Morality Requires Freedom
All human beings have natural rights – either endowed by their Creator or inherent in their nature, depending on whom you ask – and have a moral obligation to respect the rights of others. Natural rights impose the negative obligation not to interfere with someone else's liberty. Thus, it is morally illegitimate to use coercion against someone who does not first undertake the use of force. The role of government, as recognized by America's founders, is to protect man's natural rights.
This kind of freedom involves far more than simple democracy. It demands a protected private sphere within which an individual can pursue his freely chosen norms, actions, and ends without the arbitrary intervention of others. And this freedom is necessary for individual morality.
There can be no morality without responsibility and no responsibility without self- determination. Responsible self-determination implies rationality, honesty, self-control, productiveness, and perseverance. In order to provide the maximum self-determination for each individual, the state should be limited to maintaining justice and defending against internal or external coercion, thus protecting life, liberty, and property.
A
social system such as capitalism is a system of relationships and cannot be moral or immoral in the sense that a person can be – only individuals can be moral agents. However, a social system can be moral in its effects if it promotes the possibility and likelihood of moral behavior by individuals who act within it. It follows, then; that there is a moral imperative to create a political and economic system that permits the greatest possibility for self-determination and moral agency. Capitalism is that system.
Capitalism is itself only a means and requires individual participants to decide on the ends to be pursued. No economic system can make people good. The best that an economic system can do is to allow people to be good. But morality and virtue require that individuals be free to be immoral and of bad character. Only when an individual has choice and bears responsibility for his actions can he be moral. Capitalism, more than other economic systems, allows the exercise of individual free will. Thus, though capitalism cannot guarantee a moral society, it is necessary for one.
