Concerning Our Right to Live Life as We Please

Quite commonly we hear the person who proclaims his right to live his life as he pleases, regardless of what anyone else thinks about it. He says that his life is his own and, bluntly, what he does with it is none of anyone else’s business. Usually he recognizes, in part at least, the restraints of civil law, because he wants to keep out of the hands of those who are sworn to uphold it. But beyond that, he says that no moral law or social convention, no public opinion or private counsel, is going to have any effect on his way of living—and he doesn’t care who knows it. Perhaps we could bring ourselves to leaving this type of individual to his own devices, if it weren’t for the effect his life has upon others. But there is no one in all the world so inconspicuous but what the acts of his daily living, influence in greater or lesser degree the lives of others. And when anyone flaunts his unbecoming conduct, his acquaintances, especially those who are young and impressionable, those who are easily led, may thereby have their own resistance lowered. Even the least of us does not fail to be observed, and the higher the place a man reaches, the greater is his responsibility in this matter. Our lives are our own to do with as we choose only up to that point where we begin to affect the lives of others. And for this reason we are admonished not only to avoid evil itself, but also to “abstain from all appearance of evil,”¹ lest others, seeing us, take license for themselves. And this is the answer—or part of it at least—to those who proclaim their right to do as they please because they think their lives are all their own—which no man’s is. Too much of others has gone into the making of each of us for this to be so.