The Many Faces of Freedom

Abstract

Abstract Persons have a fundamental right to be left alone. This right stands at the very center of secular morality, not because it is a good thing to have, but because it is unavoidable and the source of moral authority when moral strangers meet. Be cause secular morality cannot provide a canonical vision of the good or a canonical content-full account of proper action, the principle of permission is the cardinal source of moral authority. For better or worse, persons are in secular moral authority over themselves and during their consensual activities with others. For those who recognize the concrete values that should guide the good life, secular morality is a wasteland without moral content, without the possibility of moral guidance, and with the possibility of such serious moral failures as suicide and euthanasia. The choices that individuals will be free to make within secular morality will conflict with what people will see within particular content-full moralities. For example, those with strong ideological commitments to egalitarianisms of various sorts will recognize that their aspiration to achieve equality coercively will be without general secular moral authority and go aground on free choice. The centrality of the principle of permission discloses the radical implications involved in recognizing secular morality as the morality of moral strangers. The centrality of the principle of permission discloses the wide-ranging implications of the Enlightenment’s failure to establish a canonical, content-full morality. In the failure of reason and in the absence of faith, secular morality is the morality of moral strangers who find themselves bound together and separated by their choices.