Index of Moral Freedom
The World Index of Moral Freedom is sponsored and published by the Foundation for the Advancement of Liberty, a libertarian think tank based in Madrid, Spain. The Index is an international index ranking 160 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 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, etc). 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 WIMF's first edition was published on April 2, 2016, co-authored by Foundation researchers Andreas Kohl and Juan Pina. A second edition was published by the same foundation in July, 2018, this time authored by Juan Pina and Emma Watson.
The World Index of Moral Freedom is sponsored and published by the Foundation for the Advancement of Liberty, a libertarian think tank based in Madrid, Spain. The Index is an international index ranking 160 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 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, etc). 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 WIMF's first edition was published on April 2, 2016, co-authored by Foundation researchers Andreas Kohl and Juan Pina. A second edition was published by the same foundation in July, 2018, this time authored by Juan Pina and Emma Watson.
SUBJECT Variables
OVERALL PERFORMANCE
The overall performance score is the average of the scores of 5 indicators - Religious, Bioethical, Drugs, Sexuality and Gender.
- India's level of moral freedom in the 2022 Index is classified as "Insufficient"
- India is placed at the 74th position in 2020 amongst 160 countries on the index
- India performance level on the Index of Moral Freedom in 2022 was 49.3%, a 2.1% drop from its performance in 2020.
- In comparison to its benchmarked G20 peers, India's overall performance score on the Index in 2022 is at the mid-point on the table with only Russia, China, Turkey, and Indonesia below it.
- India's overall performance level on the index has fallen by 8% between 2016 and 2022 while that of Australia has increased by 25% during the same period.
- Portugal holds on the top spot on the 2022 Index with a performance level of 95.2% on moral freedom
RELIGION
This indicator measures how free is the state from any religious bias, and, on the other hand, how free is the individual to practice any religion, or to not practice any. 37.5% of the indicator weight is allocated to the amount of religious influence onto the state, including its formal institutional status and governmental practice. 10% weightage is assigned to moral censorship of online content. 37.5% is allocated to religious freedom, mostly based on constitutional and legal provisions and adjusted to reflect any well known breaches in practice. 15% is allocated to the indicator reflecting religion-related Human Rights, which takes into account the existing rate of incarceration of prisoners of conscience in each of the countries.
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