Free

In scripture, to be free is to be released from bondage into a life one can direct, and Restoration doctrine grounds that release in agency, truth, and law. Technologies that enlarge human capacity can be judged by whether they widen liberty or bind their users in new ways.

The Hebrew word for free, chophshi, describes someone released from bondage or from a tax, and the release came without payment. A common reading takes freedom to mean the absence of restraint or the power to do as one pleases. Scripture describes something harder to hold: a liberty that God grants, that law protects, and that can be lost through the choices it makes possible.

Liberty Throughout the Land

Israel's law built release into its calendar, and the prophets made that release a picture of redemption.

Hedcut illustration of The jubilee law aimed to restore people “unto his possession” and to “proclaim liberty throughout all the land” (Leviticus 25:10). — The jubilee law aimed to restore people “unto his possession” and to “proclaim liberty throughout all the land” (Leviticus 25:10).

Every fiftieth year Israel was to "proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof," returning each person "unto his possession" and "unto his family" (Leviticus 25:10). The word for liberty, deror, carries the sense of free flowing, and the same word names "pure myrrh" that flows freely in the oil used to anoint Israel's priests. It is difficult to say how much ancient hearers made of the link, yet Isaiah's servant joins the two ideas: "the Lord hath anointed me … to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to them that are bound" (Isaiah 61:1). When Jesus read this passage in the synagogue at Nazareth and declared it fulfilled, he placed his ministry in the pattern of the exodus and the jubilee, a release from bondage emphasized in the Mosaic law and fulfilled in the Messiah.

Truth, Law, and Agency

Scripture ties freedom to truth and law. Jesus told his hearers that "the truth shall make you free," and they answered that as "Abraham's seed" they "were never in bondage to any man"; he replied, "If the Son therefore shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed" (John 8:32-33, 36). The quick reading of freedom belongs to his audience, who counted themselves free already. An 1833 revelation repeats the promise and adds a surprising term: "I, the Lord God, make you free, therefore ye are free indeed; and the law also maketh you free" (D&C 98:8). Restoration scripture calls the underlying capacity to act for oneself agency. Lehi taught that "men are free according to the flesh," and that they "are free to choose liberty and eternal life, through the great Mediator of all men, or to choose captivity and death" (2 Nephi 2:27). Freedom in this account is a capacity that grows through choices made in light of truth and shrinks through choices that bind.

Without Money and Without Price

Nephi describes a Christ who refuses no one and invites "all ye ends of the earth, buy milk and honey, without money and without price" (2 Nephi 26:25). In this connection, the free software movement of the 1980s drew a distinction between software free of cost and software that users are free to run, study, change, and share, and it treated the second as a matter of liberty. Latter-day Saint readers can recognize both senses in the law of release, which let the servant go free and asked nothing for it.

Morphological Freedom and Its Captivities

Technology can enlarge the range of choices open to a person and can also make the person dependent on whoever controls the tools. Transhumanists speak of morphological freedom, the right to modify one's own body through medicine, genetics, or prosthetics, and Mormon transhumanists read that right as an extension of agency to the body, which Restoration doctrine counts as part of the soul.

Hedcut illustration of The entry argues that technological “morphological freedom” requires repairable tools and support that outlast any one company, because dependence shrinks agency. — Morphological freedom requires repairable tools and support that outlast any one company, because dependence shrinks agency.

Morphological freedom deserves its name only when it includes the means to keep a modified body working: open designs, the right to repair, and support that outlasts any one company. Lehi gives the reason. Agency grows through choices made in the light of truth, and a person who depends on a vendor’s goodwill has fewer choices left to make.