Home -> Law Blog Directory -> Academic Blogs -> Legal Theory Blog

Academic

: Legal Theory Blog

Yankah on Liberal Virtue

By Lawrence Solum

Ekow N. Yankah (Cardozo Law School) has posted Liberal Virtue (LAW, VIRTUE AND JUSTICE, Alalia Amaya, Ho Hock Lai, eds., Hart Publishing, Oxford, 2011) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:

If prostitution is ?the world?s oldest profession?, debate about its moral and legal permissibility is nearly as old. Powerful arguments have been made that the moral condemnation of prostitution cannot withstand philosophical scrutiny; that moral condemnation of prostitution borders on superstition and parochial conventions. A different type of reformer argues that a legitimate liberal government cannot properly prohibit prostitution; that liberalism demands that we cabin off our individual moral evaluations from the business of governance and law.

This article takes a starkly different approach. This article does not take the view that prostitution is intractably controversial or insist on agreement with particular philosophical paradigms in order to reform prostitution laws. This article illustrates that we can respect the conviction that prostitution is immoral. The commonly held view that prostitution is morally wrong is correct or at least plausible. Examining the foundational thinkers in the two philosophical traditions, often used as foils for the other ? deontology and virtue based theories ? shows how each understands that prostitution is immoral. Rather than ask many to discard their deepest convictions, this article makes sense of the commonly held intuition that prostitution is immoral while still showing how we can garner widespread agreement on reforming the current law. Secondly and most critically, unlike decriminalization arguments that have come before, this article demonstrates how agreement on decriminalization can be reached by liberals and non-liberals alike. By showing how we can respect widely held moral conviction and reach agreement from a wide range of moral starting points, lawmakers and social reformers can be armed with the arguments needed to move reform forward.

Highly recommended.

Full post as published by Legal Theory Blog on August 13, 2010 (boomark / email).