World Index of Moral Freedom

The World Index of Moral Freedom is an international index ranking one hundred and sixty countries on their performance on five categories of indicators: religious freedom (taking into account both the freedom to practice any religion or none, and the situation of religious control on the state); bioethical freedom (including the legal status of abortion, euthanasia and other practices pertaining to bioethics, like surrogacy or stem cell research); drugs freedom (including the legal status of cannabis and the country's general policy on hard drugs); sexual freedom (including the legal status of pornography and sex services among consenting adults, and the country's age of sexual consent), and family and gender freedom (including women's freedom of movement, the legal status of cohabitation of unmarried couples, same sex marriage and the situation of transgender people). The index is sponsored and published by the Foundation for the Advancement of Liberty, a libertarian think tank based in Madrid, Spain. The WIMF's first edition was published on April 2, 2016, co-authored by Foundation researchers Andreas Kohl and Juan Pina.

The World Index of Moral Freedom aims at completing the views presented by other international freedom indices measuring general freedom or aspects thereof (press freedom, economic freedom, etcetera). To do so, the Index aims at responding a simple question: how free from state-imposed moral constraints are human beings depending on their countries of residence? The research conducted tries to determine the degree of individual freedom to take decisions pertaining to the great moral debates of our time. The first edition of the WIMF includes a short note on the comparison between its country ranking and those of the other freedom indices.

Each category of indicators is worth twenty points (20% of the total score) and aims at responding the following questions:

Each category is made up of various indicators (normally one or two leading indicators adjusted by one or two lesser wheighted ones), the weight of which is set in view of their inferred relevance towards the category’s overall score. Countries have been classified towards each category according to the information available in the sources reviewed. All category results and the general index itself are presented in a 0-100 point scale. Countries are classified according to the following intervals:

Only one country, the Netherlands, is classified as having the “highest” level of moral freedom by scoring slightly over the 90 points required for that label. Just four countries make it into the upper twenty points, and only ten pass the 75 point threshold. Out of the 160 countries considered, only 64 “pass the exam” and score 50 points or more. And around 30% of all countries fall in the “low”, “very low” or “lowest” moral freedom areas of the index. Technology and the cultural globalization that it produces are deemed by the authors to be the most powerful driving forces towards acceptance of individual moral freedom.

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