The Freedom & Virtue Institute

The Freedom & Virtue Institute The Freedom & Virtue Institute brings to Southwest Florida opportunities to learn, dialogue and live out the principles of a free and virtuous society. Address

Our Values

FREEDOM
Goal: To promote activities in the local community that present individuals as the primary initiators and implementers. Goal: To study and educate the community on the virtues of free market capitalism over collectivist government intervention. VIRTUE
Goal: To teach in various settings the importance of values, character and faith in solving the problems of local communities. E

NTREPRENEURSHIP
Goal: To create programs and offerings that promote innovation and entrepreneurship among young people. Goal: To teach and promote the value of individual freedom, self-initiative and limited government among various constituencies in SW Florida. FAITH
Goal: To promote America’s Judeo-Christian heritage and values among church members. Goal: To energize people of faith to become active participants in their churches and community and transform institutional programs using the principles of the Institute. Our Principles

PERSONALISM AND INDIVIDUAL FREEDOM
Individuals possess a dignity based on their capacity to know the truth and do the good. Such capacity exists as we have been made in God’s image. The choices we make are the primary determinants of the quality of our lives. There is a need to reject a victim mentality that fosters self-defeatism and denies personal responsibility in favor of collective entitlement and dependency. LIMITED GOVERNMENT
This principle asserts that society is comprised of various networks or natural mediating institutions (family, community, church, voluntary organizations, etc.) with natural functions and responsibilities. The higher or more complex ones (such as government) should not unnecessarily interfere with the most basic ones. Effective change occurs locally. EFFECTIVE COMPASSION AND HUMAN DIGNITY
Our modern crisis is one of a bureaucratic and intrusive government. It is also a crisis of private charities acting upon what feels good instead of what is right. Charity is about intelligent giving and intelligent withholding. We need to promote personal responsibility, accountability, and religion. Compassion is to be measured by how we treat each other, not on how big are the budgets of government bureaucracies.

02/06/2026

What are some of the myths that we are trying to dispel at the Freedom and Virtue Institute?

For one, that socialism is the praxis of Christianity and that it is about community.

Another is that free markets are unjust by definition and that the poor suffer because of capitalism.

That freedom is merely the absence of external constraints and that it does not require virtue is another myth.

Expressed positively we believe that:

The human person has certain inherent capacities that move us to put them in motion. These capacities arise from the fact that we mirror our creator by being able to reason and act. We are reflective and creative beings.

When we help those serving others reflect and ponder about the why of their service, they get to one necessary question:

“What does it mean to be human?”

This is the foundational premise of all understanding of social action. From there we depart to discover principles for action. Communicating these principles is the heart of the Freedom and Virtue Institute.

Dear Friends, if you give a tax-deductible donation to The Freedom & Virtue Institute you will be advancing the cause of...
12/15/2025

Dear Friends, if you give a tax-deductible donation to The Freedom & Virtue Institute you will be advancing the cause of freedom. A gift of $25 goes a long way. With any gift of $50 or more you will receive your choice of one of these two books from our Institute:

Rethinking Charity or Not Tragically Colored. You can donate directly to our website at www.fvinstitute.org or send a check to:

Freedom & Virtue Institute
12565 New Brittany Blvd. 24W
Fort Myers, FL 33907

12/14/2025

Can we build a civil society without a substantive vision of the good? Can we obtain a reasonable arrangement for social cooperation while pretending neutrality about the meaning of being human? Can we advance the good without grounding the good on a given anthropology?

The answer is soundly NO!

In fact, the prevention is itself self-referentially incoherent, as refusing to take a stand materially at least tells us that it does not matter what we choose as long as we choose it, which is itself an anthropological affirmation.

There is no middle ground, there is no safe space from the crucial question about human existence and what are the elements constitutive of the person qua person. Thre is no escaping from discerning the goods that bring about human flourishing and integral fulfillment.

The alibi that the question concerning libertarian freedom pertain only to the role of the state and not about what goods are worth defending apart from it does not work. Unless we believe that government is not a part of the organic constitution of society the fact is that the goods of human nature must be upheld by that organ. After all, the target community for government legitimate activity is the whole of the social order within its jurisdiction.

Such extensive jurisdiction, and the powers of law creation and enforcement, policing, and taxation give to government, even under a limited government vision, a great power to influence and to incentivize behavior. Aristotle understood this and thus defined law as written reason. We can reason what are the goods of himan nature and the social order and thus teason to what extent the law can gave a subsidiary influence in the formation of character and ordered liberty.

12/13/2025

Love is the answer to all our social problems. Now, love must be properly understood as an act of the will, instead of an emotion. When we choose voluntarily what is good for the other we are loving the other. The moment all of us begin to choose that good, problems begin to be seen as solvable.

Justice is the preeminent virtue in the public square but it needs to be refined by love. Justice is to render his due to the other. When we choose voluntarily to give to others wgst us theirs, right order is enforced. But justice can be confused with revenge.

Revenge can look like justice because revenge can be inflicted on the perceived oppressor. Revenge stems from pain and anger, pain and can drive one to hirt others while having the sense of being justified. Only love can direct justice to its proper ends.

“Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.”
— 1 Corinthians 13:4-7

12/13/2025

Steven Pinker is a renowned psychologist and atheist who denies that meaning and purpose extend beyond the momentary. He affirms that progress can be attained through the use of reason, science, and technology to improve human life. Using rationality instrumentally, purpose is attainable by solving problems, appreciating beauty, to help improving the life of sentient beings.

Meaning, he adds, is not merely sentiment but a realization that life is improving and worthy goals like happiness, knowledge, and justice are achievable. Atheists like him want to affirm that significance exists only for some duration. If human flourishing can be attained, we can overcome obstacles using our capacity to reason, derived from evolution. That is the extent of the quest for meaning and purpose, the here and now. Pinker affirms that compassion and kindness can also be explained to the same limited and punctiliar extent.

These ideas are humanistic and lofty. I commend such desires. There is, however, a problem. What Pinker and others speak about necessitates a notion of value that is absent from their atheist construct because they cannot ground objectively their litany of desired outcomes.

What they propose is change, not progress. Progress implies a telos and they deny it. Absent such grounding, their effort measures change from one state into the other. There is no good reason behind any of it, only an illusion. Strictly, transitory changes lack objective moral worth. There is nothing we ought to do. Because there is no “ought,” only “is.” There is only what we do and the pleasure it provokes. It is not as if Pinker and I have a duty to improve the lives of others. If he affirms a duty, implicitly, and, I assume, grudgingly, he will have to accept what we call God.

Pinker acknowledges the lack of that grounding when he says:

“The scientific outlook has told us that some parts of our subjective experience are products of our biological makeup and have no objective counterpart in the world. The qualitative difference between red and green, the tastiness of fruit, the foulness of the scariness of heights, and the prettiness of flowers, are features of our common nervous system and if our species had evolved in a different ecosystem or we were missing a few genes our reactions could go the other way. Now, if the distinction between right and wrong is also a product of brain-wiring why shpyld we believe it to be more real? And if it is just a collective hallucination, why should we believe it any more real? If it is just a collective hallucination how could we argue that evils like genocide and slavery are wrong for everyone rather than just distasteful to us?”

Only a grounding transcendent reality can give meaning to what we do for others. When I work with the poor I am not just acquiescing to an illusion. I am acting based on truths that compel me. The Enlightenment project without the religious world it despised is entertainment without meaning.

12/11/2025

The word “virtue” can be used to represent high moral character. It is a synonym for high standards of behavior. In theology there is a more precise meaning as being a special grace. In other words, virtue is a gift from God that inheres in our souls. The virtues under this understanding are like a seed planted in the soul. A seed will grow or weaken depending on how we cultivate it. It can strengthen or weaken depending on multiple factors. If we provide good soul, sunlight, and water regularly the plant can grow into a tree. The same happens with virtue. Virtues are habits of behavior and only by cultivating them, that is, by practicing them, can they solidify in us and shape our character.

There are two general categories of virtues. Faith, hope, and love constitute the first category called theological virtues. They pertain (to our relationship with God in the case of faith and hope, and both to our relationship with God and with others in the case of charity.

Moral virtues are the second category of virtues. These are very important perfections that allow us to shape our character and succeed in the task of being authentically human. Chief among them are virtues called cardinal. These are prudence, justice, temperance, and fortitude.
Prudence pertains to sound judgments; Justice is the habit of rendering to others what belongs to them; Temperance helps us to have self-control and dominion over our sensual appetites. It is so important because it allows us to make properly approach God’s creatures. Fortitude helps us persevere. It is akin to grit and courage.

Other moral virtues are humility, which is to recognize what we have as gifts and place them at the service of others; patience assists us both to perform tasks without quitting and have good relationships with others; obedience is a hard one but needed to be humble and to recognize our limitations and our duties; chastity is scuffed at by a world lead by appetites. But a chastity person is a person that understands his value, places proper boundaries, and respects others as not being objects for our pleasure. Another virtue in piety refers to the proper rendering thanks to God but also refers to our devotion to a life consistent with our commitments. Finally, veracity or truthfulness. Telling the truth tells us about our moral marrow and the proper use of our reason.

We have abandoned the language of virtue because it arises from religion and in a world where the secular dominates people surrender with ease these pearls of wisdom. Their use is also misunderstood as if those who promote them are elevating themselves as better than others. In reality, a proper presentation of the virtues simply refers to our need to cultivate them precisely because we are imperfect. In reality, these are also character traits that can assist us in the world of enterprise, relationships, and civic life.

It is time to revive the virtues!

12/11/2025

There are political markets, economic markets, cultural markets, and spiritual markets.

Political markets are decided by power. Politics is defined by political scientist Deborah Stone as who gets what, when, and where. Those who hold office (regardless of the political system) make top-down determinations. Vying for power becomes an antagonistic battlefield.

Economic markets are decided by the parties involved in exchange according to their discrete desires and needs. Economic producers compete with each other to convince consumers to transact with them. It follows that entrepreneurial creativity is determinant. In effect, the entrepreneur is the one who produces and the buyer is the judge.

Cultural markets are tied to both economic and political markets. Access to knowledge is often determined by those holding political power to control institutions and economic markets that create and provide communication tools. Yet, culture is still passed at the most familial way and in organic fashion through institutions such as families, networks of friends, and churches.

Spiritual markets are to be considered an aspect of cultural markets and they are affected by the same set of influences from the political, economic, and familial spheres. The economic sphere sells “spirituality” as it sells soap. Take for example aspects of Buddhism marketed through technological means and packaged for Western consumption like the Chinese market a bastardized cuisine to sell to us at their restaurants.

The greater peril resides in the influence of political markets over the entire ethos of society communicating values. Political actors possess way too much power. They have the power of policing, the power of confuscating, and the power of conceding benefits. They act through compulsion and thus can move all other actors one way or the other. They determine what economic, cultural, snd rven spiritual commodities reach the masses. They can manufacture values and culture. Limited government is an essential component in restoring organic life to the passing on of values.

The second head of the monster of manufactured values are the corporations. Yes, larger corporations are often aligned with political power and move in the realm of manufacturing values for the purpose of economic advantage. It is interesring how economic actors can embrace campaigns with ideological meaning when the winds of political power go north and drop these campaigns with ease when those winds go south.

They have found a way to go around strict competition to succeed through political markets. But if political markets are reduced in their influence, economic markets can return to their narrower place in competition..

12/04/2025

Can humans lose their dignity? To answer this question we must first understand what is dignity. The Latin word “dingus” means “worthy.” A derivative of dignus is “dignitas,”meaning "worthiness.” Worthiness refers to the value of something. Dignity is the quality of a person that makes him or her deserving of respect.

Humans have dignity because they are exceptional. That is, they are unique among other beings. Human exceptionalism derives from the greatness of our origin. In the Book of Genesis we are told that God created all animate and inanimate things as good things. There was worth in all of creation. (Genesis 1:10;12;18,21;25)

Then, as the crown of all the goodness he instantiated, God created man in his image and gave him (male and female) dominion over all of creation. (Genesis 1:26) The image of God, the Imago Dei, was conferred on human beings for being human. This is an intrinsic or innate dignity. Mother Theresa and Hi**er had that same dignity. Billy Graham and Pol Pot had that dignity.

That dignity is reflected in aspects of our constitution as beings. In great part it is showcased in the possession of certain capacities or potentialities, the main ones being reason and volition. Reason is the cognitive capacity to think logically and judge. We can make sense of our existence and the world. It is both theoretical (to know what is true) and practical (to know what what to do).

What to do and doing it needs volition. That is, the capacity for self-direction and voluntary activity. We can choose, we can move ourselves one way or the contrary way. We deliberate and choose. Here is where we find the actualization of our innate caoacities through acts. In spite of all antecedent factors impinging on our lives and determining our activity in the world (whether genetic, psychological, emotional, or environmental and societal) we keep a window open for self-direction and freedom.

The quality of our actions determines the other aspect of our dignity, the existential one. Here is where Mother Theresa and Billy Graham part company with Hi**er and Pol Pot. We complete our dignity when we choose activities in line with the truth about our constitution. We detract from our dignity by choosing evil. But we never lose the intrinsic dignity. It follows that each person, unique and unrepeatable, deserves at least a basic measure of respect. Our actions obscure often what remains underneath the filth we often choose but that filth never eradicate what is constitutive of our beings as human. The image is distorted but resilient.

This is why to understand the human person as a specimen of social groups whose worth is pre-determined as evil or good, oppressed or oppressor, and then treat individuals as specimens rejects the fact that we have a constitutive dignity we all share and that each of us have reason and volition as individual persons, not as beings moved by instinct or external forces out of our control.

12/04/2025

Even the magnanimous king, by concentrating power, is an usurper.

11/25/2025

One of the interesting aspects of Marxist political economy is its theory of “commodity fe**shism”. This is the belief that commodities are mysterious. They possess s sort of “magical” power intrinsic to them that obscures their true value as products of labor and of the social and human relationships that went into their production.

The main emphasis in capitalism, said Marx, is placed on the character of commodities as items of exchange. The labor they signify and the effort of people as people are replaced in capitalist consciousness with the economic relations between commodities and money. It is as if commodities have a life of their own. This masks the understanding of how the capitalist economy actually works as exploitative.

This fetichism is connected to the Marxist understanding of labor as merely another factor of production. Commodity fe**shism derives from the idea of “reification.” That is, treating what is abstract as if it were a concrete object or physical thing. Reification can also function in the opposite direction, by treating something concrete as if it were abstract. The capitalist system treats the human capacities of the workers as objects or commodities thus instrumentalizing people. It also sees the worker not as a concrete person but as yet another factor of production, as an entry on a ledger, depersonalizing them.

Interestingly, these aspects of Marxist theory derive from Marx’s analysis of the thought of the early capitalist economists who understood the value of commodities as a calculation of the costs of production. This cost was dependent on three factors of production: land, labor, and capital. The worker was depersonalized and his labor ignored, while the commodity produced was idolized.

One way at looking to these ideas as errors is by pointing out the existence of a fourth factor of production ignored by both Marx and the early classical economists, and that is, the entrepreneur. The entrepreneur is the one who creates the idea and ideas are eminently personal. The entrepreneur is is the one who creates something that was not there and that idea is what mobilized the entire engine of production. It humanizes the system by positing on intelligence and creativity the heart of free markets economics.

The entrepreneur, wittingly or not, must persuade the landscape of human needs and attempt at satisfying them. He becomes other-regarding even if he cares little about the other. Labor lands his energies to an enterprise eminently humanistic. Another more modern economist, spoke of the “mystery of capital.” Marx was into something but missed it. Hernando de Soto Soto understood that within a formal legal framework commodities can transform into capital and assets that signify value beyond their physicality. What looks like a fe**sh is instead a sacramental or an icon of recognition of human intelligence and effort in pursuit of economic wellbeing.

11/18/2025

Networks of influence carry with them powerful incentives, for good or ill. These networks operate within a set of assumptions that are hard to question. Questioning means doubting and doubting is dangerous.

These assumptions emanate from narratives. Narratives are explanations in the form of storytelling that filter reality through a lens of understanding. They focus on recognizing the significance of historical events, systems, structures, and collective behaviors. They are presented as a type of legacy to the group, one that is expected to be accepted as a gift. But it can also become a curse. After all, narratives are constructs that can be deconstructed.

Now, daring to deconstruct is not easy. The pull is to conform, accept, and pass along the narrative. The narrative brings a sense of belonging. But the narrative often contains within itself aspects that bring about serious questioning by some within the group. These are seen as distortions. As Hegel put it, within the narrative we find its antithesis. Every period of history is a synthesis of prior knowledge and every synthesis has its affirmation or thesis. This thesis is a sort of spirit of the times, a cure set of ideas that shape reality. Yet, to advance in knowledge that spirit must contain a contrary spirit, if not, there is no progress. It is only through the struggle between one and the other that a higher state of knowledge, a new consciousness, arises. The challenge to present notions is sublated within itself. It arises from within.

But he also postulated that the thesis will violently resist the antithesis. He was right on this. As a communist, my a priori assumptions about social reality admitted but one explanation, we were an oppressed people. In time, however, there arose within me a discomfort with the explanations I took for granted. The questioning came not from the outside but from within my narrative and its explanations. It was very costly to question. Ostracism is a weapon used by the to make you feel a sense of betrayal.

Narratives can offer a sense of belonging and safety but they can also become chains that imprison and sever the self from the task of being fully human. This was true about my narrative and it is true about the narrative of racial solidarity or any other type of axis of identity.

11/16/2025

Should we blame the poor for their poverty? Absolutely not. Are the poor in most cases doing their very best to succeed, find work, and improve? Yes.

There is no doubt that people in poverty strive for a better life. The image of poor people intentionally having more babies to stay on welfare and avoiding work is pure mythology based on truly unrepresentative exceptions. Most of them are trapped in poverty cycles due to a complex set of personal circumstances, proximate environments, and systems that create incentives perpetuating their poverty.

To most, certain choices are just not available. Yet, there is always space for introspection and the communication of values and attitudes that will benefit the poor in their quest for success. I remember years ago when my family descended temporarily into borderline poverty because we made certain decisions concerning educating our children at home to avoid the public school system. It was not easy at the time. Just as certain actions make people descend financially, even if only temporarily, other choices perpetuate people in poverty.

So, are there still certain personal attitudes and behaviors that may impede progress? Yes. After all, if not, we would be saying that they are objects moved by forces, marionettes of happenstance, to use Theodore Dalrymple’s apt term. We are both creatures of great dignity and experiencing brokenness. At times we get in our own way. In a society of consumerism and technological advancement, we are bombarded with images and expectations concerning what does it mean to be successful or to experience a better life.

It is difficult at times to avoid the meeting of wants while postponing needs. There is no doubt that the psychology and sociology of choices going in this direction is complex. Maybe what we consider meeting wants fulfills certain psychological needs in the midst of a turbulent existence. But no doubt that reordering priorities is an aspect of moving toward flourishing, as complicated and difficult as that reordering might be.

I never forget years ago entering into an apartment occupied by people we were trying to help at a housing projects. It was a place in disarray and filth. Nothing within that apartment made sense. I hesitated to sit anywhere, although finding a proper space to sit was a task. Yet, at the most prominent place within the chaos there was an almost wall to wall, brand new TV, with all the gadgets, attachments, and sound systems you can imagine. It seemed totally out of place. Yet, it made sense as constituting a little oasis providing the mirage of normalcy or as an escape route to avoid an anomie of existence.

Poverty is truly a web of personal, interpersonal, psychological, sociological, and structural issues.

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