Lord Sovereign
The resident Britbong
This was partially what I was driving at. Outlawing vice is a murky road we shouldn’t go down, but vice is an enslaving thing that can reap a man’s soul more completely than even a sword’s edge.True.
Yet, as the Scholastics noted on the subject of free will: to be forcibly witheld from ill behaviour is no virtue at all. To be called good at all, you must choose to be good.
The problem of "the Moderns" is that they are nihilists, by and large, who argue that there is no morality, and that "allowed" therefore equates to "good". Or at least "as good as anything else". The problem of many "conservatives" in the modern period is that they (often without understanding it!) think in the same paradigm, but just flip it around. They say: "...And because of this, everything we recognise as not good must be forbidden by law."
That, too, is against the traditional conception of morality, which recognised different spheres of authority. Meaning, generally: that by which you harm others is the province of the law, and that by which you harm your own soul is the province of the Church.
The traditional view is more nuanced than the modernist one, and essentially holds that things can be bad without being legally forbidden; and that therefore, the mere fact that something shouldn't be regulated by the law doesn't mean that it is therefore a good idea.
Of course, that view assumes that people are capable of exerting moral agency. Traditional approaches to morality are superior to the crude modernist attempts, but are wholly unsuited to a populace of vacuous idiots. Hence the current state of things.
Edit: And I’m not even sure a majority of the population are vacuous idiots. They strike me as more…lost than anything else. On some level they’d like to be virtuous but they aren’t sure how.