"Making Men Moral" at 15

At Public Discourse, Micah Watson has posted an essay on Robert George's Making Men Moral, which was published 15 years ago.  A bit:

The work of Princeton professor Robert P. George has now spanned three decades and addressed several subjects, including, among others, analytic philosophy, constitutional law, philosophy of law, bioethics, and natural law theory. His discussions of these topics have been marked by two common principles—the perfectionist principle and the reason principle—both enjoying an august philosophical heritage, even as they have more recently fallen into disfavor. These principles, first expounded upon in book form in his 1994 work Making Men Moral: Civil Liberties and Public Morality, were the subject of a recent conference at Union University commemorating the 15^th anniversary of that book.

We might articulate the perfectionist principle in this way: “religion, morality, and knowledge, being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools, and the means of education, shall forever be encouraged.”

Such was the position of the United States Congress as expressed three years before the Constitutional Convention in the Northwest Ordinance of 1784. The exact nature of the encouragement is not as important as the principle underlying it: republics depend on a virtuous citizenry and thus it is in the interest of the government to promote virtue. It is necessary, then, for government and law to partner with the institutions of religion, morality, and knowledge toward the perfectionist end of “making men moral.”

While the carrying out of this task is difficult and calls for principled and prudent leadership, the principle itself is much more controversial than it used to be. . . .

Many liberals . . . purport to reject a perfectionist role for government in the name of individual autonomy. In reality most do not object to government promoting an idea of the good as such. Rather, they worry about the content of what passes for good when traditionalists argue for a government role—they seem to have no problem when the government advances a liberal conception of the good life. Nevertheless, many liberals speak as though the role of government is to enable individuals to pursue their own understandings of the good life and this approach is in tension with the principle espoused by the 1784 Congress.

The second principle is a bit more complex. If the perfectionist principle holds that the government should play a role in encouraging citizens to be good, the reason principle holds that we can identify that good through careful deliberation and the exercise of universally available human reason. . . .