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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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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 lib- 
erty 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 re- 
quired 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.

Editor's note: There are so many things wrong with this traditional view that one hardly know where to begin deleting. See the "Jesus page" for full discussion.

 
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 pos- 
sess 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.