Freedom to choose is good but not all choices are good

LETTERS

Patricia and Tony Pargeter’s Oct. 8 Letter to the Editor is ripe with misunderstandings.

Their argument why Harder should not have been a committee chair, assumes that a religious person should not hold a position that is in contradiction to the nation’s “right” of a woman to control her own body, e.g. abortion.

There is no contradiction, however, between divine (religious) law and human law.

One definition of law can be “a certain dictate of reason for the common good, made and promulgated by those who have the care of the community.” These include the eternal law, the divine law, the natural law and human law.

The eternal law is God’s own mind. The divine law would be revelation through sacred scriptures. The natural law is a participation of the eternal law: structures of the world that include the deep intuition of the basic goods regarding the structuring elements of the moral life. The human law is positive law, e.g. legislation.

The Bible states that life is good, and that since women are made in God’s image and likeness, have free will and reason. We also have the intuition that life is good, that freedom is good, and that we should use our reason. This is why we have laws that protect life and enact laws reflecting consent and our rational faculty.

If you put these intuitions together, we see that life is a good, worthy protecting. Those who exercise their rational faculty should use their freedom to protect those whose rational faculty is still developing, and who have no voice. Not all choices are good. Some choices kill another human being. Human law may allow this, but that’s not in line with our intuition. This has more to do with misinterpretation of freedom as radical autonomy and the relativization of the moral good.

The mediating reality between the eternal law and the human law, are these fundamental intuitions of these basic goods. The reason Christians can mount, in the public forum, a non-sectarian argument of morality, is because they appeal to anyone a common moral sensibility — the natural law.

Lukas Drapal

Lethbridge