False freedom

Mr Robert Paul Cachia's rejection of moral relativism as being a "dictatorship" (The Sunday Times, June 26) is naive. Even more preposterous is his claim that the Catholic Church is a dictatorship because it proposes moral absolutes for belief. Mr Cachia's misconception rests upon a false understanding of freedom.

In the 20th century great efforts were made to stop people believing, to make them reject Christ. This resulted in a devastation of consciences, with ruinous consequences in the sphere of personal and social morality.

Appeal is thus made today, by those like Mr Cachia, to a certain concept of freedom that diverts attention from ethical responsibilities. It is a freedom that seeks to be released from all constraint or limitation, so as to operate according to private judgment, which in reality is often pure caprice. It is a primitive freedom and one that is potentially devastating.

As a matter of history, the Enlightenment period recognised a need for a criterion to regulate the use of freedom but adopted one based on utility or pleasure rather than on the "just good", where one's goal is conformed to the very essence of the object of one's actions.

According to utilitarian ethics the aim of the human action is personal or corporate advantage in conformity with the principle "the greatest happiness of the greatest number". Immanuel Kant responded to this by observing that giving priority to pleasure is dangerous and threatens the very essence of morality. However, he did not return to the "just good". Instead, he laid what can be said to be the foundation for modern personalist ethics which separates freedom from objective truth.

If freedom ceases to be linked with truth and begins to make truth dependent on freedom, as Mr Cachia proposes, it sets the premises for dangerous moral consequences, which can assume incalculable dimensions. When this happens, the abuse of freedom provokes reaction which takes the form of one totalitarian system or another.

Today there are anti-evangelical movements that strike at the very foundations of human morality promoting abortion, euthanasia, homosexuality, contraception, divorce, free love, embryonic tissue research. They are supported by enormous financial resources on a worldwide scale. One may legitimately ask whether this also is not another form of totalitarianism, subtly concealed under the appearances of democracy.

Mr Cachia is thus incorrect in denying there is a "conspiracy against life and the family". In fact, in attempting to label the immorality of homosexuality as a solution to everyday problems, Mr Cachia himself might be seen as an unwilling participant in this conspiracy; there can be no greater form of dictatorship than the one which leads a person to believe that the ideas of others he is proposing is his own idea.