Understanding Freedom, Responsibility, and Moral Living

Key Dimensions of Human Existence

• Personal Dimensions: Internality, sociability, openness, eagerness to transcendence, life project.
• Components: Socio-cultural, socio-political, moral, and religious.

Determinism vs. Freedom

Determinism

Determinists argue that human beings are not free, but determined in their choices, doing what they can do at any given time.

Types of Determinism:

• Cosmological: Argues that a universal law governs humans and nature, making the future predictable and unchangeable.
• Theological: Believes that God knows and dominates all, predetermining all human actions.
• Scientific: Aims to explain human behavior through empirical dimensions.

Despite these theories, determinism fails to explain why we praise or reject certain behaviors, or why morality, law, religion, and politics exist.

Freedom and Responsibilities

We often have the opportunity to act freely.

Forms of Freedom:

• External Freedom: The power to act as we see fit, respecting laws and social customs. This freedom is lost when one is arrested or lives under dictatorships that deny freedom of expression.
• Internal Freedom: Consists of making decisions about issues that affect us; moral freedom.

Responding to the Sense of Existence

There are three basic ways to respond to the sense of existence:

• No Sense: Life and the world are absurd and not worth supporting. Associated with authors like J.P. Sartre and A. Camus.
• Sense Limited by Death: Life has meaning and value, but death is the absolute limit.
• Sense Beyond Death: Life continues beyond death, often called transcendent meaning, defended by religions with promises of salvation and a just and happy afterlife.

Moral Living and Thinking

The terms ethics and morality are often used interchangeably due to their similar etymology. Morality is what people and societies live by daily, while ethics is the philosophical reflection on morality.

Morality is a matter of everyday life, expressed in everyday language. Ethics is a philosophical reflection on morality, using philosophical language. Ethics clarifies what we call moral, what we should consider moral, and how it influences our private lives.

It primarily clarifies three issues: what is moral, how it is constructed, and how it applies to life, as discovered through philosophical reflection, depending on ethical theories.