Liquor and Legalism

Two days ago, Amanda linked to Harvey Mansfield’s appreciative discussion of Solzhenitsyn’s Harvard speech . Mansfield endorses Solzhenitsyn’s claim that “Legalism is [the West’s] substitute for virtue: You don’t have to distinguish good from evil and do good while avoiding evil; all you have to do is obey the law.”

Indeed, we can take that even further. Since a legalistic society finds it hard to account for any prima facie moral obligation even to obey the law, the rule of conduct eventually degenerates to “Obey such laws as are effectively enforced.”

A good example of this is Britain’s efforts to combat alcohol abuse among the young. So far their strategy has been to pass increasingly strict legislation. The result? Fewer young people think it worth the effort to try to drink, but those who do drink with greater abandon.

Time was that they frequented pubs under the supervision of older drinkers and bartenders, who could establish reasonable communal norms regulating their drinking. Now laws have replaced those norms . . . and the laws are disregarded.