What are Morality Policies? The Politics of Values in a Post-Secular World
| Author | Julia Mourão Permoser |
| DOI | 10.1177/1478929918816538 |
| Date | 01 August 2019 |
| Published date | 01 August 2019 |
| Subject Matter | State of the Art |
https://doi.org/10.1177/1478929918816538
Political Studies Review
2019, Vol. 17(3) 310 –325
© The Author(s) 2019
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DOI: 10.1177/1478929918816538
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What are Morality Policies?
The Politics of Values in a
Post-Secular World
Julia Mourão Permoser
Abstract
This article critically reviews the literature on morality policies and the politics of values, focusing
in particular on the question of what defines morality policies as a specific policy field. Drawing
from both US American and European literature, it surveys to which extent morality policies can
be understood as a particular form of contention over primary values, a way of framing, a cultural
conflict, a specific type of politics, or a class of substantive policy issues. The article then develops
a new approach that draws on political theory and pays particular attention to the role of religion,
arguing that morality policies reflect deep divisions within modern societies over key principles of
political liberalism.
Keywords
morality policies, politics of values, religion, post-secularism, political liberalism
Accepted: 10 November 2018
Introduction
Value-based issues are experiencing a revival in Western politics and attracting ever more
attention in academia. In that context, “morality policies” are often dealt with as a specific
class of public policies, exhibiting common characteristics and generating similar politi-
cal responses and patterns of policy-making. But what are, in effect, morality policies?
And why have morality policies and the politics of values become so prominent in recent
times?
In this article, I conduct a critical state-of-the art review of works that have addressed
these foundational questions. The review draws on works from different strands of the
morality literature, from the first definitions that appeared in the context of US research,
to its re-evaluation by researchers of bioethical issues and of framing, to recent European
cross-national comparisons. As a result of this review, I argue that the existing literature
does not pay sufficient attention to the role of religion in delimiting the morality policy
Department of Political Science, University of Innsbruck, Innsbruck, Austria
Corresponding author:
Julia Mourão Permoser, Department of Political Science, University of Innsbruck, Universitätsstraße 15,
A-6020 Innsbruck, Austria.
Email: Julia.Mourao-Permoser@uibk.ac.at
816538PSW0010.1177/1478929918816538Political Studies ReviewMourão Permoser
research-article2019
State of the Art
Mourão Permoser 311
field. Furthermore, whereas the existing literature indicates a relationship between moral-
ity policies and conflicts over liberal principles such as individual autonomy, it does not
dig deeper into this relationship, leaving undertheorized a potentially rich source of
insights into the nature of morality policy controversies.
With this aim in mind, I approach the policy field from the viewpoint of political the-
ory in order to propose a new reading of morality policies that addresses more explicitly
the intricacies of their relationship to religion. This new approach emphasizes the power
of religion to blur the boundaries between private and public values, to generate conflicts
over liberal principles, and to expose inner tensions within political liberalism itself.
Morality Policies as Value Conflicts
The by far most cited definition of morality policies goes back to the work of Christohper
Mooney (1999, 2001) and Mooney and Schuldt (2008) and focuses on public disagree-
ment over privately held beliefs. For Mooney (1999: 675), “[t]he important distinction
between morality and nonmorality policy is that at least a significant minority of citizens
has a fundamental, first-principled conflict with the values embodied in some aspect of a
morality policy.” The emphasis here is on conflict and on values. As Mooney points out,
although criminal law and many other policies also define what is right and wrong and thus
are based on specific moral standards, these are usually the object of large societal consen-
sus, whereas the regulation of morality issues is controversial. Another early author of the
morality policy literature, Kenneth Meier (1999) articulates the same thought somewhat
differently. He argues that morality policies are about redistributing values. Through
morality policies the government seeks to “put [its] stamp of approval on one set of values
and to abase another” (Meier, 1999: 681). In other words, morality policies imply a zero-
sum game where the values of a specific group get legitimated at the expense of others.
The idea of a zero-sum game emerges because the values involved in regulating moral-
ity policies are deemed to be unamenable to compromise. They are often considered to be
intractable policy controversies that cannot be resolved by a reference to new facts (Engeli
and Varone, 2011). As one author put it, the politics of morality policy is characterized by
“deontological reasoning” (Mucciaroni, 2011), that is, judging what is right and wrong,
and by the conviction that preferences on those issues are based on non-negotiable values
and deeply help moral first principles. Morality policies thus do not pursue rational-
instrumental goals. Rather, “principles strictly determine policy choices, and upholding
principles is a valuable end of policy in itself” (Mucciaroni, 2011: 191).
Recently, two key aspects of this definition of morality policy have come under assault.
The first critique relates to the idea that morality policies differentiate themselves from
other policies by being about values and deeply held beliefs. It is, in fact, quite unclear
why Mooney (2001) defines morality issues as “the public clash of private values.” After
all, what is private about these values? As has been pointed out, other public policies also
involve a negotiation over the correct interpretation and implementation of deeply held
values. Moreover, it could be argued that public policy is always about public, not private
values, and citizens are able to differentiate between the two, even in the case of primary
values such as human life. A woman may choose never to undergo an abortion because it
goes against her principles, and still be in favor of a public policy that allows others to do
so under certain circumstances.
Second, the notion that morality policies are not amenable to compromises has also
been criticized. Whereas moral principles may be non-negotiable, their implementation in
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