Making Men Moral

Sun, 01 May 1994 00:00:00 -0400

That any attempt by the state to legislate morals must be illegitimate has become a platitude of contemporary political thought, and Robert George’s new book, Making Men Moral , challenges it directly. Situating himself within the natural law camp, George deftly brings that tradition into a dialogue with contemporary liberalism. He proceeds dialectically, first engaging traditional supporters of morals laws and then some of their liberal opponents, including Ronald Dworkin, John Rawls, Joseph Raz, and others. George concludes by presenting “the basic outlines” of his own theory of civil liberties. The results will surely interest adherents of natural law and liberals alike.

George opens with the case for morals laws. Right behavior, he notes, requires more than knowing what one ought to do and why; one must also resist temptation and carry out the required action. Experience teaches that virtuous action is difficult because pleasure and various other goods tempt us to do wrong. Morals laws attach legal penalties to immoral acts in order to make performing them less attractive than refraining from them. They aim to encourage people to fulfill the outward demands of morality, as George rightly stresses:

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Making Men Moral