Everyone disagrees with Leviticus. Some because its moral strictures seem absurd, <insert example here>. Others, with a more complex perspective, due to their adherence to the tradition in which Leviticus plays a notable role, at least see the material in Leviticus as horribly outdated or somehow flawed. I would argue that this confusion is endemic to the field of "priestly writing."
One of the things that I have learned from working on "sin taxes" is that the priestly culture is still alive an well with us today. I am making a synthesis between priestly culture here and work by Peart and Levy on experts. (see a policy related application here or their scholarly work here). My basic model for thinking about this is a theory of hierarchy. Sin taxes build on the idea that people do not know how to choose for themselves. Much work has been done in psychology that supports the thesis, e.g. hyperbolic discounting. When it comes to the future, people discount the future heavily.
But what this allows are the same kinds of claims made by the priestly writers of Leviticus. For them both the reconciliation of the person to God as well as the reconciliation of the people of Israel to God were important aspects of founding the religion. The purity of culture that is at the end of both approaches to perfecting society is cut from the same cloth. While I certainly think that a priestly attitude is great for some, the disadvantages should be obvious. These can be summarized in two broad categories, degradation of self and degradation of the other.
Degradation of the self comes from thinking that one's own impulses are corrupt. What we learn from the behavioral literature is that people seem indifferent to their future selves. If we accept the findings of hyperbolic discounting, then we consider most actions people take towards self-indulgence to be irrational. But this faces a problem that has plagued economics since Bentham. There is no way to count the utils stimulated through irrational behavior. In fact, Bryan Caplan has suggested that irrational behavior itself generates utility. Even from a religious perspective coming to terms with man's fallen nature is important. The lesson is to recognize the process of perfection, not the achievement of it. What comes from trying to be perfect is the necessary disappointment of limited ability to do so. Here is where the state steps in. Since you want to change your behavior but lack the will, you will be protected from yourself through prohibitions, disfavored taxes, and administrative hoops forged in the name of libertarian paternalism. These administratively delivered self-denials are certainly part of the tool kit of reform, but why the one-size-fits-all approach?
Degradation of the other stems from this same process but calls on many more animal instincts. The tribal pull to want to extend our preferences to others helps to explain how our diets, our smoking choices, our retirement choices, and our sexual mores all become part of the public debate. What was good for us in reaching our own goals must be good for others, right? The problem is that with so many competing priorities for improvement, how do we narrow it down to a few categories? The economist wants to know how the marginal dollar is spent on improving behavior. Where should the emphasis be placed?
Inevitably the emphasis gets placed by those with the most voice. In a society where the priests have the most voice, the outcome looks like Leviticus. In a society of politicians, how different is it? Our desire to think of our government as the rational embodiment of perfection is not all that different than the writers of Leviticus. The groups may change over time, but I feel certain that in 3000 years our desire to perfect this society according to the moral dictates of the current group will be seen with equal reproach and disgust as their analogues in ancient history.
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