PRINCIPAL
ABOVE : YEAR 7 BOYS ENJOYING OUTDOOR ED AT COWES .
RIGHT PAGE : STUDENT CREATING A PROTOTYPE DURING A DESIGN AND TECHNOLOGY CLASS . believed that the toppling of God would enable humans to find liberation in a new intellectual age .
Today our society has seemingly embraced , either consciously or unconsciously , an understanding of individual freedom which extols the view that we are each free to do as we want , any old time . Today , freedom is orientated as being free ‘ from ’ and at one level , this is clearly positive ; we should be free from persecution , free from slavery and other forms of oppression . However , in a moral sense , ‘ freedom from ’ and specifically , freedom from restraints , is of much greater concern .
As our society has increasingly walked away from religion , as virtue and even truth have been separated or removed from something rooted in a transcendent narrative to a subjective and even market-driven function , we have started to see more cracks appear . Indeed , Isaiah Berlin famously cautioned against the desire for absolute liberty , noting that ‘ total liberty for wolves is death to the lambs , total liberty of the powerful , the gifted , is not compatible with the rights to a decent existence of the weak and the less gifted ’.
Liberty has boundaries and great responsibilities . We know that we are not ‘ more free ’ when all constraints are removed . Are we really more free because we have more choices ? Or is it more the case
that when we choose to constrain our own actions in certain ways , to restrict choices , we can become more free ? I know that parents who send their children to school restrict their children ’ s freedom – it is a form of constraint . Yet this restraint can lead to a child receiving a good education , thus opening many new opportunities .
The other form of freedom is ‘ freedom for ’, and according to Robert Gascoigne , Emeritus Professor of the School of Theology at the Australian Catholic University , the fundamental point about ‘ freedom for ’ is its relationship to morality . Gascoigne noted that superficially , morality does involve at times possible restrictions upon our freedom of action . However more significantly , morality is not a restriction on freedom , but rather , it acts to make the fulfilment of freedom possible .
De Carvalho in his article noted that freedom unmoderated by virtue in the interests of the common good , has mutated into licence . Here , De Carvalho highlights that the sexual liberation movement of the ’ 60s has mutated into the enormous global pornography industry , and that where freedom of speech once advanced political discussion , this important component of a healthy democracy has today become a mechanism for verbal abuse and
6 Great Scot Issue 171 – Edition 1 2024