4: Institutions and Organizations: Constructing the Social Foundation

A good society naturally provides a wide range of larger and smaller life options and the freedom to choose among them. It is appealing precisely because there is such diversity of opinion and belief as to what constitutes the good life, the kind of life that each of us would like to live. The good society is not a recipe for any one concept of how life should be lived so much as it is a society flexible enough to accommodate the peaceful coexistence of many alternative concepts, one that also facilitates making changes in our own life path if we come to desire such a change, for example, with age and accumulated experience. What the good society offers is not a world without constraints. Human beings do not seem to do well, be happy, or feel fulfilled in a free floating environment without structure or boundaries, a world where anything goes. Instead it offers true freedom: the freedom to choose your own constraints, set your own rules, create your own structure, as long as the path you follow does not deny that same freedom to others. That includes the freedom to voluntarily be a part of institutions or organizations (such as churches) that do require a certain set of rules to be followed, or noncoercively choosing to adopt a more rigid set of secular behavioral constraints that have been advocated by others but seem appealing to you.