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271 l ConcludingReflections In writing this book, I was motivated not only by specific intellectual questions but also by more diffuse goals, concerns, and worries. As I bring this work to a close, I want to summarize the former and articulate the latter more explicitly. I want to situate, in other words, my reflections on law’s pedagogical function in the broader context of law, religion, and politics in the contemporary United States. Law as a Moral Teacher The overarching purpose of the volume is to make a case for the way in which law can and should function as a moral teacher, even in a pluralistic representative democracy committed to individual liberty, such as the United States. Isidore of Seville, a seventh-century historian, proposed a compact definition of the criteria for good law that was then appropriated by Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century. According to Isidore, “Law shall be virtuous, just, possible to nature, according to the custom of the country, suitable to place and time, necessary, useful; clearly expressed, lest by its obscurity it lead to misunderstanding; framed for no private benefit, but for the common good.”1 An animating conviction of this volume is that Isidore’s formal criteria for good law are just as useful to us today as they were in ancient times, despite the fact that we would doubtless not interpret the substance of each item on his list in the precise way he did. These chapters are not intended to provide an exhaustive account of my broadly Thomistic theory of law or to defend that account against the whole possible range of objections emanating from secular and religious sources. Nor are these chapters meant to address each and every issue at the intersection of 272 Concluding Reflections law and morality in a completely comprehensive manner. An entire volume could be dedicated to the role of law as a moral teacher with respect to each of the three issues I touch upon at some length: abortion, genetics, and euthanasia . Finally, I certainly do not intend to provide a complete analysis of the morality of voting, a topic that is only now beginning to receive the scholarly attention it deserves. Rather, my aim in the book is to sketch a model for how it might be possible to think of law as a teacher of virtue in a pluralistic society, as well as to proffer some concrete examples for how such an approach would deal with important and contentious issues. Throughout the volume I emphasize the key virtues I think the law should teach—autonomy and solidarity—even as I try to work through the basic implications of those virtues for more particular questions of law and policy. I am not trying to formulate a one-size-fits-all view of the pedagogical function of the law, or to hide the values animating my own account. I do not take my account as beyond dispute by all reasonable persons, or by all persons of good will. I think that the effective exercise of the pedagogical function of the law in a pluralistic society must grapple with the fact that some citizens will conscientiously disagree with some aspects of the moral message being proposed, particularly on contentious issues. The United States is a religiously and morally pluralistic society. Yet Americans nonetheless share a significant number of overlapping moral beliefs, as evidenced by the less contentious aspects of our legal norms. I find a deeply admirable moral vision of solidarity and autonomy in the Civil Rights Acts, the Americans with Disabilities Act, the Family and Medical Leave Act, and the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. Equally pervasive but more workaday moral norms animate tort and contract law, which have developed richly textured notions of how “reasonable” men and women ought to treat one another in their social dealings. I do not mean to deny that our nation is divided on many issues, including not only abortion and euthanasia but also sexual morality, stem-cell research, the legalization of drugs, the death penalty, and torture. But I think that our disagreements may be ameliorated, if not abated, by putting the legal and moral dimensions of an issue in a broader frame. Is the activity under discussion actually performed by the state (torture), funded by it (stem-cell research), or merely permitted by it (abortion)? Does the regulatory scheme confer approval (same-sex marriage) or simply tolerance (decriminalization of drugs)? We can examine the costs and...

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