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(Not that I expect to hop the fence and turn Pro-Choice, fight for legalized drugs, or have laws against murder repealed.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.

[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.