 With the heating up of the abortion debate the phrase legislative morality has come back into more frequent use This week the Washington Post printed a letter to the editor with the headline Anti-abortion legislation is prohibition all over again the author complains quote Prohibition was an attempt by government to legislate morality unquote Hello, this is Ryan McMacon, and you're listening to radio Rothbard Similarly state legislator Kirk Hatcher of Montgomery, Alabama Who opposed the state's legislation that nearly bans abortion states quote we can't legislate morality We can't legislate hearts unquote and last week DNC activist Marissa Richmond declared the problem with the GOP these days is it's quote trying to legislate morality That's not the role of government unquote when used the general formula is this that law I don't like amounts to legislating morality, and we all know you shouldn't do that The problem with this inane line of argument, of course, is that nearly every law involves legislating morality of some sort It doesn't exactly require an outlandish amount of study to see that laws against murder and theft are cases of Legislating morality Courts legislators and law givers and most times in places have declared murder and theft Variously defined to be illegal acts precisely because most considered these acts to be immoral Laws against fraud exist because cheating people is regarded as immoral laws against rape exist because it's morally repugnant Certainly, there may be other reasons also given for making these activities illegal Outlawing theft and fraud are good for economic growth, for example But if the opposite were shown to be true It's hard to imagine many people declaring that swiping a child's bike from his driveway ought to be perfectly legal But we don't have to limit our analysis to big and obvious cases like murder How about laws regulating minimum wages is not the argument here that it's somehow immoral to pay people below a certain amount Certainly proponents of minimum wage laws are known to denounce opponents as greedy Inhumane and a number of other things all of which amount to calling the person in question immoral If creating a minimum wage is not a matter of legislating morality Then why are those who oppose the legislation regarded as immoral? The welfare state is similarly based on calls for legislating morality The claim is that it's immoral to leave families without some sort of taxpayer-funded safety net Opponents of such schemes of course just want people to die. That is their immoral Indeed, it's difficult to think of many laws at all that aren't justified in some way on a moral foundation Consider for example a local law on whether or not County X will have three DMV locations or two This might seem at first like a mere administrative question But the argument for there being three locations could be this Don't the people of tinyville deserve a DMV location that is convenient do the proponents of only two DMV locations Think the rural people of this County have all day to drive to Biggsville to register their cars We rural folk have families and jobs too The retort to this could then be Those people of tinyville want to steal even more money from the taxpayers of Biggville to fund their unnecessary extra DMV location and so on So when proponents of abortion declare anti-abortion laws to be matters of legislating morality What they really mean is these laws are based on a version of morality. I don't like After all there's nothing morality free about the pro-abortion position The position is that it's immoral to restrict a woman's freedom to get a legal abortion This is so immoral in their minds that they denounce anti-abortion activists as being hate-mongers enemies of women or worse For them the answer lies in you guessed it Legislating morality through federal laws prohibiting state and local governments from enacting abortion restrictions Meanwhile anti-abortion activists think the unborn baby is a person who deserves legal rights Thus their version of legislating morality involves prohibiting what they see as the killing of a person The fundamental difference between the two sides is not that one of them legislates morality while the other doesn't Both sides want laws that reflect their own moral views The abortion debate helps us to illustrate that the real issue behind whether or not a law legislates morality is whether or not There is an identifiable victim From the pro-abortion point of view if the unborn baby is not really a person then the crime quote-unquote has no victim on The other hand the anti-abortion position is that there is a clear and identifiable victim This distinction comes into play in other contexts where the term legislate morality is used in the case of the drug war For example those who oppose drug prohibitions claim that there is no identifiable victim That is the drug user is using potentially harmful substances of his own free will similarly opponents of prohibitions on prostitution argue that both the prostitute and his or her client are willing Participants in a contractual relationship Thus in these cases it is argued there is no victim and it would be immoral to prevent these people from doing as they please The other side of course might argue that there are real victims in these cases They might argue that prostitutes aren't really willing participants or that drug users aren't making free choices due to ignorance or addiction Thus when the author of the Washington Post letter compares alcohol prohibition to anti-abortion laws He's missing an important point Nearly everyone today regards alcohol prohibition as foolish because most regard the drinking of alcohol in most cases as a victimless activity But opponents of abortion maintain that it is not the case when it comes to deliberately terminating a pregnancy But in all these cases the argument hinges on whether or not there are victims and not whether one side is legislating morality Thank you for listening to radio Rothbard. 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