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Classically, the ambition of legal regulation is to change behaviors. Laws might aim to increase or decrease various activities, such as owning a gun, or taking a work leave to care for a sick family member, or polluting, or hiring a minority job candidate. They might aim to get people or institutions to substitute one activity for another, such as buying diet soda instead of sugared, or using chewing tobacco instead of smoking, or using solar energy instead of conventional sources. Legal regulation can accomplish its goals directly, through fear of sanctions or desire for rewards. But it can also do so indirectly, by changing attitudes about the regulated behaviors. Ironically, this indirect path can be the most efficient one, particularly if the regulation changes attitudes about the underlying morality of the behaviors. This is because iflaws change moral attitudes, we reduce—maybe drastically—the need for the state to act on or even monitor regulated players.

What does regulation designed to affect moral attitudes look like? It can be obvious, such as an information campaign. But less obvious (and even unintentional) approaches are more common, and probably more effective. Legal regulation might seek to link a behavior that the public already thinks is bad or objectionable to a behavior it currently finds inoffensive. For instance, regulators might wish to reduce abortions generally by stigmatizing a rarely performed, but particularly distasteful, version of it (“partial birth” abortions), with the idea that highlighting—and outlawing—a repugnant version of the procedure will ineluctably associate it with the more common, and more innocuous one. Or legal regulation …