I got a bunch of messages responding to my “forcing religious opinions” post; I’m too swamped now to respond in detail, but let me just mention a general point to my libertarian correspondents — I can certainly see why people would object to others forcing wrong opinions on us through the legal system. I object to it myself.
But the proper objection is that the laws being advocated are wrong on the merits. It’s right to force on others our opinions that rape, child molestation, murder, and slavery is bad — where “force their opinions” means, as it often does in public debate, “enact coercive laws” based on those opinions — because these are correct opinions, and the laws that embody them, and try to force others to comply, are good laws. (We can debate about why they’re good laws, but we support them because we think they’re good). That many people supported abolition of slavery on religious grounds, thus forcing their opinions that slavery is wrong on others, doesn’t make this support wrong.
Conversely, it’s wrong for people to force on others their opinions that everyone should hand over all their property to the poor, or that everyone should destroy their guns, because these are morally unsound opinions, and the laws that try to force others to comply with them are bad laws. It doesn’t matter if the supporters of the laws are religious pacifists or antipropertarians, secular pacifists or antipropertarians, Marxists, or whoever else.
Law is a means of forcing people to comply with certain views. If we have law, we’ll have that coercion. It’s quite proper to insist that laws only coerce people to do (or not do) things that it is right to coerce people to do (or not do) — for instance, as I mentioned, it’s right to coerce people not to kill, rape, steal, and so on. But I see no reason to fault people based not on what laws they want to implement, but based on whether their grounds for supporting such laws are religious opinions or secular opinions.
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