction on freedom, just not a restriction that prevents transgression.

1

TMax01 t1_ir7cbxu wrote

>starting point for any moral system must be personal agency.

I agree with this premise, but I cannot discount the inverse; that any personal agency must have morality as it's starting point, in order to be at all distinguishable from lack of personal agency. Freedom by itself does "create" morality, it just doesn't differentiate between moral action and immoral action, without some premise beyond freedom itself; a "boundary", in your formulation. Your analysis confuses moral bounds for mere principle, and simultaneously appears to demand morality be a "limit" that somehow requires adherence beyond moral dictate, as if being immoral made an action physically impossible for the moral agent making moral judgements, even for itself and according to it's own moral strictures, to execute.

1