The Law’s Moral Purpose

QUESTION: If laws can’t make people good, why do we try to legislate morality? Read Chuck Colson’s response below, taken from Answers to Your Kids’ Questions: First, law is a moral teacher—an enduring standard by which we cultivate order and civility in society. In the biblical perspective, the law is meant to embody objective standards based on divine prescriptions for social order. We often hear that we cannot legislate morality, but that is not true. When we enact laws against murder, we are making a moral judgment. In fact, if you think about it, the very act of passing a law almost always involves making a moral judgment; we consider some behavior to be acceptable, other behavior not acceptable, and the law reflects that. This was certainly true in the Old Testament. God gave the Israelites the Ten Commandments (all with moral implications), and God’s law flowed from this not only into Israel but also into the whole of Western civilization. (Even Hindus believe the Ten Commandments are a good, moral formulation.) Second, a system of objective law, which reflects a society’s moral consensus, is essential for maintaining order in society. Think of traffic laws as a simple example. When we enter an intersection, we want to know that all of the other drivers are going to follow the same rules we are. Our confidence is not a matter of emotion; it isn’t a matter of whether or not we believe the other drivers like us. Our confidence is based on a certain knowledge that the other drivers are going to obey the same traffic laws. If that were not so, our streets would quickly degenerate into chaos. The same is true for society as a whole. So the law is meant to be both a moral teacher and a means of maintaining order. Still some people question the law’s moral purpose, asking, for example, whether we should legalize drugs. They argue that this would eliminate so much crime that is related to the drug trade. But this would be tantamount to society’s saying that drug use is all right, that we find no moral objections to it. To take away the law takes away the moral condemnation that the law reflects: that drug use and other publicly destructive vices are morally objectionable. In addition, legalizing drugs wouldn’t work. Just visit Needle Park in Zurich, where drug addicts come to get their government drugs, or see what is happening in the Netherlands, where drug use has been legalized. Making drugs legal doesn’t decrease drug use; it increases it. And society decays in the process. Moreover, so-called legalization does not eliminate criminal activity because drugs are still regulated by the state; and certain groups, like young people, for example, are prohibited from using them. The black markets and crime associated with drug use remain. To their discredit, Western societies, long elevated above paganism by the vitality of revealed religion, are today crumbling through their defection from the Judeo-Christian heritage. The loss of that inheritance has accommodated levels of brutality and vice reminiscent of barbarian heathen societies in the pre-Christian era.—Carl F. H. Henry, “Natural Law and a Nihilistic Culture.”

08/20/07