Jonah Goldberg talks law and morality:
How many people consider "whatever you can get away with" to be the moral standard today? Answer: too many. What [Oliver Wendell] Holmes took for granted were the reasons people tried to cluster around the "external standard." A more Hayekian — heck, a more reasonable — man would understand (or in Holmes's case, care) that men have good manners and good values not because they are taught good manners are more efficient (though surely they are) but because good manners and good values are simply right. A good mother might very well explain to her children that proper manners and respect for others will make their lives easier. But, a good mother will surely explain that proper manners and respect for others is the right thing to do even if it makes your life more difficult. As the saying goes, character is what you do when no one's looking.
I've made that point many times: pragmatism, an unstable straddle of relativism and absolutism, can be safely practiced by individuals who take their moral upbringing for granted. Pragmatism as a societal value can slide quickly into antinomianism and nihilism.
Many years before I became an American Baptist, one of my favorite priests told a sermon (too short a sermon, one of my many reasons for conversion) that initially came across as a practical use for Christianity. "When everything is stripped away, it's always there for you to fall back on," he said. It seemed pleasant enough, but put to the question of law the statement is far weightier: left with nothing else, if one cannot consult a universal standard, the Divine, he will make do with Self, and sink into the relative.
Goldberg also touches on Oliver Wendell Holmes' "prudent member of the community," and the old justice's belief in legislation through a population's collective, pragmatic agreement. Strict leftism as experienced in America poses a specific threat to that academic arrangement: tyranny of the minority. If the consensus of a majority is challenged and charged as invalid for reasons ranging from "unfairness" to "insensitivity," society faces not only fragmentation, as every cultural or ethical deviance is offered acceptance by relativists but also oligarchical subversion. Such a minority, able to dictate its terms as a modified, collectivist equal or superior to a democratic majority, is particularly capable — which is why the left, never to be a majority, is frantically trying to regain the loss of its intellectual, pop-cultural and journalistic monopolies.