Recently someone challenged me after I said one of my favorite quotes “You can’t legislate morality” (I’m not sure who said it first but Barry Goldwater and Jesse Ventura both said it at some point) to explain what I meant by that and that I should consider the validity of that statement. I tried to give an answer but I do not think I did a very good job. So I have thought about it a lot since then and I’m going to try to summarize what I mean when I say “You can’t legislate morality”.
First a couple of definitions:
Violence: Using force or the threat of force to do something to someone else against their will.
Immoral: Something is immoral if it makes life worse.
These are not a perfect definitions but hopefully they help to describe what I mean.
For starters I have to admit that the quote “You can’t legislate morality” is a bit vague and easy to misunderstand, but that’s almost always a problem with these easy to say/remember axioms.
A longer, less ambiguous way to say what I mean would be:
Just because something is immoral does not mean there should be a law making it illegal.
Another way to put it would be:
If you want to justify a law to make X illegal you need a better argument then just demonstrating that X is immoral.
And:
You should not try to legislate morality.
And:
The standard for having a law to make X illegal (and punishing people who are guilty of X) should be that X is an act of violence not just that it is immoral.
Here’s a picture that might help too.
So all the stuff in the big circle is immoral stuff (stuff I do not want people to do). However in order for me to think we need a law to make any given immoral act illegal it also need to be a violent act.
Why? I’m glad you asked. There are lots of reasons. However this is the main one.
It is bad to be the aggressor. So the first person to resort to violence is the bad person.
If someone is doing something immoral but is not being violent and someone else uses violence to stop them from doing it they become the aggressor and are now also acting immorally.
This is what’s called the Non-agression-principle.
The non-aggression principle is an important part of my moral framework and it should be a part of yours.
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