Another Bad Argument Against "Legislating Morality"
And the comment thread of my previous post, I encountered another bad argument against "legislating morality." This one runs that, if there is a law against something, then people lose their ability to behave morally in that area. The steps in the argument are that: 1) For something to be a moral choice, it must be a choice. The rate at which my heartbeats is not a moral issue, since I can't choose it. Step one is sound. 2) Once there is a law against X, a person is no longer doing not-X by choice: he is being forced to forgo doing X. Step two is clearly unsound. Drug prohibitions do not prevent people from buying drugs (or at least from attempting to do so): they change the incentives involved in doing so. Making prostitution illegal does not prevent people from using prostitutes. And so on. If I think it is wrong to use heroin, I still faced a moral choice, albeit with potentially higher penalties if I choose to do so. This is true even if I take a strict K...