The Problem of Moral Dirigisme: A New Argument Against Moralistic Legislation
This Article applies a theory of rational choice to moral decision-making. In this theory, agents act primarily on local and personal knowledge to instantiate moral principles, virtues, and moral goods. The State may seek to prevent them from acting as they independently determine by prescribing or proscribing certain conduct by formal legal means. If its purpose is to ensure that people act morally or become better persons, we call this “moral dirigisme.” Our thesis is that the need to use decentralized knowledge to determine the moral status of an act makes the task of the moral dirigiste well-nigh impossible. The Article models moral agents as ideal-typical utilitarians, Kantians, or natural law adherents. We show that within each of these systems the determination of the morality of an act depends on the “particular circumstances of time and place.” Because the State’s access to knowledge of the personal and local circumstances of the actor is inferior to the knowledge available to the actor himself, the State does not possess a necessary instrument for the compulsion of morality. It does not have adequate concrete knowledge to know what is good. We conclude that the State cannot make people moral, because even when all members of society accept the same moral framework, it does not and usually cannot have the specific knowledge needed to determine the concrete manifestations of morality.
