Our panel of 91 professional philosophers has responded to

96
 questions about 
Time
1280
 questions about 
Ethics
31
 questions about 
Space
34
 questions about 
Music
221
 questions about 
Value
244
 questions about 
Justice
110
 questions about 
Biology
80
 questions about 
Death
77
 questions about 
Emotion
51
 questions about 
War
4
 questions about 
Economics
24
 questions about 
Suicide
392
 questions about 
Religion
69
 questions about 
Business
27
 questions about 
Gender
58
 questions about 
Abortion
58
 questions about 
Punishment
75
 questions about 
Perception
574
 questions about 
Philosophy
89
 questions about 
Law
284
 questions about 
Mind
23
 questions about 
History
151
 questions about 
Existence
43
 questions about 
Color
134
 questions about 
Love
75
 questions about 
Beauty
39
 questions about 
Race
70
 questions about 
Truth
2
 questions about 
Culture
154
 questions about 
Sex
54
 questions about 
Medicine
110
 questions about 
Animals
218
 questions about 
Education
88
 questions about 
Physics
81
 questions about 
Identity
282
 questions about 
Knowledge
32
 questions about 
Sport
5
 questions about 
Euthanasia
170
 questions about 
Freedom
67
 questions about 
Feminism
117
 questions about 
Children
287
 questions about 
Language
208
 questions about 
Science
374
 questions about 
Logic
2
 questions about 
Action
36
 questions about 
Literature
105
 questions about 
Art
68
 questions about 
Happiness
124
 questions about 
Profession

Question of the Day

Let's stick with criminal law here. One obvious reason why "immoral" doesn't entail "illegal" is that what's legal, what's not, and what the punishments are needs to be clear. In a functioning legal system, it's generally possible to determine in advance whether something is a crime, and in cases where it's not clear, there's a system for settling the matter, with various safeguards and forms of appeal built in. But there are plenty of moral loose ends — matters on which people disagree, sometimes vehemently, about whether something is immoral.

We might try restricting things by saying that actions which are clearly immoral should be illegal. Unfortunately, however, that doesn't move the ball as far as it would need to go. When people disagree vehemently about moral matters, one side typically thinks something is clearly immoral and the other side that it clearly isn't. Few of us would want to live in a state where we might be subject to imprisonment because some judge judges that something we think is moral is actually immoral. I may think that a statutory law is a bad one, but I can at least know in advance what the law actually is and work to get it changed if I want to.

In addition to these more general reasons, there's sheer practicality. Legal systems aren't meant to address all problems or govern all behavior, and thank Heavens for that. For one thing, the resources it would take to enforce all of morality through the law would be extraordinary, and better spent in other ways. But also, most people — I'm one — think that there should be a sphere of life that's outside the reach of the State. If morality is entirely swallowed up by the law, that sphere will shrink to almost nothing. And again: I suspect that very few of us would want to live in a country like that.