Personal Identity, Freedom, and Responsibility in Ethics
Personal Identity, Freedom, and Responsibility
Human beings, as moral subjects, become themselves with their ethical and moral choices. These choices can lead to a happy and fulfilled life or a bitter and frustrated one. The good that all persons want to achieve in their moral life is, as Aristotle and St. Thomas believed, to achieve the best for their life. The morally wise and good person always tries to do good, not bowing to good or bad fortune, to ensure their emotional and psychological inner balance.
As people, we have various existential life choices and different perspectives. For example, there are different races, occupations, and sports. As we encounter them, we discover that some attract us more than others or that some are more suited to our capabilities. Let us choose our life project. People must have ideals, that is, a set of values, beliefs, and aspirations that serve as a model for our behavior in life. The most positive ideals for human and social relations are recognizing the dignity and equality of people, achieving peace, achieving sustainable development with ecological responsibility, personal honesty, work, eliminating violent behavior, and respecting human rights.
The Moral Person as a Subject
A person is a subject of moral responsibility because, not being determined by the genetic inheritance of the species, they must take responsible personal decisions and choose what best fits them to survive and live well. Javier Sádaba argued that behind this behavior is a selfish desire for personal satisfaction. Morality must be universal and universalizable: what is valid for one person should be valid for all (e.g., you should not kill anyone because it violates the inalienable dignity of persons). Man is a moral agent embedded within a given society with a code of moral behavior adapted to a determined sociocultural system.
David Hume believed that the goodness or badness of an event is a feeling of approval or disapproval of the subject towards a moral act. As moral subjects, we have the human capacity, and not transferable, to choose between various possibilities—the most suitable, the most correct, the best—to develop and improve our personal being. Javier Sádaba stated that the state should promote and respect social goods, economic models, and civic models of good social life with respect for each other as responsible citizens. The moral subject must practice virtues to be fulfilled in life as a responsible, honest, and happy person.
For Zubiri, virtues are pure and simple possibilities: the desire to achieve is what men want to achieve. Aristotle best defined virtue under the history of moral philosophy as hexis, the freedom of personal choice, which is an average governed by rational prudence (logos). Medieval Latin scholasticism distinguishes four cardinal virtues: prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance.
Ethical Responses to Human Questions
Since the beginning of moral reflection on ethical conduct, human beings have made a rational effort to answer the great questions: “Who am I?” and “Where have I come from?”. Ethics has tried to respond to these questions. For Epicurus, in the third century BC, philosophical thinking about the moral life of man is an activity that seeks a happy life. For the Stoics, those who do good and act virtuously are happy, following a moral line of behavior that gives meaning to human life in pursuit of the moral good through virtue and the search for social justice.
Aristotle believed that to be happy was to practice ethical virtues, developing good behavioral habits to achieve the moral good. The ultimate achievement of happiness involves reflection on Aristotelian ethics to reach inner contemplation. In the Middle Ages, Thomas Aquinas considered love as the appetite or the tendency for humans towards moral good, to be pursued by all persons to be happy. This love will, in the first instance, as well as for Aristotle, be self-love, love of others, and things. But love itself is not synonymous with selfishness; it is love for the best of us.
For Thomas Hobbes, happiness is wanting desired objects evenly: pleasure as an end in itself. In Enlightenment thought of the eighteenth century in Europe, a part of self-love or finding rational egoism calculated and prudent for one’s own happiness is the principle of benevolence, a universal philanthropy. Nietzsche, in the nineteenth century, wondered what sense there was in getting out of our misery, fears, and hardships, because all that makes us grow ethically to strengthen our existential willpower.