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“But to pronounce moral judgment is an enormous responsibility. To be a judge, one must possess an unimpeachable character; one need not be omniscient or infallible, and it is not an issue of errors or knowledge; one needs an unbreakable integrity, that is the absence of any indulgence in consciousness, willful evil.”

These are lines directly from the essay “How Does One lead a Rational Life in an Irrational Society?” in the book “The Virtue of Selfishness” by Ayn Rand. It may not at first sight present any relation to the right to free will, but it does explain the direct duties a man acquires alongside this right.

The right, of a man, to free will – the right to select a course of action as a means of fulfilling his desires - is a right given to him by the moral law. He is free to choose any set of values and morals for himself and practice them with no threat and interference from any other man. He is also free not to choose anything. No other man can dictate conditions onto him and can in no way control what he decides to choose. It also entitles him from being free of any implications forced onto him by the society or any traditions or any culture. He is given the right to choose his own destiny.

When a man steps into the phase of his adulthood he embarks on a journey into his end and every step he takes thereafter, before this end, is a selection based on his value judgments or most probably some favorable criteria that guides him to logics and conclusions. He selects every thought he may aspire to continue thinking or any action he may commit. Every dot of the line of his life – right from his conscious living to his end – is freely opted by him and the values of these dots he holds. And he is free to perform all this based on the moral law that supports him with the right to free will.

But when he is free to follow his own will, the same law also prescribes onto him the ruling that he, in no way, can interfere with the same right that has been given to his fellow men too. The law binds him to himself and restricts his choices to his own courses of actions. One man cannot claim the moral right to violate the rights of another. Every man here is equated to every other man.

The right to free will is as necessary to a man as the right to live - living under the dictations of any force and without his will is the murder of man’s dignity and pride. But this right fortifies his self-esteem and elevates his personal level to a civilized being by allowing him to access and assess his own value systems and rationally choose anything that pleases him. This right gives man the power over himself to advance his being in any direction he wants.

Coming to values systems, rationality and directions, there is only one logic that materializes the whole right – ethical morals. If a man chooses a value system for himself that guides him into a direction that may destroy him or the use right itself is ill conceived and a show of immature rationality i.e., irrationality, then he is responsible for opting of ethical values destructive to him. When he chooses a course of action for himself he has chosen to be himself and so the consequent gain or loss is prescribed implicitly into his own credit.

Amongst all the creatures that live on this planet it is only the man that has the ability to act in a way that can reflect his survival instinct as a very weak one. Neither plants nor animals do anything that may result in their own destruction but man keeps doing it - just to clear any doubts of his possible mindlessness. He opts on the basis of his right to free will, intentionally or unintentionally, sometimes the courses of actions which turn out to be in his own disadvantage or even his end. (It is only a man who can commit suicide. Plants and animals never do that. If lower levels of self-destruction are considered, smoking can be taken as an example for that.)

So for a rational man, it is expected from him that the choice he makes about the dots of the line of his life to be an upshot of valid reasoning and purpose and not just a free irresponsible practice of his right to free will. He also stands responsible for all the consequences – good or bad – which are a response to his actions. And if he causes to affect others in an undesirable way or interfere with other’s respective rights, then he is entitled to be under the punishable force of the same law – the moral law.

So finally coming back to the lines of Ayn Rand - though they were in a slight deviation of the context as they were said for a good judge of a court of law, they can be found to describe a rational man who has to make reason based choices rather than answering his desires or emotions or whims or fancies or likeability.

Every claim a man stakes on himself is a simple approval of his inherent instincts that may or may not be good for him in a real honest sense, but what he chooses on self-grown and self-sustained reasoning is coherent and gives the definition of his character which again is implicitly self-opted.