I could not imagine that, in his final State of the Union address, President Bush would pass up the opportunity to once again contrast believers in democracy and believers in terror, the adherents of “freedom” vs. the adherents of “tyranny.” He did not disappoint. And this final time around, he phrased it like this:

The advance of liberty is opposed by terrorists and extremists -- evil men who despise freedom, despise America, and aim to subject millions to their violent rule.

This echoed the essentially same thought he expressed in his 2002 address:

They [the terrorists] embrace tyranny and death as a cause and a creed. We stand for a different choice, made long ago, on the day of our founding. We affirm it again today. We choose freedom…

Now, I am hardly faulting the President for casting the idea in these terms. Along with millions of Americans, I think I know what he means.

But if truth be told, with each passing year, I have found these appeals to ‘freedom’ and ‘liberty’ to ring hollow—notwithstanding their well-intentioned air of eloquence in the context of our global conflict with Jihad-driven terrorism.

They ring hollow because, while millions of Americans are able to understand appeals to ‘freedom’ and ‘liberty’ within a philosophical context shared by President Bush—and arguably by the founders of our great nation—it is also apparent that millions of Americans do not partake of that context, are oblivious to it, or in many cases ideologically and existentially at extreme odds with it. It goes without saying, of course, that lacking well defined and well reasoned accounts of what ‘freedom’ and ‘liberty’ are—and how they were understood at America’s founding—such appeals will falter as mere platitudes.

In many contexts, the concepts of freedom and liberty are used interchangeably. But there are also meaningful distinctions. Freedom is perhaps best understood from within the context of philosophical anthropology, as a basic assessment, that is, of our human condition: we are able to act as self-determining agents, to be the “fathers of our own actions” as Aristotle would put it.

While it has been philosophically trendy of late to espouse some form of determinism and challenge the validity of traditional claims to such freedom, determinism doesn’t play out well in our shared human experience. Determinists have a particularly difficult time trying to explain how our DNA might have hard-wired us to make choices often against the deepest clamorings of our basic tendencies and preferences: why a Thomas More would face beheading rather than betray his conscience, or why a Marine might smother a live grenade with his own body rather than jump for cover.

Liberty could be understood as the public exercise of freedom within the life of a polity in which we have membership. Freedom, in this sense is the foundation and raison d’etre of liberty.

It is no secret of course that common understandings of freedom and liberty in American culture are not only conflicting but often work at cross purposes. And that is surely not lost on the President.[1] I was reminded earlier today of a fine synthesis of what I believe the founders understood about such concepts. It was an address by Pope John Paul II in 1998 to newly confirmed ambassador to the Holy See, Lindy Boggs:

The Founding Fathers of the United States asserted their claim to freedom and independence on the basis of certain "self-evident" truths about the human person: truths which could be discerned in human nature, built into it by "nature's God". Thus they meant to bring into being, not just an independent territory, but a great experiment in what George Washington called "ordered liberty:" an experiment in which men and women would enjoy equality of rights and opportunities in the pursuit of happiness and in service to the common good. Reading the founding documents of the United States, one has to be impressed by the concept of freedom they enshrine: a freedom designed to enable people to fulfill their duties and responsibilities towards the family and towards the common good of the community. Their authors clearly understood that there could be no true freedom without moral responsibility and accountability, and no happiness without respect and support for the natural units or groupings through which people exist, develop and seek the higher purposes of life in concert with others.

The current state of our union, if anything, is one of sheer confusion as competing accounts of liberty and freedom collide with each other in the public square, and the denizens of public culture are either oblivious to these semantic conflicts or resigned to their own helplessness in trying to make sense out of them.

Is ‘liberty’ to be understood, as Washington understood it, as being “ordered” and indeed subordinate to certain self-evident truths about human nature and our situation in the cosmos, or rather is it the case, as Justice Anthony Kennedy speculated in Casey vs. Planned Parenthood (1992) that “liberty is defined as the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of being, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life”?

Is ‘freedom’ a fundamental disposition that enables us “to fulfill our duties and responsibilities towards the family and towards the common good of the community” or is it the maximum possible existential space in which to pursue my own personal preferences, unencumbered by any demands of others except those I would reasonably expect them to respect in my own regard?[2]

The late John Rawls is the father of the most broadly accepted possible solution to this cultural predicament. His answer, in part, hinges on the notion of “public reason”, that is, the supposed collection of assertions about persons, societies, rights, and duties generally agreed upon and accepted as an area of "overlapping consensus" by "reasonable" people who happen to hold contradictory opinions on those same matters.

While we might take some consolation in the fact that Rawls at least appeals to some notion of objective and reasonable belief,[3] his notion wears rapidly thin under philosophical scrutiny. It is a notion, to be sure, which deliberately rejects any kind of tenet whose origin is to be found, for example, within a tradition of religious belief. And confusion today over what is “reasonable” and what should be admitted into “public reason” is at the very heart of our confusion about liberty and liberal democracy.[4]

This is why I look forward to the day when an American president will take advantage of the state of the union address to disabuse us of the impression that we share an allegiance to a unified understanding of what “advancing liberty” or “choosing freedom” means. That might be a good catalyst toward really getting us onto—or back onto—the same page. If we don’t eventually get ourselves on the same page here—preferably the same page the founders were on—we have reason to fear for the endurance and survival of our great experiment in ordered liberty.

So let’s keep discussing what should and should not be considered “reasonable”; let’s keep alive a thriving public discourse about the nature of morality, about the common good, about the nature of rights claims, and the relationship of moral judgments to law and public policy. Such on-going debate, discussion and reasoned discourse are our only way forward.

Rev. Thomas V. Berg, L.C. is Executive Director of the Westchester Institute for Ethics and the Human Person.

Copyright © 2008 The Westchester Institute for Ethics & the Human Person

[1] On another note, I would be amiss if I did not credit the President for acknowledging the scientific breakthrough in somatic cell reprogramming, and for calling on Congress to ban the cloning of human organisms:

In November, we witnessed a landmark achievement when scientists discovered a way to reprogram adult skin cells to act like embryonic stem cells. This breakthrough has the potential to move us beyond the divisive debates of the past by extending the frontiers of medicine without the destruction of human life. (Applause.) So we're expanding funding for this type of ethical medical research. And as we explore promising avenues of research, we must also ensure that all life is treated with the dignity it deserves. And so I call on Congress to pass legislation that bans unethical practices such as the buying, selling, patenting, or cloning of human life.

[2] For a wonderful exploration of our competing notions of freedom, see George Weigel, “A Better Concept of Freedom,” First Things (March 2002).

[3] It would seem Pope Benedict is at least intrigued by such claims to “public reason.” His recent (planned but undelivered) discourse to students and faculty of La Sapienza University is well worth a read.

[4] For more on Rawls’ theory and how the natural law tradition poses a considerable problem to that theory, see Robert P. George, “Public Morality, Public Reason,” First Things (November 2006).

***