In his 1961 inaugural address, President John F. Kennedy famously challenged Americans to “ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country.” Kennedy’s appeal to patriotic duty implored citizens to look beyond themselves and find their role within the broader national project. However, in the opening pages of his 1962 book Capitalism and Freedom, Milton Friedman explicitly rebuked Kennedy’s famous proclamation. The University of Chicago economist argued that “to the free man, the country is the collection of individuals who compose it, not something over and above them.”
Whose vision won out? It is clear that Friedman’s vision dominates American society today. Kennedy’s implicit endorsement of our unchosen obligations challenges Friedman’s promotion of expressive individualism and neoliberal capitalism. For Friedman, freedom elevates individual choice and desire to the highest importance. But by converting our social arrangement into a collection of atomized individuals, we disregard obligations that transcend ourselves—the very obligations central to Kennedy’s understanding of the American nation.
In the modern West, it is undeniable that self-gratification rules the day. We fulfill our momentary desires, whether by participating in the consumerist economy or hookup culture. We satisfy our endless wants without regard for moderation. We are masters of ourselves: we are beholden to no authority and consumed with cultivating a perfect version of our future. This cultural orientation toward individual desire and satisfaction is a consequence of the social and philosophical framework that dominates the modern West: liberalism. Within liberalism, individuals prioritize self-preservation over honor and duty and lose sight of the importance of unchosen obligations, the often difficult and inconvenient duties we have to our fellow human beings.
Liberalism actively corrodes our sacred unchosen obligations. It strives to liberate the individual from core social institutions, such as the family, on the basis of individual choice. Although some thinkers contend that we must move beyond liberalism into a post-liberal future, they fail to articulate a distinct and cohesive vision of society. How can we limit the harmful excesses of liberalism? Is it possible to safeguard and champion the importance of the unchosen obligation while working within the parameters of the liberal paradigm? I remain hopeful because, deep within each of us, there exists an understanding that the liberal inclination to abandon our unchosen obligations is wrong and counter to human nature. This is evident solely from the resonance of Kennedy’s declaration of civic duty. Despite the hegemony of liberalism today, we still intuitively understand the moral importance of unchosen obligations, and we should seek to recover these obligations within this sociopolitical framework.
Long before Kennedy made his speech, the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius proclaimed in his legendary work Meditations, “Fight to be the person philosophy tried to make you. Revere the gods; watch over human beings. Our lives are short. The only rewards of our existence here are an unstained character and unselfish acts.” Would any mainstream political figure in the West say the same today? In this reflection, Marcus Aurelius recognizes the seriousness of unchosen obligations—moral duties that constitute the common good. Far removed from the world of classical antiquity, modern society has lost touch with convictions concerning duty and honor and has supplanted them with vanity and hedonistic self-aggrandization. Do we lose a necessary and foundational component of the human essence through our superficiality? I believe the answer is a resounding yes. We have become relativists, incapable of advancing universal moral virtues that conflict with any individual conception of truth. By hunkering down within our individualistic silos, we neglect our capacity to yearn for truth and to fulfill responsibilities that extend beyond ourselves.
Unchosen obligations are inherent to what it means to be human. They include the necessity of charity and helping the most vulnerable in our communities, such as the poor or disabled; the obligation to care for our parents in old age; the shared sacrifice and commitment of marriage for the purpose of an everlasting union and bond; the inherent compulsion to care and provide for our children—our future; and the duty to serve our nation when it is under attack.
Unchosen obligations are moral duties, not merely individual choices, that we owe to our families, communities, nation, and God. They require sacrifice and delayed gratification, but acting upon them is honorable because of that very struggle. As Princeton politics professor Robert George recently put it, excessive individualism produces a new religion called the “cult of the imperial self.” In it, unchosen obligations don’t exist. “The only moral obligations we have are the ones we freely assent to, what we give ourselves.” Liberalism as it operates in the twenty-first century prides individual consent as the sole barometer of the good. However, the consent framework proves reductive when it leads individuals to turn away from moral duties integral to the human condition. We cannot choose the families, communities, or nations that we are born into, but we retain a fundamental obligation to them out of a deep moral compulsion.
In her essay “Human Personality,” French political theorist Simone Weil recognized the inadequacies of liberalism and the failure of its rights-based framework to fully encompass moral wrongs and transgressions. She asserted that in order to achieve justice, communities must prevent affliction, “a device for pulverizing the soul.” Affliction is a deeper moral transgression, the incitement of spiritual duress through the deprivation of dignity. Rights fail to protect against total deprivation of dignity because of their personal focus: Weil contended that “the notion of rights, by its very mediocrity, leads on naturally to that of the person, for rights are related to personal things.” Rights engender a superficial conception of justice; they constrain individuals within the material world, their “personal things,” while obfuscating the impersonal obligation to “truth, beauty, justice, and compassion.”
By centering politics and culture around the individual, liberalism changes how we conceive of justice and freedom. Its individualistic framework fails to encapsulate the unchosen moral duties central to the human experience. Consequently, Weil reveals how rights, by their very philosophical construction, must emanate out of the individual and neglect forms of affliction that target not the individual, but rather our impersonal bonds and duties to the common good. The liberal ideology that permeates the Western cultural consciousness distorts our basic impulses, leading us to favor individual convenience and indulgence to the detriment of our obligations.
To stress the incompatibility of moral obligation and the liberal rights-based paradigm, Simone Weil examined the ancient Greek play Antigone. In Sophocles’s enduring work, Creon, King of Thebes, prohibits Polynices, Antigone’s brother, from receiving a proper burial—a rite considered necessary to reach the afterlife—because of his traitorous actions against the nation. In defiance of Creon’s decree, Antigone performs the funeral rituals out of moral obligation, but seals her own fate as she is condemned to death for her legal transgression. Weil asserted that “the Greeks had no conception of rights.… They were content with the name of justice. It is extraordinary that Antigone’s unwritten law should have been confused with the idea of natural right.” In a world before liberalism, modern understandings of freedom and justice were inconceivable. Antigone’s moral stand seems foreign to modern readers, and our allegiance resides with Creon’s familiar attempts for worldly retribution. Yet her defiance strikes a chord within our hearts, as we know deep down that Antigone’s sisterly duty is worthy and honorable.
In the face of her fate, Antigone proclaims, “Nevertheless the other world demands other laws.” Antigone did not choose Polynices to be her kin, but she remains committed to his proper burial. Analyzing Antigone’s devotion to her moral obligation as a sister, Weil argues, “the unwritten law which this little girl obeyed had nothing whatsoever in common with rights, or with the natural … It was Justice, companion of the gods in the other world, who dictated this surfeit of love.” Antigone’s unchosen obligation strictly conforms to a universal, yet unspoken, supranatural moral law, while defying the positivist, worldly decrees of Creon.
By articulating Antigone’s dilemma and heroic moral determination, Weil exposes the limitations of rights and the liberal framework in achieving the moral justice inherent to the unchosen obligation. Rights are material and personal, incapable of encompassing the transcendental fulfillment of justice through moral duties. Antigone’s situation demonstrates that the individual cannot be the locus of justice; she must suffer in the earthly realm on the basis of unyielding love and commitment to the metaphysical. While claiming to derive legitimacy from nature and God, the liberal rights-based paradigm grounds itself in the material world of the individual and her assented choices. It thereby degrades the importance of unchosen obligations—such as those Antigone grapples with—and, by extension, the very essence of what it means to be human.
Many prominent thinkers, such as Notre Dame politics professor Patrick Deneen and Harvard law professor Adrian Vermeule, point to the structural distortions of the common good within liberalism as reasons to embark towards a post-liberal future. While many of their arguments are compelling, I caution against a wholesale rejection of liberalism and instead advocate only for constraining the extent to which liberalism dissolves our unchosen obligations. Despite its flaws, liberalism has brought about democratic governance, religious freedom, and economic prosperity for billions around the world. We would be wise to seek to ensure that our obligations to family, community, and nation remain protected from the eroding influence of individualism within a broadly liberal paradigm. Former Dean of Yale Law School Eugene Rostow argued, “there are some phases of American life which should be beyond the reach of any majority, save by constitutional amendment.” Even though Rostow most certainly intended to protect certain personal freedoms within the liberal framework from democratic majoritarianism, it is accordingly essential to safeguard the common good and our unchosen obligations from the encroaching tides of liberalism.
In order to counter the emptiness of our current moment, we must challenge our contemporary liberal paradigm to accommodate a renewed emphasis on justice, truth, and the common good. Simone Weil puts forth a framework that allows us to privilege the impersonal, accommodating our unchosen obligations and emphasizing the dangers of affliction—the deepest moral harm. By reorganizing away from the centrality of the individual, we can reinforce the importance of moral truth and virtue to our collective social and cultural purpose. While Friedman attempted to trivialize our responsibilities to the nation as an abridgement of individual freedom, Kennedy’s words still ring as an enduring inspiration for generations of Americans. In the deepest part of our souls, we aim to be part of something greater than ourselves. By constraining the excesses of liberalism that impede our most basic impulses, we can truly serve the moral obligations intrinsic to our shared human condition.