3.10 Freedom of Choice
Natural Freedom
No one in the world enjoys absolute freedom.
Human beings depend on one another in every condition of life. The lowliest and the greatest alike need others, and this mutual dependence sets limits on complete independence.
Absolute freedom could exist only in total isolation, such as that of a hermit alone in the desert. As soon as two people live in relation to one another, rights come into play. Each must respect the other, and absolute freedom disappears.
Respecting the rights of others does not take away anyone’s own rights.
The rights proper to each person are granted by nature. Because of that, honoring another’s rightful claims does not diminish one’s own. True freedom is not the power to ignore others, but the ability to act within the justice that belongs to all.
A person may speak in favor of liberty in public life and yet act like a despot at home or toward subordinates.
This contradiction comes from pride and selfishness. Some understand natural law intellectually, yet fail to live by it. They know what they ought to do, but do not put it into practice. Their professed principles become a calculated pretense rather than a rule of conduct.
Such inconsistency carries moral responsibility.
The more intelligence people have for understanding a true principle, the less excuse they have if they do not apply it to themselves. Sincere and simple persons who live according to what they genuinely grasp may be further advanced in the path of God than those who seek only to appear virtuous without being so.
Slavery
No human being is naturally meant to be the property of another.
Every form of subjection in which one person claims ownership over another violates the law of God. Slavery is an abuse of power. Like other abuses rooted in ignorance and domination, it is destined to disappear as humanity progresses.
Any human law that establishes slavery stands against nature. It reduces a person to the level of an animal and degrades both body and soul.
Custom Does Not Make Injustice Right
When slavery is accepted as part of a culture’s customs, that acceptance does not make it good. Evil remains evil, even when it is defended by habit, convenience, or social approval.
Moral responsibility, however, is measured in part by the degree of understanding available. Those who uphold slavery always violate the law of nature, but their guilt varies according to their ability to recognize the wrong they are doing. In societies where slavery had long been treated as normal, many accepted it in good faith because they had not yet clearly perceived its injustice. As reason developed, and as spiritual teaching made human equality before God more evident, that excuse could no longer stand. Once people understood that the enslaved person was their equal before God, continuing the practice became a more conscious wrongdoing.
Inequality of Aptitudes Does Not Justify Domination
Differences in intelligence, capacity, or development do not give one people the right to enslave another.
More advanced individuals or nations may assist those who are less developed, helping them grow and progress. But this does not authorize humiliation, exploitation, or bondage. Superiority in knowledge creates a duty of guidance, not a right of ownership.
Human pride has often led some groups to treat others as if they were beasts of burden merely because they seemed less advanced in material or intellectual terms. People have imagined themselves to be of purer blood and therefore entitled to rule, buy, or sell others. This is a deeply material way of thinking. True superiority is not a matter of blood. What matters is the spirit.
Humane Treatment Does Not Remove the Injustice
Some slaveholders provide well for those they enslave and persuade themselves that bondage is justified because freedom might leave those persons in greater hardship. This reasoning does not change the nature of the act.
Such people may understand their own interests well. They preserve the health and comfort of those they own much as they would care for livestock they hope to profit from. They may be less blameworthy than those who abuse and mistreat their slaves, but they still treat human beings as merchandise. Even under mild conditions, slavery remains a denial of a person’s right to belong to himself or herself.
The wrong lies not only in cruelty, but in possession itself. To claim ownership over another person is already to violate human dignity.
Freedom of Thought
Human beings possess an inner domain that no external power can completely subdue: thought.
Thought enjoys unlimited freedom because it encounters no material barrier. A person may be prevented from speaking, writing, or acting, yet the movement of the mind itself remains beyond outward constraint. Its expression can be obstructed, but thought itself cannot be destroyed.
This freedom gives thought profound moral importance. What is hidden from the world is not hidden from divine justice. Human beings are responsible for their thoughts, even when those thoughts are never expressed in words or deeds.
God alone fully knows what passes within the conscience. For that reason, judgment does not rest merely on visible conduct, but also on the intentions, desires, and inner movements of the soul. Thought may be silent before others, yet it remains accountable before God, who alone can condemn or absolve with perfect justice.
Freedom of Conscience
Freedom of conscience follows from freedom of thought.
Conscience is an inward thought belonging to each person, just as other thoughts do. Because of this, no one has the right to erect barriers against freedom of conscience any more than against freedom of thought. Human laws may govern relations between individuals, but the relation between the individual and God belongs to a higher order of law.
To violate freedom of conscience is to pressure people to act against what they truly think. This does not produce genuine conviction. It produces hypocrisy. For that reason, freedom of conscience is one of the marks of real civilization and progress.
Respect for Belief
Not every belief is equally true, but every belief deserves respect when it is sincere and leads to the practice of the good. What deserves reproach is not sincerity itself, but beliefs that lead to evil.
It is therefore wrong to use one’s own convictions to scandalize, humiliate, or wound those who think differently. Such behavior shows a lack of charity and violates freedom of thought.
Limits in Social Life
Freedom of conscience does not mean that every outward act committed in the name of a belief must be tolerated.
Inner belief is beyond coercion. External actions, however, may be restrained when they disturb society or cause harm to others. Preventing harmful acts does not destroy freedom of conscience, because it does not reach into the inner forum where belief itself remains free.
A clear distinction is needed here: belief as belief must remain unforced, while conduct that injures others may be lawfully checked.
Correcting Error Without Violence
When harmful doctrines spread, there is nothing unjust in seeking to bring those led astray back toward what is true. More than permitted, this is a duty. But the means matter.
Truth must be taught through gentleness, persuasion, goodness, and fraternity, never through force. Violence corrupts the very cause it claims to defend. Forced conviction is not conviction at all. If anything should be imposed, it is the example of love, not the pressure of compulsion.
The Sign of a True Doctrine
Since many doctrines claim exclusive possession of truth, their value is known less by proclamation than by their fruits.
A doctrine is recognized as good when it produces fewer hypocrites and a greater number of genuinely moral people—people who practice the law of love and charity with the greatest purity and the widest application. Wherever a teaching sows division, fosters hostility, and separates the children of God from one another, it bears the sign of error and harm.
The truest teaching is the one that most fully strengthens charity, reduces hypocrisy, and unites human beings in the practice of the good.
Free Will
Human beings act with free will.
Because they possess freedom of thought, they also possess freedom of action. Without free will, a human being would be nothing more than a machine.
Free will does not appear in its full strength at birth. It exists in proportion to the development of the will and of the faculties through which the spirit expresses itself. In the earliest stages of life, freedom is almost absent. It unfolds gradually, and its objects change as the person grows. A child’s thoughts are shaped by the needs of childhood, and free will is first applied to what is necessary at that age.
Instinctive tendencies present at birth do not destroy freedom. They come from the spirit’s condition before incarnation. According to the degree of its advancement, these predispositions may incline a person toward blameworthy actions, and sympathetic spirits may reinforce such inclinations. Yet no impulse is irresistible where the will to resist is present. The power to choose remains, and with sincere resolve, resistance is possible.
The body does influence the spirit’s expression during earthly life, but this influence does not abolish free will. Matter can hamper the spirit’s manifestations, which is why faculties unfold more freely in worlds where bodies are less dense and material than those of Earth. Still, the body is only an instrument; it does not create the spirit’s faculties.
A necessary distinction must be made between intellectual faculties and moral faculties. If a person carries an impulse toward violence or murder, that tendency belongs to the spirit and is transmitted through incarnation; it does not arise from the bodily organs themselves. When people deliberately sink into material preoccupations and silence their higher thought, they degrade themselves. In doing so, they become responsible, because they have chosen that condition through the use of their own freedom.
Limits on Responsibility
When intelligence is seriously impaired by some cause, free will is no longer complete. A person who no longer has full command of thought no longer has full freedom. Such distortions may sometimes be expiatory conditions for the spirit, especially where faculties were once misused through pride, vanity, or wrongdoing. A spirit may then find itself confined in a body marked by mental impairment, just as a tyrant may be reborn in the condition of a slave, or a selfish rich person in that of a beggar. Even under such restraint, the spirit remains conscious of the limitation and suffers from it. In that suffering, the constraining action of matter becomes evident.
Voluntary drunkenness does not excuse wrongful acts. One who becomes intoxicated knowingly deprives oneself of reason in order to satisfy lower passions. That is not the removal of responsibility, but an added fault. The wrongdoing committed in drunkenness is joined by the deliberate act of having clouded one’s judgment.
Instinct, Development, and Accountability
Among people in a more primitive state, instinct is the dominant faculty. Even so, instinct does not prevent them from acting freely in certain matters. Their freedom resembles that of children: it is first directed toward immediate needs and grows later with the development of intelligence. As intelligence expands, responsibility also increases. For that reason, those who are more enlightened are more accountable for their acts than those whose development is still rudimentary.
Social position can also restrict the full outward exercise of freedom. Life in the world imposes demands, pressures, and constraints. Yet divine justice takes all of this into account. No one is judged without consideration of circumstances. Responsibility remains, however, for the effort made—or not made—to overcome the obstacles that stand in the way of what is right. The obstacle may diminish blame, but it does not justify moral laziness. What is weighed is not only the difficulty of the path, but also the sincerity and strength of the effort.
Fatalism
Fatalism exists only in a limited sense.
It applies to the choice a spirit makes before incarnation, when it accepts a particular kind of life, with its trials and conditions. By choosing such a path, the spirit outlines for itself a kind of destiny, the natural consequence of the position it has chosen to occupy. This concerns physical trials.
Moral life remains under the rule of free will. In temptations, struggles, and decisions between good and evil, the spirit always remains free to yield or to resist. Good spirits may encourage, strengthen, and help when courage falters, but they do not suppress the will. Inferior spirits may trouble, frighten, or intensify a danger, yet even then the incarnate spirit retains freedom of choice.
Many hardships that people attribute to fate are, in reality, consequences of their own actions. It is often easier to blame destiny than to recognize personal error. Character, judgment, and conduct shape success and failure more than people usually admit. Even when spiritual influence is involved, harmful suggestions can be resisted.
Some individuals seem relentlessly pursued by misfortune. At times this reflects trials they chose for themselves. Yet even in the midst of suffering, conscience remains decisive. When a person can say inwardly that they have not acted wrongly, that awareness brings real consolation.
Fatalism and the Hour of Death
Fatalism, in the strict sense, applies above all to the moment of death.
When the appointed time for departure arrives, death cannot be avoided. Until then, dangers may threaten without succeeding. Countless examples suggest that a person does not die before the hour has come. But once that hour arrives, no precaution can ultimately prevent the transition.
This does not make prudence useless. The precautions taken against danger are themselves part of the means by which death is delayed until its proper time. The warning, the instinct to avoid harm, the impulse to step back, seek help, or choose safety—these also belong to the order of Providence.
A spirit may know before incarnation that the life it has chosen exposes it more probably to one kind of death than another. It also knows that it will face struggles in which effort and vigilance matter. Knowledge of risk is not the same as absolute certainty regarding every circumstance. The spirit enters a life whose general conditions are known, while still preserving freedom within them.
Dangers as Warnings
Dangers are not always meaningless accidents.
At times, when life is threatened and the danger passes, the experience serves as a warning. It can awaken reflection, humility, and the desire to become better. Under the influence of such a shock, a person may briefly see more clearly the fragility of life and the weakness of human pride. Good spirits support these moments of awakening.
Yet the effect is often temporary. Once the fear passes, old passions may return. People may imagine that, because they escaped once, they can always escape. In that way, danger becomes a reminder that is neglected.
Many dangers also have moral significance. Their cause is often linked to some fault committed, some imprudence, or some duty neglected. They are not always punishments in a crude sense, but warnings that invite correction.
Presentiments of Death
Some people seem to know that their end has not yet come. Others foresee that death is near.
Such presentiments may come from protector spirits, who warn in order to prepare the person for departure or to restore courage when courage is needed. They may also arise from the spirit’s own intuition concerning the life it chose or the mission it accepted and knows it must fulfill.
This helps explain the confidence sometimes seen in those who face extreme danger, such as soldiers in combat. At times that confidence is not mere bravado, but an obscure sense that the hour has not yet arrived.
Those who foresee death often fear it less than others. In them, the spirit is less absorbed in bodily life. They understand death more as release than as annihilation, and for that reason may meet it with greater calm.
Everyday Accidents and the Limits of Necessity
Not every event in life is fixed in advance.
Many ordinary accidents are small enough that guidance may help a person avoid them. Spiritual influence can direct thought, awaken caution, or suggest a safer course, especially because unnecessary physical suffering is not desired. True fatalism applies only to entry into bodily life and departure from it, and to certain major events tied to the chosen path.
There are events that must occur because they were foreseen and accepted before incarnation. Even so, it is mistaken to imagine that everything is written in detail. Much of what happens is the consequence of free acts. If a person is careless and suffers for it, the event follows from that imprudence, not from an irresistible decree.
Only the great sorrows and decisive experiences—those capable of influencing moral growth—belong to the broader design foreseen for purification and education.
Can Events Be Avoided?
Human effort can often avert events that seemed destined to occur, if such a change remains compatible with the overall course of the life chosen.
Doing good has real power. By fulfilling duty and choosing rightly, a person can prevent much evil, especially the evil that would have led to still greater wrongs. Destiny does not remove responsibility. On the contrary, moral effort is one of the means by which many harmful outcomes are avoided.
No One Is Predestined to Commit Crime
No one is ever predestined to commit a crime.
A spirit choosing a life of struggle may know that it will encounter situations in which wrongdoing is possible, even probable. It may know that violent passions, harsh conditions, or severe conflicts will place it near the danger of grave faults. But it does not know that it must commit them.
A murderer deliberates before acting. That inner deliberation proves freedom. If a person were bound in advance to commit murder, there would be no moral responsibility. Crime, like every moral act, results from volition.
A necessary distinction must therefore be maintained between the material events of existence and the moral acts of life. If fatalism exists at all, it concerns certain material conditions independent of the will. Moral acts proceed from the individual and remain free.
Apparent Bad Luck in Human Affairs
Some lives seem marked by constant frustration. This may result from the kind of existence chosen before incarnation, especially when the aim is to develop patience, resignation, or endurance. But such hardship is not always unavoidable.
Failure often comes from taking the wrong path. People sometimes attempt what does not suit their abilities, temperament, or true calling. Vanity and ambition draw them away from the place where they might have done honest and useful work. Wanting brilliance instead of fitness, they choose a role that flatters self-love and then blame fate when they fail.
There is wisdom in recognizing one’s proper work and limits. Many disappointments would be avoided if people sought a life in harmony with their real capacities instead of chasing illusions inspired by pride.
Social Customs and Free Will
Social pressure does not destroy freedom.
Customs are human creations, not divine decrees. If people submit to them, it is usually because they prefer the approval of others to the cost of independence. That too is a choice.
Public opinion can become an obstacle when vanity makes people fear any lowering of social status. Some would rather endure ruin than accept honest work that appears beneath them. Yet the sacrifice made in such cases is often not a noble sacrifice, but a sacrifice to pride.
This does not mean that wisdom consists in eccentricity or in defying convention for its own sake. There is no merit in becoming singular merely to appear philosophical. Better judgment lies in accepting, without complaint, a more modest place when circumstances require it.
Apparent Good Fortune
Just as some seem pursued by bad luck, others seem favored by fortune.
Often this is simply because they guide themselves better. Prudence, moderation, realism, and self-knowledge spare them many of the difficulties that afflict others. What appears to be luck may be sound judgment.
Yet success can also be a trial. Prosperity intoxicates. People begin to trust blindly in their star, and later they may pay dearly for that confidence through reversals that prudence might have prevented.
Even luck in matters such as games of chance can have moral meaning. It may be a temptation accepted beforehand. Material gain may conceal spiritual loss if it feeds greed, vanity, or pride.
The Real Meaning of Material Destiny
What appears to govern material destiny is often the result of free choices made before and during earthly life.
Spirits choose trials according to what will best contribute to their progress. The more difficult the trial, the greater the possible advancement if it is borne well. For this reason, the number of those who suffer exceeds the number of those who seem favored. Many spirits prefer useful trials to lives of ease.
A life of abundance and selfish enjoyment is not necessarily enviable. It may reveal a timid spirit unwilling to face the struggles that foster growth. Even the most comfortable life contains its own anxieties, events, and hidden burdens.
Earthly greatness and pleasure have little lasting value. What matters is how life is used: whether difficulties are turned into means of purification, whether freedom is used well, and whether the spirit grows in patience, wisdom, and goodness.
“Born Under a Lucky Star”
The saying that someone is born under a lucky star comes from an ancient superstition that linked the stars to human destiny.
At most, it survives as an allegory. Taken literally, it mistakes poetic imagery for reality.
Foreknowledge of the Future
The future is, in principle, hidden from human beings. Only in rare and exceptional circumstances is its disclosure permitted.
This concealment is not arbitrary. If people knew in advance what was to happen, they would often neglect the present. They would no longer act with the same freedom. If convinced that an event must occur, they might conclude that there is no reason to concern themselves with it. If the coming event seemed undesirable, they would try to prevent it. In either case, their conduct would be altered by the knowledge itself.
Providence has willed that events unfold in such a way that each person contributes to their accomplishment, even when attempting to resist them. Human beings thus prepare, often without realizing it, many of the events that will arise over the course of their lives.
Why the Future Is Sometimes Revealed
Although the future is generally hidden, there are circumstances in which its revelation serves a purpose. This occurs when the foreseen event helps bring about what must be accomplished rather than obstructing it, and when the knowledge leads a person to act differently than they would have acted without it.
Such revelations may also serve as a trial. The expectation of an event can awaken either noble or harmful impulses. A person who learns of an unexpected inheritance, for example, may be stirred by greed, vanity, or the desire to increase worldly pleasures. That person might even begin to wish for the death of the one from whom the fortune is expected. Yet the same anticipation might instead awaken gratitude, generosity, detachment, or a more upright use of what is to be received.
Even when the prediction does not come to pass, the experience still has value. The disappointment becomes another test. What matters morally is not only the event itself, but the thoughts and intentions it aroused. In that way, the person acquires either merit or blame according to the good or bad dispositions brought to light.
The Purpose of Trial
Since God knows all things, divine knowledge does not depend on trial. A trial does not exist to inform God of what a person is worth. That is already perfectly known.
Its purpose is to leave human beings fully responsible for their own conduct. Because they are free to choose between good and evil, they must be placed in conditions where that freedom is exercised. Trial presents the temptation of evil and leaves them all the merit of resisting it.
Even when the outcome is foreknown, justice requires that reward or punishment follow acts that have truly been committed, not acts only foreseen. No one can justly be condemned or rewarded for what has not yet been done.
The comparison with ordinary human life makes this clearer. However capable a candidate may be, and however certain success may seem, no diploma is granted without examination. Likewise, a judge does not condemn an accused person because a crime might be committed, but only on the basis of proof that it has in fact been committed.
The same principle applies to moral life. Human beings are not created already perfected in completed virtue. They advance toward it through development, choice, and experience. Trial belongs to that process.
The Wisdom of Concealment
Reflection on the consequences of knowing the future shows the wisdom of its concealment. Certainty of a happy event would tend to produce inaction. Certainty of an unhappy one would often lead to discouragement. In both cases, effort would be weakened.
Human beings are shown the future only in the sense of a goal to be reached through their own labor, without being given full knowledge of the difficulties that lie along the way. If every obstacle and incident were known beforehand, initiative would be diminished and free will would be paralyzed. Instead of acting with courage and intelligence, people would allow themselves to be carried passively along the slope of events.
When success is guaranteed in advance, concern relaxes, vigilance fades, and effort declines. The hidden future preserves action, responsibility, and freedom. It keeps each person engaged in the work of the present moment, where character is formed and destiny is prepared.
A Theoretical Summary on the Driving Force behind Human Actions
Human beings are not fated into evil.
Their actions are not written in advance, and the wrongs they commit do not result from an unchangeable decree of destiny. A spirit may choose, as a trial or an expiation, a life in which crime becomes more likely through circumstances, surroundings, or powerful tendencies. Even so, the person remains free to act.
Free will operates in two moments. In the spirit state, it appears in the choice of trials and of the kind of bodily life to be lived. In earthly life, it appears in the power to yield to temptation or resist it. Incarnation does not destroy freedom. If a spirit gives in to the influence of matter, it fails in a trial it had accepted. Yet help is never absent: God and good spirits may be invoked for strength.
Without free will, there could be neither guilt in evil nor merit in goodness.
Praise and blame always rest on intention, and intention implies freedom. To excuse wrongdoing entirely by physical constitution would be to deny reason and reduce the human being to the level of an unthinking creature. The same principle applies to good actions. People rarely attribute their virtuous acts to their bodily organs. Instinctively, they recognize that freedom of thought and will belongs to the dignity of human nature.
Fatalism and Moral Freedom
Fatalism, in its ordinary sense, means that all the events of life have been irrevocably ordained in advance. If that were true, human beings would be machines without real will. Intelligence would lose its purpose if every action were overruled by destiny.
Such a doctrine would overturn moral responsibility. There could be no true evil, no real crime, and no genuine virtue. Reward and punishment would cease to be just, since no one could deserve either. Progress itself would become meaningless, because those who believed themselves wholly ruled by fate would see no reason to improve.
There is, however, a limited sense in which fatalism exists.
A spirit may have chosen, before birth, a certain kind of earthly condition as a trial, an expiation, or a mission. In that sense, the broad circumstances of life and the tendencies connected with them may be said to be undergone necessarily. The person encounters the tribulations bound up with that chosen existence.
But this necessity stops there. Whether one yields to those tendencies or resists them remains a matter of will. The details of events depend partly on the circumstances people themselves create through their actions, and partly on the influence of spirits who suggest thoughts and impulses. What is presented to a person may follow from a chosen life-plan; what results from those events is not fixed in the same absolute way.
Prudence, effort, and moral decision can alter the course of things. For this reason, fatalism never governs the acts of moral life.
The Fatality of Death
There is one point at which human beings submit absolutely to fatalism: death.
No one can finally escape the term fixed for earthly life or the kind of death that will interrupt it. In this matter, the law is inexorable.
The Source of Human Actions
A common view holds that all instincts arise solely from the individual, either from bodily organization or from an innate personal nature. That view easily becomes an excuse: one says, in effect, that wrongdoing is unavoidable because one was made that way.
A moral view of human freedom rejects that excuse.
Even when an evil suggestion comes from outside, the person remains responsible because the power to resist remains intact. Resistance to an external suggestion is easier, not harder, than struggling against an evil presented as one’s own nature. No temptation is irresistible. People can close their ears to the secret voice that urges evil just as they can refuse the spoken advice of a corrupt companion.
This resistance is an act of will. It is strengthened by prayer, by asking God for support, and by seeking the help of good spirits. The prayer, “Do not let us fall into temptation, but deliver us from evil,” expresses exactly this struggle and this hope.
Imperfection, Influence, and Progress
Human beings are not machines moved by a foreign impulse.
They are rational beings who hear, judge, and choose between opposing counsels. Nor are they deprived of initiative. They act by their own impulse because they are incarnate spirits who retain, beneath the bodily covering, the qualities and defects they possessed before birth.
The deeper source of wrongdoing lies in the imperfections of the spirit itself. The spirit has not yet attained the moral superiority toward which it is destined, but it still possesses free will. Bodily life is given so that these imperfections may be purified through trial.
Those very imperfections weaken the spirit and make it more accessible to the suggestions of other imperfect spirits, who take advantage of its vulnerable points and try to make it fall in the struggle it has undertaken.
If the spirit wins this struggle, it advances.
If it fails, it remains what it was—no worse, but no better. The trial must be taken up again, and this may continue for a long time. As purification increases, weaknesses diminish. The more a spirit improves, the less open it becomes to the influence of those who tempt it toward evil. Moral strength grows with progress, and evil spirits withdraw.
Education and the Reform of Character
Education has a serious duty in the struggle against evil tendencies.
To fulfill that duty well, it must be grounded in a deep knowledge of human moral nature. Just as intelligence is cultivated by instruction and the body is improved by proper care, character can be modified through understanding the laws that govern moral life. Evil tendencies are not unchangeable sentences. They can be corrected, restrained, and gradually transformed.
Humanity and the Condition of the Earth
All incarnate spirits, whether more advanced or less advanced, form the human species.
Because the Earth is one of the less advanced worlds, it contains more imperfect spirits than good ones. Much of the wickedness seen here reflects that condition. Earthly life therefore carries the character of struggle, trial, and moral labor.
The proper response is effort. Each person should strive not to return to such a world through continued imperfection, but to become worthy of rest in a better one, among those worlds where goodness prevails. Then earthly life will be remembered as a period of exile that served the work of purification and progress.