NationStates Jolt Archive

In the last few hundred years of political evolution, governments have been shying away from concerning their authority with "morals". Instead, they have been primarily concerned with "civil interest".

Is this good? Is a government's role simply to supply laws so that we don't destroy each other, and anything past that is cool?

Or should they be concerned with a deeper code of moral conduct....of good and bad, as it stands?

In the last few hundred years of political evolution, governments have been shying away from concerning their authority with "morals". Instead, they have been primarily concerned with "civil interest".

Is this good? Is a government's role simply to supply laws so that we don't destroy each other, and anything past that is cool?

Or should they be concerned with a deeper code of moral conduct....of good and bad, as it stands?
I think it is an absolutly wonderfull thing that the governments role is to keep us from destroying eachother

The government should not in the market of defining morals, specaialy when enforcing thoes morals take away freedoms

I think it is an absolutly wonderfull thing that the governments role is to keep us from destroying eachother

The government should not in the market of defining morals, specaialy when enforcing thoes morals take away freedoms

Agreed

Is this good? Is a government's role simply to supply laws so that we don't destroy each other, and anything past that is cool?

Or should they be concerned with a deeper code of moral conduct....of good and bad, as it stands?

Is "lets not destroy eachother" such a bad basis for a moral system then ?

In the last few hundred years of political evolution, governments have been shying away from concerning their authority with "morals". Instead, they have been primarily concerned with "civil interest".

Is this good? Is a government's role simply to supply laws so that we don't destroy each other, and anything past that is cool?

Or should they be concerned with a deeper code of moral conduct....of good and bad, as it stands?

Actually, I would deny that the government has been shifting its emphasis purely to civil interest rather than promoting a common view of the common good over the last 100 years. In point of fact, I would say that this line of thinking has been prevalent for much less time than I've been alive. It only became dominant around 1990 or so, where it was generally used as a repudiation of the more liberal government of the time.

The simple fact is that while the state cannot directly enforce a moral code (it can't by force of arms enforce the law "Don't think about cheating with your neighbor's wife, for instance), it can help promote a common sense of the good a society strives for. In point of fact, most of the best laws our society has passed in the last hundred years have directly resulted from this kind of commonality. The civil rights campaign of the 1960's emerged out of a common moral view that the status quo was illegitemate because it was unjust and immoral. In many ways, the Civil Rights Acts that followed were directly reflective of this moral view; they were in fact directly attempting through legistlative means to legislate morality by legislating the consequents of the immoral view and undercutting the social girders that supported it. In that sense, they were wildly successful: in less than twenty years, we went from a society in which views of racial injustice were widely adopted and socially supported to almost universally rejected and condemned.

The view that "you can't legislate morality" is nothing more than an extremely recent backlash to that phenomenon. It is a claim first made by "states-righters" wanting to turn back the clock on discriminatory policies, and later adopted en masse primarily by Baby Boomers alienated from government. Despite the popularity of this view, however, it is one that must be made in complete ignorance of or animosity to any sense of history, because it simply does not square with the historical record.

We can "not destroy eachother" while still keeping morals, no? Morals don't = less rights. It really just depends on who's in charge.