Volume 4, Number 2 • Fall 2001

Reply to Paul Cleveland's “Economic Liberty”

Stephen J. Grabill
Research Fellow
Center for Economic Personalism

I want to thank Professor Cleveland for his work in preparing such a helpful and theologically informed treatment of economic liberty. I found his analysis of Bastiat's divine pedagogy of suffering to be particularly insightful. However, the issue that I want to address in this response, concerns the possibility of providing a moral case for economic liberty. Professor Cleveland raises this issue himself in the opening paragraph of his paper. Needless to say, we both agree that such a possibility exists. Professor Cleveland uses Bastiat's statement from the Economic Harmonies to address this possibility. As you will recall Bastiat writes: “All men's impulses, when motivated by legitimate self-interest, fall into a harmonious social pattern.” Though I ultimately have no quarrel with this statement, I prefer to distinguish between different types of freedom, which, when taken together, can provide a strong moral case for economic liberty. The advantage of my approach may be that it enables us to develop a positive rationale for the morality of economic liberty.

It is important to begin by acknowledging that economic liberty is a subspecies of freedom in general. In the tradition of Christian social thought, freedom is generally divided into three types but not always with the following labels, negative freedom, positive freedom, and ontological freedom. Free-market thinkers such as Bastiat do a fine job of developing the concept of negative freedom, which can be defined as “the absence of coercion,” but they usually have very little to say regarding the other two types. Consequently, freedom (and, by implication, economic liberty) is reduced to meaning the absence of external restriction or of any attempt to interfere with a person's rationally chosen end. I think that Bastiat's understanding of economic liberty can be classified as negative freedom. Thus, for him, social harmony results when people are left alone to pursue their legitimate self-interests. Professor Cleveland summarizes his view as follows: “Bastiat's concept of civil liberty … can be defined as the condition in which people are free from the arbitrary dictates of others…. When applied to the realm of economics, the establishment of civil liberty implies that a person is free to engage in any mutually agreeable exchange of goods that might be legitimately traded.” The problem with Bastiat's view of negative freedom is not what it negates–arbitrary coercion by others–but that, taken by itself, it begs the question of why coercion or intervention is immoral in the first place. I would argue that one must have a full understanding of freedom in its positive, ontological, and negative dimensions to develop a sound moral case for economic liberty.

In The Acting Person and elsewhere, Karol Wojtyla offers a Christian personalist understanding of positive and ontological freedom that helps to overcome the moral ambivalence of negative freedom. Positive freedom, as Wojtyla understands it, follows from his account of self-determination, where self-determination is the idea that people choose to act in ways that show they are self-aware. “I will do x, but not y, if and only if she does z.” It follows from the fact of self-determination that people are ultimately responsible for their actions, as Bastiat also affirms. But transcendence is another aspect of positive freedom, and that is the freedom to act in accord with truth. In effect, then, every action ordered toward truth is also a step in the direction of freedom. Therefore, positive freedom can be defined as “the freedom for living a life that is in accord with the truth about the human person.“ Positive freedom presupposes that the human ability to act is seen not merely in terms of an absence of constraints but also in terms of what the goal of the action is. We must have not only the ability to act (i.e., freedom from coercion) but the ability to act toward some end that is worthy of our striving. For those who defend the morality of economic liberty, there must be an affirmation that the goal toward which an action is directed should be pursued. This means that some goods that may be legitimately (that is, legally) traded should not be traded because they undermine human dignity.

The concept of ontological freedom provides an even more compelling argument for the morality of economic liberty. Human beings, by virtue of their capacity for self-mastery, are aware of themselves as free in the sense that they are the authors of their own actions. Since the capacity for self-mastery is a constitutive and reflexive aspect of our humanity, it follows that freedom (what we are calling ontological freedom) is an essential part of what it means to be a human being. There can be no truly human act without a truly free actor. If an action is coerced, then the person fails to act as a person because, unlike animals, persons act in ways that exhibit self-possession, self-governance, and self-determination. To act in a fully human manner (which assumes acting in freedom), the action must be directed toward that which is true. This is so because actions are not merely internal states directed outwardly, but they also have an effect on the person acting. Actions directed toward ends other than the truth (or a person's basic good) can progressively undermine freedom as they are assimilated into the one who performs them. I think that Bastiat recognized to some extent the reality of positive and ontological freedom, for why else would he claim that people motivated only by self-love would act in such a way as to increase human flourishing?