World Index of Moral Freedom

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.

With a three-point (three per cent) advantage over their closest competitor and eight points over the third, the Netherlands top the 2016 country ranking. The Dutch score is twenty-one points higher than the average of all countries enjoying "high" or "very high" moral freedom. For many decades, whenever moral freedom was discussed, the Netherlands had the least interventionist policies. The first country to fight human trafficking by legalising sex services performed by consenting adults, or to normalize the use of cannabis, or to acknowledge same sex marriage already in 2001, performs remarkably high in most indicators considered towards the index.

A trend may be inferred towards international unification of the legal and political approach to moral issues. And that trend favours the Western world's predominant choice for low moral interference by the state. This is particularly noticeable when looking at the index performance of many Latin European and Latin American countries, which seem to reveal a fast cultural evolution from traditional, conservative values into a laissez-faire approach to morality. Five of the top ten countries are Romance-speaking, while nine other Romance-speaking countries in Europe and the Americas make it to the "high moral freedom" region of the index. The particular performance of countries like Portugal or Uruguay is much higher than their recent history would indicate. These and other Latin countries seem to have discarded their traditional background of religiously influenced governance. Greece, while not a Latin country, shares a Mediterranean heritage with Latin countries and also makes it to the "high moral freedom" region.

The fifteen lowest scoring countries at the World Index of Moral Freedom are Islamic and located in the Persian Gulf, North-Eastern Africa and the Arabian Peninsula. This is also true for the region's economically free enclaves in the area. Saudi Arabia comes last (160th) in the ranking and doesn't even score ten points out of the one hundred potentially available. Only four predominantly Islamic countries obtain more than fifty points: Bosnia and Herzegovina, Albania, Turkey and Kazakhstan. A few non Islamic countries also show low levels of moral freedom which the authors consider likely to be due to a strong political leverage held by another religion.

In Russia, moral conservatism, derived from either the Orthodox faith or traditional culture, seems to have replaced Marxism as the basis for an ongoing, though softer, social engineering by the state. Russia's score is just in the middle of the classification, a position shared by some of her cultural and political allies, like Serbia or Moldova, while politically unfree Belarus falls further below. In all of these countries, the freedom of LGBT individuals is a matter of particular concern.

The remaining communist regimes coerce their citizens into abiding by a moral code based on allegedly scientific views. Freedom of conscience and the practice of any religion are repressed. In the case of the People's Republic of China, decades of limited economic liberalization have not resulted in an equally noticeable moral openness. Two other communist regimes, North Korea and Vietnam, fall further down into the low moral freedom area, while moral freedom is deemed insufficient in Laos and just slightly over the fifty point threshold in socialist Venezuela or in outright communist Cuba.

For different reasons, often including abnormally low scores in a particular set of indicators, a few Western countries which perform reasonably high in other freedom indices rank rather low at the WIMF. Hungary and Norway fail to make it into the "high moral freedom" area, although just for under half a point. The British and Irish performance is particularly low within the moral freedom area, compared to the Anglo countries of North America and Australasia. Iceland, Japan, Poland and Romania barely manage to pass the fifty point mark, while Singapore, Israel or South Korea fall in the "insufficient moral freedom" part of the index. While most countries topping the WIMF in its first edition belong to the developed world, some countries with a lesser degree of development have also made their way into the higher classification areas. Cambodia, scoring just over seventy points, obtains the fifteenth place in the global classification and is the first developing country in the index. It is also worth noting that the four European micro-states considered −the principalities of Andorra and Monaco and the republics of San Marino and Malta− score surprisingly low in comparison with their bigger neighbours. In spite of their high living standards and economic freedom, these countries fail to perform similarly when it comes to moral freedom. A similar situation is observed in Caribbean and South Pacific island micro-states, which score poorly in most categories and rank in the lower areas of the WIMF classification. This similarity between very small countries in different regions, in spite of the cultural influence of their neighbours and allies, may lead to the conclusion that moral freedom is affected, among other relevant factors, by country size.