Morality

Laws often reflect the moral sensibilities of a society. Where immoral acts affect other people or the culture at large, we enact laws to enforce our shared "morality". So in a sense we do have laws to "legislate morality" on one level.

But the phrase "can you legislate morality" I have always considered to mean "can you codify the entire moral code of a society". In other words, can you write all the laws necessary so that people not only avoid harming others or society itself, but also avoid harm to themselves.

It becomes an impossible task. Laws only look at current or past situations, and cannot project forward into unknown territory very easily. Genetic engineering is an issue that has taken medical ethicists some time to wade through; there were no laws preventing harvesting DNA without the person's knowledge before the discovery of DNA, for instance. Or the sharing of genetic information.

Morality also guides future situations. Societies have a shared morality, inherited from the past. Even though we like to think we are all independent, we all think even innocuous things are off limits. Passing gas in public is rude, for instance, yet it is hard to show any harm to anyone from the act. Gluttony is evident everywhere in our society, and used to be a huge moral issue when food was scarce; imagine if we had laws against being fat that had to be revoked or superseded once the "green revolution" ended the famines.

Morality is the self-imposed law written in our hearts, and is a better protection for others than codified laws which only serve to punish wrong doing after the fact. Morality keeps us from doing things, while the law will punish us later if we do them. One depends on our self-reflection, the other on the deterrent effect that is weakened by the odds of whether we will get caught or not.