Education
Robert P. George
Topics: law, culture, and politics

Robert P. George is McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence and Founder and Director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University.

He is a member of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom. He previously served on the President’s Council on Bioethics (2002-2009) and as a presidential appointee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights (1993-98). He has also served on UNESCO’s World Commission on the Ethics of Scientific Knowledge and Technology (COMEST), of which he remains a corresponding member. He is a former Judicial Fellow at the Supreme Court of the United States, where he received the Justice Tom C. Clark Award.
Professor George is author of Making Men Moral: Civil Liberties and Public Morality (Oxford U. Press, 1993), In Defense of Natural Law (Oxford U. Press, 1999), and The Clash of Orthodoxies (ISI Books, 2001). He is editor of several volumes, including Natural Law Theory: Contemporary Essays (Oxford U. Press, 1992), The Autonomy of Law: Essays on Legal Positivism (Oxford U. Press, 1996), Natural Law, Liberalism, and Morality (Oxford U. Press, 1996), and Great Cases in Constitutional Law (Princeton U. Press, 2000), and co-editor with Jean Bethke Elshtain of The Meaning of Marriage (Spence, 2005).

Topics

Making Man Moral

The Case for Marriage

Customized programs
Making Men Moral: Civil Liberties and Public Morality
Contemporary liberal thinkers commonly suppose that there is something in principle unjust about the legal prohibition of putatively victimless crimes. Here Robert P. George defends the traditional justification of morals legislation against criticisms advanced by leading liberal theorists. He argues that such legislation can play a legitimate role in maintaining a moral environment conducive to virtue and inhospitable to at least some forms of vice. Among the liberal critics of morals legislation whose views George considers are Ronald Dworkin, Jeremy Waldron, David A.J. Richards, and Joseph Raz. He also considers the influential modern justification for morals legislation offered by Patrick Devlin as an alternative to the traditional approach. George closes with a sketch of a "pluralistic perfectionist" theory of civil liberties and public morality, showing that it is fully compatible with a defense of morals legislation. Making Men Moral will interest legal scholars and political theorists as well as theologians and philosophers focusing on questions of social justice and political morality.

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