We have a right to religious freedom because we have a duty to seek and abide by religious truth.

Grounding Our Right to Religious Freedom

by Joshua Schulz

Our right to religious freedom is best grounded in the universal duty to seek ultimate truth, and not in human autonomy. Do rights protect autonomy or duties? Answers to that question drive our current debate over religious freedom.

To say that rights protect autonomy is to understand rights as guarantors of the absolute freedom to define the meaning and purpose of one's own life. One should have the "right" to devote one's life to sculpting marshmallow chipmunks just as much as one should have the right to devote one's life to curing cancer.

Indeed, many people favor this view of rights because of its supposed "value neutrality." This view would have us respect other people's freedoms by interfering with their lives as little as possible.

Of course, even if one thinks rights protect autonomy, no one is absolutely free to do whatever he wants. We all face natural limits like power and scarcity. For example, I am balding; I would like to have a full head of hair, but I am not free to have a full head of hair. I don't have the power to grow hair. I am also limited by scarcity. I have only one head. If I were a robot, I might wear a different head every day, changing them out like wigs.

While ancient peoples, by and large, dealt with powerlessness and scarcity by developing moral virtues like patience, temperance, and hope, modernity has a new solution: technology. Technology increases our power and increases the products from which we can choose. Today I can cure my baldness with drugs, disguise it with implants, or hide it with spray paint: then I will be happy. This is the promise of technology in our day: it allows us to satisfy all of our desires and so become happy.

Modern liberalism, pairing the autonomy view of rights with the pursuit of progress, treats technology as necessary for happiness. Every technology is good so long as it pleases someone. Limiting technology therefore limits "choice" or autonomy, and therefore someone's happiness.

The Obama administration's HHS contraceptive mandate is rooted in this philosophy. Proponents of the mandate believe that to hinder people's use of a technology that would facilitate the satisfaction of their desires, such as contraception, is to deny them happiness. When one says that abortion, contraception, or in vitro fertilization is a wrongful, bad technology, what theyhear is: you don't have a right to be happy. "And don't I have a right to be happy?" they respond.

Modern liberalism cannot deny demands for technology, no matter how absurd or immoral. Neither can it adjudicate between conflicting rights. If rights are based on autonomy and autonomy is defined as the absence of frustrated desires, whatever those desires are, there's no objective limit to what one can have a right to. Since reality doesn't limit rights based on desires, liberalism must resolve conflicts of rights by convention, contract, or sheer power. Despite its intention to maximize freedom, liberalism often ends up restricting some people's rights of conscience for the sake of others' technologically powered autonomy.

..........................

Read more: www.thepublicdiscourse.com