May a conscientious citizen reasonably seek to have the law reflect his or her moral convictions? My answer is that there are circumstances under which such efforts are reasonable, and cannot be meaningfully challenged except by substantive moral criticism of the moral views in question. However, there are many areas of life in which a morally earnest citizen must not seek to impose his or her morality, but must, instead, respect the fact that a morally defensible legal system should leave room for wide discretion on the part of the individual exercising moral judgment.

To establish these conclusions it is necessary to clarify some aspects of the general relationship between morality and law. In particular, it is necessary to establish the primacy of the moral point of view, for the question about what is reasonable in these areas is fundamentally a moral question.