Thirty years ago, Robert P. George’s Making Men Moral: Civil Liberties and Public Morality (Clarendon Press, 1993) challenged the consensus that justice requires governmental neutrality on contested questions of morality. Dr. George argued that moral neutrality in politics is impossible, that a proper concern for public morality can be a legitimate basis for laws and policies, and that natural law offered a more secure foundation for civil liberties than “neutralist” liberalism did.

How did Making Men Moral shape decades of debates about civil liberties and public morality? As these debates have evolved, how is Making Men Moral relevant going forward?

Please join AEI, the Ethics & Public Policy Center, Pepperdine University School of Public Policy, and the Project on Constitutional Originalism and the Catholic Intellectual Tradition at Catholic University for a conference to mark Making Men Moral’s enduring influence on public policy.