This is from a video from http://publicchristianity.org/Videos/ethics_and_the_good_life.html of David Bentley Hart commenting on why he things modernity has struggled with being able to sustain a unified, compelling ethic without a metaphysical base. I thought how he phrased the two perspectives on freedom was very clear.

“We work with a model of freedom in the modern age that has a theological history stretching back to the fourteenth century, at least, and a secular philosophical history going back probably to the late fifteenth century which defines freedom not in classical sense as the power of a being to realize its nature by growing into greater conformity with ‘the good’ as such. We don’t assume we have a nature we don’t assume ‘the good’ as such is anything other than a cultural construction. Rather freedom consists in the unrestrained, spontaneous power of the self to construct for itself the ends it desires and then to pursue them with as little interference as possible to the greatest extent of its power. If that’s true, if we’re working with that model of freedom the pretense that there’s just some obviously self-evident system of ethics out there that all rational persons will agree on because its good for us is absurd. It may be, it has been catastrophically the case in the 20th century that we’re not interested in what’s good for us, we’re interested in what’s good for me, or for the German people or for the utopia of the future.”