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Word Gems 

exploring self-realization, sacred personhood, and full humanity

Dr. Mortimer J. Adler's 

Six Great Ideas

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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 mak- 
ing 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 obliga- 
tion to seek, if our freedom of choice is thwarted by unjust 
limitations on our liberty of action, or is nullified by the depri- 
vation 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 gregar- 
ious 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 so- 
cieties 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 commu- 
nities 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 sub- 
jects of a despot no matter how benevolent, human beings can- 
not 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 polit- 
ical 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 abey- 
ance, is restored in full measure when he has served his term, 
if that is anything short of life.