Foundations of Ethical Action: Morality, Freedom, and Conscience

Posted on Nov 23, 2024 in Philosophy and ethics

Foundations of Ethical Action

Reasons for the Good

  1. Theological Reasons: God is the author of universal order and legislator of our behavior. The rules of the divine nature can be embedded in human nature or have been positive in some commands.
  2. Natural Reasons: Before developing or acquiring historical standards, human nature entails universal and obvious requirements that must be respected unconditionally. Aristotelianism and natural law doctrines defend this justification of moral duty.
  3. Social Reasons: Every society ensures its survival and identity through imposed rules. These rules become moral norms to be internalized by individuals.
  4. Self-Will: The good is given to the will, and this is good if it intends the line of duty or decides on universality. Good is established by a consensus intended to be universal, such as the declaration of human rights.

Conscience

Consciousness does not respond to the instance of the super-repressor, but to the free self. The person independently recognizes and appropriates values guided by reason and “moral sensibility.” Both are partly innate and the purpose of education in particular.

An ethic of freedom arising defines duty as the link the person sets up between ends and means to achieve them from a claim of universality, not as the expression of a taxation law. We call this responsibility, which is the other face of freedom. Development of conscience:

  1. Moral maturity is learning to decide for oneself while considering others.
  2. Individual motivation evolves from fear to abiding by universal principles of justice.

Moral Critique

Conceptions:

  1. Marxism: Considers morality a form of ideological alignment, the final result of the expropriation of the worker. Its function is concealing and legitimizing the divide and rule of capital.
  2. Nietzsche: Moral philosophy and the West have built a metaphysical and moral grand fiction to free man from the insecurity of existence. Traditional morality is the result of resentment and cowardice in life. Human beings must rise above good and evil, creating true-to-life values.
  3. Psychoanalysis: Explains moral consciousness as a product of the superego, which controls the self and suppresses the release of impulses. Conscience is the inner voice of all prohibitions and social taboos.

Freedom: A Requirement of Morality

The Meaning of Freedom

Freedom is a necessary presupposition of moral action. Without freedom, there can be no morality or responsibility. To say we are moral is to say we are free, but it is still difficult to define freedom specifically.

  1. Physical or External Freedom: The absence of physical impediments. It is never absolute but always subject to some degree of difficulty.
  2. Moral or Internal Freedom: The ability to choose something when one could have chosen something else. This free will can be understood in two senses:
    1. As a spontaneous will not predetermined by anything. The person decides with utter indifference, randomly or arbitrarily. This is called free will and freedom of indifference, where nothing predisposes the person. It is impossible for us to have absolute freedom.
    2. As a will where a person already has an identity that cannot be renounced. Human beings cannot do whatever they want, but must choose what aligns with their identity as rational human beings in society. This is our human liberty itself.
  3. Freedom of Reason: The spirit is free to think but is linked to the truth. Freedom of thought is a necessity rather than pure freedom. We move within a range of conditions. Freedom is understood as a gradual release.

Freedom and Responsibility

The advance of freedom is interpreted as the recovery of an active subject in an open society, such as political and social liberation. The responsibility of the individual transforms them into a citizen, someone who participates in the collective discourse on justice and contributes with their values and ideals. This participation is virtuous, practicing civility and citizenship. It is a synthesis between affirmation and respect for others.

The Irrationality of Evil

  1. Physical Evil: Attributed to natural causes, it raises metaphysical questions and is a strong argument against the goodness of being and even the existence of a supreme being. The importance we feel about it eventually transforms misunderstanding and rebellion into resignation. But it still remains unexplained.
  2. Moral Evil: Arises from our decisions as betrayal and cruelty. It is rejected and calls into question the sense of freedom; sometimes, we would relinquish it in exchange for the survival of the good.

For some philosophers, moral evil results from ignorance or choosing a particular good over the ultimate good. For others, like St. Augustine, evil is the absence of good and not an entity itself. For Leibniz, evil is inseparable from the world’s harmony, which is the best possible.

Experience shows the consistency of evil, resistant to rationality and paradoxical: if we remove it, there is nothing in the physical realm and chaos in the moral realm.

Freedom understood as liberation includes the reduction of evil as one of its tasks. Better understanding the nature of evil and educating critical awareness helps us achieve a freedom that faces injustice, pain, and death without evasions.