Part 1: Legislating Morality Refutation

As you might now, Jason over at Logical Consistency and I are currently waged in a life or death debate on legislating morality. Or something like that. Anyway, we’ve both posted a case for our position, and now we get to the good part — the refutation. This should be both fun and educational, so I’m looking forward to it. This refutation will be written in a very casual style.

In order to understand what exactly I’m refuting, it might be best to open up Part 1: The Enforcement of Morality Debate by Jason, and read my responses to his points right after reading his essay. This will make the discussion much more coherent. Also, before reading the refutation, it would be incredibly helpful to read my original case against legislating morality. My refutations will be based upon that case. This is a bit long, and, considering it’s based upon a “quote then refute” style, will read more like a casual conversation than a professional critique.

Ban it All

At this point, I’m surprised to say that Jason has not argued that only some sin should be banned. He’s arguing that sin should be banned. Period. Any clarification he makes on this simply hasn’t been made yet. I’ve heard of people wanting to ban things if they hurt society. But Jason has argued that sin should simply be banned.

In order to make sure I wasn’t misunderstanding what Jason was arguing, I had another person read over his article and make sure that I wasn’t missing anything. Given his arguments, he provides no exceptions, and strongly implies and even states that sin should be outlawed. Not some sin — sin. If Jason wants to clarify his position, that’s fine. But it will be in direct contradiction to his arguments. Basically, he’ll be refuting himself.

This is, up to this point, the most radical belief of legislating morality that I have come across. I do not say this in a mocking way — if Jason is right, then radicalism is no vice. I, however, believe Jason is completely wrong.

Church and State

Before I begin, I’d like to note that if we do as Jason is implying we do, we’ll need a new court — a court to interpret the Bible. Yes, this is about as frightening as it sounds. A full-scale attempt to legislate morality leads to a slave society where we have merged the Church and State. Freedom will die.

(Note that I’m not against God and State — just Church and State.)

Logical Conclusions

I will be using the argumentation style of reductio ad absurdum. In other words, I’ll show how Jason’s theory takes us to logical conclusions that are obviously false. Namely, in this discussion, slavery and a government that makes 1984 look like America. I am not saying that Jason consciously supports these policies — that would be a straw man. I am, however, saying that his philosophy supports these policies and restrictions. Pure scary.

Considering I’m sure that Jason doesn’t support using state action to monitor individual computer usage, dating activities, child-parent relationships or our ego-problems, he has a contradiction in philosophy, as I’ll be explaining later.

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Jason starts off by saying that he isn’t like George W. Bush. This is a very good thing. He then defines conservativism. I think his definition is incredibly weak, but before getting into that, let me first say that the point isn’t relevant — we aren’t debating conservativism verses libertarianism — we’re just one aspect, just one concept. If this were a formal debate round, Jason would be the affirmative and I would be the negative. My purpose is simply to show why a system based on the legislation of morality is weak indeed.

This may or may not have implications regarding conservativism or libertarianism, but that simply isn’t the point. It’s a great point, but completely off topic. But since it has already been brought up, I’ll respond.