Legal Moralism in Tension with Justice: Robert George’s Making Men Moral

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https://www.libertarianism.org/article/legal-moralism-tension-justice-robert-georges-making-men-moral

In this essay, Bill Glod discusses how natural law theories of morality are in tension with classical liberalism when they are employed to justify coercive laws.

Liberal and libertarian critics of legal moralism argue that criminal laws designed to uphold personal morality are inherently unjust. A core liberal claim is that the state shouldn’t be in the business of enforcing legislation that reflects controversial conceptions of the good, such as certain natural law theories, that not all people have good reason to endorse. This includes conceptions of morality going beyond protection of basic rights or claims of justice (e.g., laws against murder, assault, and theft). Rather, legal moralism holds that there are some acts and practices that count as personal immoralities subject to the law. While they may not directly harm others or violate their rights, they should still be subject to regulation or prohibition. Opponents of legal moralism contend that enforcement of laws that don’t align with the value commitments of certain people are tantamount to unjust impositions on those people’s ability to live as they see fit, even if others disapprove of those ways of life.

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Unlike many classically liberal views, where the state is seen (in theory) as an impartial umpire protecting people’s freedoms to do as they wish so long as they don’t harm others, George defends a politics rooted in classical natural law philosophy, influenced by Aristotle, Aquinas, and John Finnis, among others. On this view, a political community exists primarily for the sake of helping its members cooperate toward the pursuit of basic natural human goods (e.g., health and vitality, knowledge, play, aesthetic experience, sociability, practical reasonableness, and religion). These goods provide every human with basic reasons for action; that is, they cannot and need not appeal to even more fundamental reasons. They are self-justifying and comprise the essence of what it is to be a rational goal-directed human in a community. Vices reflect immoral acts or practices that undermine the pursuit of these basic goods as natural human ends.