Thoughtful Innuendos

[jackofallgeeks]

I was doing some thinking the other day, spurred by a comment made by my uncle over dinner the other night. We were discussing the Libertarian Right vs. the Religious Right, and why he doesn't like the trend that the Religious Right would have us take -- legislating morality and dictating behavior.

I've been sitting on the fense of this one for a while, sort of. On the one hand, I've been aware that you can't legislate morality, though I can't articulate it any better than "it won't work." But at the same time, older theories on Politics argued for a Government that takes stock of it's people's spiritual health as well -- I cite Plato and Aristotle, lest anyone fear I refer to the Middle Ages' Catholic Church. And so I've been stuck, in a way; why not set laws to dissuade people from doing what's wrong, anyways?

The key point my uncle made was a line he pulled from a book, What's So Great About America? if I recall, and it went to the tune of "true virtue must be freely chosen. To force it on someone robs it of all it's value." It would actually be a disservice, I think, and something of an insult to human nature, to legislate morality (aside from the other point that was made, that is that morality is not easily codifiable enough that we might build a suitable code of laws from it).

This post, from mephron makes a point of how legislating morality could go wrong. We would all have people Be Good and Do Right, surely, but seeing that this is so isn't necessarily the job of Government, I think.

(Not that I expect to hop the fence and turn Pro-Choice, fight for legalized drugs, or have laws against murder repealed. My uncle also made a point that most good laws were those which were set to either protect individual rights or to preserve the interests of society. I am not an anarchist, I would just have morality dictated by something other than the government.)

Comments

[dikaiosunh.livejournal.com]

Hmm. I'm not sure how the story is an example of legislating morality "going wrong" except insofar as it's, you know, an attempt to legislate morality. As such an attempt, if the cop knew he had the authority to enforce his judgment, it seems like it'd work fine. What's morally odious about it is just that it's an unwarranted attempt to impose one particular view of morality through the medium of law.

What "going wrong" (by the lights of the attempt to legislate morality) would be would seem to be something more like: we outlaw abortion and the total number of abortions does not decrease (much), but rather it just means that more women have them done under unsanitary conditions and are harmed thereby. In that sort of case, you'd be thwarting the very moral values you were attempting to legislate.

On another note, it's not impossible to reconcile a committment to government as a system for protecting fundamental rights and making society run with a committment to government as a system in which citizens can reach their full moral potential. After all, one of the major reason we want rights protected and society running relatively smoothly is so that people can live good (in the Aristotelian sense of *eudaimon*, not *just* morally good) lives. One attempt (and I'm biased, because I basically agree) is Mill's in On Liberty. In a nutshell: the only way to find the best life is by experimentation; one role of government is to preserve the ability for citizens to freely choose and experiment with forms of life without undue interference from others.

One thing to keep in mind is that a lot of the social control stuff in Aristotle is supposed to happen in the course of moral *education* - laws serve a moral purpose for adults mostly when those adults have had defective upbringings that have left them without a properly developed moral sense. So you can have a basically libertarian society that's still committed to a morally loaded education (in citizenship values, etc.) for its youth - after all, turning a bunch of unsocialized psychopaths loose in capitalism is a recipe for disaster (cf corporate personhood in law). This is why marketizing education (through vouchers, e.g.) isn't necessarily a good idea (OK, it's a bad one) - educators are very often in the position of providing a service that their customers will only desire *after* they've received it, and so normal supply-and-demand won't work properly. But I don't think it's incompatible with some basically libertarian approach to policy - since it would be a fallacy to regard children as the kind of rational choosers that it assumes.

Of course, it bears keeping in mind that the government isn't the *only* potentially tyrannical structure (*pace* Reagan). Mill worried a lot about the 'tyranny of the majority' (which is what I think we're sliding dangerously towards now, illiberal democracy). And freedom can be infringed upon by the family, the culture, corporations, religious organizations, etc. - many of which will move to fill the power vacuum where government recedes from social control (cf, like, the entire 80s and 90s). Sometimes the way to preserve liberty is to use one power structure to check the influence of another. Dewey's Liberalism and Social Action is a useful corrective on this point. :)

Blah blah blah.

[jackofallgeeks.livejournal.com]

Blah Blah Blah
No, no, you actually make good points here. Unfortunately, I haven't been intellectually primed in a while, and I'm so mentally, physically, and emotionally tired these days... In short, I don't think my post above was very articulate at all, and I don't think my comment below will do much better.

I don't really think that the post is an example of Legislation Gone Wrong, because there's no real legislation or going-wrong happening. It just made me think, is all, about how far would be too far, and how easy it would be to slide that way. It just resonated with my current thoughts on how fit or not I feel Government is to dictate morality. I think it should put certain measures into effect -- keep honest men honest, or something -- but...

I don't see how a failed law (illegalizing abortion having no effect on actual abortion rates) thwarts the moral it is intended to protect. it seems to me that it simply fails. If all people stole, it doesn't mean that laws against theft were compelling them to steal...?

Neither do I see that it's irreconsilable to have government protect rights and at the same time provide an environment to achieve moral maturity -- I do see a problem with Legislating Morality and providing an environment to achieve moral maturity, but I can't quite articulate it.

I do believe you're right on Aristotle, and I agree that The Goivernment isn't the only potentially-tyranical structure... Unfortunately, I don't feel I'm able to say any more right now; my head hurts and I'm tired, and as such can't think well at all. Hopefully later...

[dikaiosunh.livejournal.com]

Rereading, I see I wasn't as explicit/careful as I should have been on the abortion example. Specifically, the law would be for the (presumably moral - it's not like we need to keep the birthrate up, or have any other compelling state interest) purpose of outlawing abortion. More generally, though, the moral value it would serve would be something like respect for and/or preservation of life. So a law that had little effect on the actual abortion rate, but greatly increased the number of women harmed or killed by illegal abortions would be a net loss from the perspective of encouraging life.

Not much turns on it being the *same* value. It could be an overall moral failure as a piece of legislation because it fails to serve one intended moral purpose while thwarting another.

I'll get to the other stuff when you're feeling better, perhaps - but thought I'd clear that up.

[jackofallgeeks.livejournal.com]

Ah, yes, I think I can kind of see where you're going with that... I'll think on it more once my head gets to working right.

[aiglet.livejournal.com]

Part of the real problem with legislating morality is the question of whose morals are going to determine the law. Your morals are not my morals are not gdmusumeci's morals are not Suzannah's morals, right, so whose are going to get prioritized?

I think that the intent of the 1st Amendment "freedom of religion" clause wasn't just to prevent the government from outlawing certain religious practices, as was common in other countries at the time, but was also to prevent the government from enshrining the tenets of any given faith or creed in our laws (freedom of also being freedom *from*).

My real problem with the (crazy) Religious Right (as opposed to the non-crazy conservative religious people I know) is that they want to take what they believe and make that the law of the land -- they're enforcing their morality on a large, heterogenous group of people most of whom aren't even of their faith. In many cases, they're doing it through very shady means (like "faith based initiatives," where they refused to give money to a pagan group which was running a soup kitchen).

I think that the law ought to allow for maximal freedom, as long as those freedoms don't hurt anyone else, or restrict anyone else's choice space. If there's a grey area, the law ought to come down on the side that allows more choices rather than less. It's one of my fundamental beliefs that no one can be moral if they're not allowed to make choices -- how moral are you if you never have to stand at the crossroads and try to figure out what the right thing to do is? (Cf. also Milton, Paradise Lost -- God points out that he gave humans free will because he wants us to *choose* to love him. If we're forced to love him, then it doesn't mean anything.)

If we're start legislating morality, we might as well legislate that everyone has to go to a certain church, or follow a certain set of beliefs -- because that's what legislating morality *does*, it forces everyone into the same creed.

My head sill hurts, but I never could keep my mouth shut...

[jackofallgeeks.livejournal.com]

I disagree on the first paragraph. I believe in an objective world with objective right and wrong, and therefore and objective morality. So, whichever morality most-closely conformed to this objectively true morality would take precedence. From there, it's only a matter of deciding the details of such a statement.

I further disagree, if only to a certain extent, the second paragraph. In great part, as I recall, the founding Fathers had fled one type of religious persecution or another; they wanted to nip that in the bud, and construct a government which would neither persecute one, or elevate another (and thus persecute all others). However, I don't think it then follows that they wanted to completely secularize the government. "In God We Trust" is on our money, for one, and in our pledge, for two, and even on our Declaration of Independence.

I do agree, mostly, with the third paragraph. I like to imagine I'm religious, but rather sane as well. I don't think I would necessarily feel comfortable with a theocracy, even if it was based in my own faith, because faith is a very personal thing, and it isn't something that *can* be forced on anyone. Not genuinely, anyways. You can torment someone long enough that they'll confess to a crime they didn't commit. Saying so doesn't mean they committed the crime, nor does saying so really mean you have faith. There's more to it than that. This comes down on the "True Virtue Must Be Chose" thing.

I mostly disagree with the fourth paragraph, but not as strongly as before. I think certain things aren't worth choosing, and that somethings which may be chosen are patently wrong, detrimental to society and individuals. I don't hold Choice above Justice, or Right, or whatever else. Yes, Choice is important and good, but not ultimately so. There can be wrong choices and bad choices, leading to wrong actions and bad actions. Even given this, though, I don't know that I want to government too involved; I think it hinges on people being raised to adulthood properly, and I don't think raising children should fall into the governments' purview. I think parents, or perhapse small, local communities, should be in charge of children (I say communities just because not everyone who can produce children can necessarily raise children, and not everyone who can't raise children necessarily wouldn't try). As you and Milton point out, Free Will is a vital part of human nature, and that was a key point in my above post, as well.

The final paragraph is, necessarily, the extreme which one could slide to.

Re: My head sill hurts, but I never could keep my mouth shut...

[aiglet.livejournal.com]

The thing is that your belief in an objective morality is, in some sense, a religious belief, one that can be (and is) disagreed with. Also, by claiming that there's an objective morality, you're (by implication) claiming that that morality is *your* morality, and that the rest of us are in the wrong. Do you really think that I'm a terribly immoral person? I suspect that you don't, because you're still friends with me -- you admit that it's possible for there to be good people with moral systems different from yours, which kind of puts paid to the notion of the One True Way.

The problem with saying that "In God we trust" is a statement of religion is that it doesn't tell you anything about which God it is. Just because they were deists, and believed in a God doesn't mean that they necessarily believed in the same God that you or I do. We can't choose to prioritize one person or group's conception of God over another on the sheer basis of what we think the Founders would have wanted. They laid out the bones, it's up to us to build the flesh of the country, and the general definition has agreed that "freedom of" is equivalent to "freedom from," at least where religion is concerned, because there is no other way to do it. Otherwise you're merely saying "you're free to choose one of these religions off this list of "real" religions," and that's not really freedom at all.

I think what you're missing about my "choice" thing is that it's inherent in my definition of justice. I firmly believe that "justice" means "allowing people the greatest range of choice, *as long as they're not impeding anyone else's choices*" (i.e., a just society would let you do whatever you want as long as you're not hurting anyone else). If people aren't allowed to make mistakes, then they can't grow -- part of learning to be virtuous is learning to distinguish between good and bad choices, and learning to accept the consequences of said bad choices, no?

On Objective Truth

[jackofallgeeks.livejournal.com]

Being born and bred Catholic, we can't completely discount that I may have some religious bias. However, I hold that my belief in objective morality is more philosophically based, an extension of my belief in an objective reality, and that it is more-or-less divorced from my religious inclinations. That both my personal philosophy and my religion tend to agree with each other is a null point -- I'm sure you wouldn't expect someone to hold two opinions which contradicted each other, would you?

And yes, it follows that I do think my morality is the correct one, which is why I subscribe to it. Again, would you expect someone to subscribe to a system of morals they thought was wrong? But I don't think it's absolutely and ultimately correct -- I'm open to persuation, and if I were persuaded that some other system was more correct, I would subscribe to that. I won't say I *know* absolutely that I'm right, but I think it's pretty obvious that I think I am. I'm not sure how anyone could really function if they believed themselves to be wrong.

It does then follow that I think you (and by necessity a great many others) are wrong. It's only logical. But just because I disagree with you on this point (or any others) doesn't mean I think badly of you, or wish you ill, or anything like that. The great majority of my friends disagree with me on at least two or three key topics, but we're still friends. Just because we disagree doesn't mean we must hagte each other, or that we can't enjoy eachother's company. That I'm friends with an Episcopalian, or a Jew, or buddhist doesn't compromise my belief in Catholicism.

On Freedom Of Religion

[jackofallgeeks.livejournal.com]

"In God We Trust" is a Religious statement, you can not deny it. You are correct, though, in that it is religiously ambiguous. Jews, Protestants, Catholics, and Muslims all (arguably) believe in the same God. This is the God who, it seems, is thought of whenever the word is capitalized. The founding fathers were Christians and so it's not too much of a stretch to say that's who they meant by it.

The problem I have with "'freedom of' equates to 'freedom from'" is that it doesn't. Freedom from oppression means there is no oppression. Freedom from unwarranted search and seizure means there is no unwarranted search and seizure. Freedom of Religion means you are free to believe what you will, and worship what you will, even if you're a godless scientist who believes in nothing superior to the human intellect. That does not mean you will be free from interaction with or exposure to the religions of others; they're just as free as you, and many of the trends in the courts these days come fearfully close to a state-imposed atheism at times -- which is, arguably, it's own religion.

There will always be some set of religions which are accepted, and those which are not. A religion whose worship consisted of abducting and sacrificing middle-aged men to the god Gariz would already be unacceptable in our society. I'm not sure what you consider to be the current list of "real" religions, but it seems to me that Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Mormonism, Scientology, Atheism, Agnosticism, and so on and so forth are all more-or-less accepted in our society. I disagree with a number of them, but that doesn't mean I would prevent you from choosing your belief. Really, I would be hard-pressed to try. Just accept that I have mine, too, and you'll have to deal with it, as well.

On Justice

[jackofallgeeks.livejournal.com]

Philosophers since before Plato have argued on what the nature of Justice is. Plato himself wrote a whole book, The Republic, on that question and it's implications. I don't have the time, space, or expertise to attack the question here. If the issue hasn't been settled in several thousand years by several thousand minds (if not more!), I'm not going to settle it here in fifteen minutes.

As I noted before, to be virtuous, one must choose. That is why a fascist Government, even based wholly in Objectively Right Morals, would be a detriment to Man and an affront to his Nature. You can not force virtue, simply because of how it is.

However, while I will grant you that there must be choice before there is justice, I don't believe choice is in anyway inherent to justice. There must be sunlight before there is corn, but sunlight is not itself inherent in corn. One may choose justly or unjustly, and so choice is not itself justice; you can't have an unjust justice.

Justice, I believe, has more to do with the consequences of an action that the origin of the action -- choice.

I intend to read Plato's Republic again soon, and think more on the issue, but as a mostly-uneducated first step, I think I would hold now that Justice is something akin to correctly rendering consequences to good and bad choices. I do think there's more to it than that, but I can't really say what.