Pomo's Universal Acid At Work

The End of Absolutes: America's New Moral Code

Research Releases in Culture & Media • May 25, 2016
Barna Group

Christian morality is being ushered out of American social structures and off the cultural main stage, leaving a vacuum in its place—and the broader culture is attempting to fill the void. New research from Barna reveals growing concern about the moral condition of the nation, even as many American adults admit they are uncertain about how to determine right from wrong. So what do Americans believe? Is truth relative or absolute? And do Christians see truth and morality in radically different ways from the broader public, or are they equally influenced by the growing tide of secularism and religious skepticism?

A majority of American adults across age group, ethnicity, gender, socioeconomic status and political ideology expresses concern about the nation’s moral condition—eight in 10 overall (80%). The proportion is closer to nine in 10 among Elders (89%) and Boomers (87%), while about three-quarters of Gen-Xers (75%) and Millennials (74%) report concern. Similarly, practicing Christians (90%) are more likely than adults of no faith (67%) or those who identify with a religious faith other than Christianity (72%) to say they are concerned about the moral condition of the nation. Though measurable differences exist between population segments, moral concern is widespread across the demographic board.

Much less widespread, however, is consensus on morality itself. What is it based on? Where does it come from? How can someone know what to do when making moral decisions? According to a majority of American adults (57%), knowing what is right or wrong is a matter of personal experience.

Just Dumb

The Fruits of a Superficial Education

In John Key, New Zealand has a Prime Minister who is superficial in critical ways.  His analysis and thinking upon some issues barely gets beyond the puerile.  When first elected to Parliament he was faced with a Prostitution Reform Bill--which would make prostitution a perfectly normal and mainstream occupation--you know, like taxi driving.

Key declared that he intended to support the Bill, announcing to the House:

I do not believe, and will never believe, that the government can legislate for morality. [John Roughan, John Key: Portrait of a Prime Minister (Auckland: Penguin Books, 2014), p.111.]

There has been a strong streak of libertinism in his approach to such issues.  He threw his weight behind New Zealand's homosexual marriage private member's bill and undoubtedly was very influential in it passing.

What Key apparently struggles to grasp is the ubiquity of morality.  It is just dumb to assert, "I will never believe that the government can legislate for morality".

Douglas Wilson's Letter From Moscow

A Theology of Slut Walks

By Douglas Wilson
Blog&Mablog

A great deal can be learned if we just take the effort to make sense out of things that make no sense. Of course, we can never make sense of the nonsensical, by definition, but we can learn why things that make no sense are nonetheless happening. Every absurd conclusion is, at some level, a valid derivation from absurd premises, but enough about any given screen shot of the Drudge Report.

Slut walks provide a great example of this. Once we trace the absurdity back upstream, we might learn something about the premises — premises, incidentally, that lurk in the minds of many Christians. I have seen it come up — many times — in trying to disentangle relationship snarls.

The point of slut walks is ostensibly a simple one. It is that dressing in any particular way in no way justifies rape. Put in a less sympathetic way, it is that dressing provocatively must never be considered a provocation. Let me defend the first expression of this and blow raspberries at the second. The reason we must do this is because there is a deadly doctrine that underlies the second, and it is a deadly doctrine that winds up paving the way for all manner of outrage. A theology of slut walks, despite a great deal of indignation directed at rapists, turns out to be a theology of rape.

In order for any two people to engage in moral argument, there must be a shared standard overarching the two of them.

Empty Sophistry

Why Our Children Don’t Think There Are Moral Facts

By Justin P. McBrayer

New York Times

 

 

What would you say if you found out that our public schools were teaching children that it is not true that it’s wrong to kill people for fun or cheat on tests? Would you be surprised?

I was. As a philosopher, I already knew that many college-aged students don’t believe in moral facts. While there are no national surveys quantifying this phenomenon, philosophy professors with whom I have spoken suggest that the overwhelming majority of college freshmen in their classrooms view moral claims as mere opinions that are not true or are true only relative to a culture.

What I didn’t know was where this attitude came from. Given the presence of moral relativism in some academic circles, some people might naturally assume that philosophers themselves are to blame. But they aren’t. There are historical examples of philosophers who endorse a kind of moral relativism, dating back at least to Protagoras who declared that “man is the measure of all things,” and several who deny that there are any moral facts whatsoever. But such creatures are rare. Besides, if students are already showing up to college with this view of morality, it’s very unlikely that it’s the result of what professional philosophers are teaching. So where is the view coming from?

A few weeks ago, I learned that students are exposed to this sort of thinking well before crossing the threshold of higher education. When I went to visit my son’s second grade open house, I found a troubling pair of signs hanging over the bulletin board. They read:

Fact: Something that is true about a subject and can be tested or proven.

Opinion: What someone thinks, feels, or believes.

Hoping that this set of definitions was a one-off mistake, I went home and Googled “fact vs. opinion.” The definitions I found online were substantially the same as the one in my son’s classroom. As it turns out, the Common Core standards used by a majority of K-12 programs in the country require that students be able to “distinguish among fact, opinion, and reasoned judgment in a text.” And the Common Core institute provides a helpful page full of links to definitions, lesson plans and quizzes to ensure that students can tell the difference between facts and opinions.

So what’s wrong with this distinction and how does it undermine the view that there are objective moral facts?

Douglas Wilson's Letter From Moscow

In Which Stephen Fry Steps In It

Douglas Wilson
Blog&Mablog
February 17, 2015





If you would be so kind, I would like to ask you to view this brief bit of blasphemous cheek. It’ll just take a few minutes.

Now then, all set? Let’s break this down into two basic parts. The first part is that Stephen Fry is given a thought experiment, and we should take a moment to see how he thinks in thought experiments. He doesn’t believe in God, but he is nevertheless asked a “what if.” What if you were wrong, the questioner asks, and the whole thing turns out to be true, with you finding yourself in a conversation with God at the Pearly Gates.

Fry takes that occasion to launch into his diatribe. Bone cancer in children? What’s with that?

But I want to note something really strange about this set up.

Douglas Wilson's Letter From Moscow (About High Moral Ground)

You New Around Here?

Douglas Wilson

Blog&Mablog

February 10, 2015

We have some truly encouraging news from Alabama on the same sex mirage front, but before getting to a defense of all that, I would like to dispatch the developing meme that this is just the desegregation battle all over again.

Here’s a quick rundown of what happened. A federal judge struck down Alabama’s same sex mirage ban, and yesterday the U.S. Supreme Court denied Alabama’s request to have that action put on hold. The Supremes are due to hear arguments in a couple of months about same sex mirage nationwide. So after this latest outrage, at the urging of the chief justice of Alabama’s Supreme Court, Roy Moore, the majority of Alabama counties are refusing to comply with this tyrannical order.

So, a generation ago, there was a showdown between Alabama and the Feds over segregated schools, when Alabama leaders defied federal orders to desegregate their schools. And the meme is that this is just “history repeating itself.”

But strip away all the additional complicating factors, which are always there, a generation ago Alabama was being pressured to quit doing the wrong thing. Now they are being pressured to quit doing the right thing. A generation ago, the Feds had the moral high ground. Now the Feds are actively campaigning for the normalization of sexual perversion, which is not, you might take care to note, the moral high ground.

Towards a Christian Political Philosophy

The Moral Purposes of Law and Government

Feb 11, 2015

Justin Taylor

Several years ago First Things published an essay entitled “Law and Moral Purpose” by Robert P. George, Princeton University’s McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence, and Director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions.  I’ve taken a section of this essay and added questions, numbering, and italics, turning it into an “interview” of sorts.

What are the obligations and purposes of law and government?

(1) To protect

• public health
• safety
• morals

(2) to advance

the general welfare—including, preeminently, protecting people’s fundamental rights and basic liberties.

Wouldn’t this require the granting of vast and sweeping powers to public authority?

No; the general welfare—the common good—requires that government be limited.

Douglas Wilson's Letter From America (About The Moral Centre)

In a World Gone Crazy

Douglas Wilson

Blog and Mablog

August 20, 2014

In a world gone crazy, it is important for us to learn how to see the root causes. I use the phrase “root causes” deliberately, because it is the kind of thing that liberals love to appeal to, whether we are talking about race riots here, or barbarity in the Middle East. But when they get to talking about root causes and the “broader context” of whatever outrage it is, they invariably veer toward their programs which desperately need more funding.

The root cause is sin — high handed sin in the first instance, and a quiet and mousy enabling sin in the second. What we are talking about is basic — evil behavior in the first instance, and bewilderment about what to do about it in the other. We are now seeing on the national and international stage, over and over again, the same realities that play out when a three-year-old flips out in a restaurant because he didn’t want that kind of ice cream, and his hapless parents are completely and utterly at a loss about what to do about it.

All of these issues are matters of understanding the moral center, and the attendant issues of discipline, strength, incentives, disincentives, resolve, and leading from somewhere other than from behind.

Limping Limpidly

The West's Double Standards

As we write this the Western world is agog with disgust at the brutality of an insurrection unfolding in Iraq.  People are being lined up and mown down.  Others are subjected to public beheadings because they don't believe in the peculiar doctrines of the Islamic Sunni sect.  The West decries such behaviour as medieval by which it means, primitive--that is, ibehaviours that belong to an age which has not benefited from the Enlightenment. 

The West, in its preening desire to be inclusive and tolerant towards all has conveniently forgotten that the historical symbol of Islam is the scimitar.  The ardent Islamic Sunni soldiers now operating in Iraq are simply being consistent.  And, we want to ask the chattering classes and the Commentariat in the West, what could possibly be wrong with that?  Upon what high moral stool is the West sitting whence to declaim such behaviour? 

The established religion of the West is secular humanism, and its philosophy of existence is evolutionism.  But the West has conveniently forgotten that secular humanism and evolutionism is morally neutral at best, vacuous at worst.  Yet still the West clings forlornly to notions of morality, of right and wrong.

Ave, United Nations

The World's Windbag

Our view of the UN is that it is not a pretty place.  It is hopelessly compromised, riddled with corruption, and not in any position to show moral leadership to anyone.  So, when the even more compromised UN committee on human rights slams the Roman Catholic Church for its "record" on homosexuality (which it opposes and rejects as unChristian, immoral and condemned by God), abortion (an act of murder, to be opposed by all Christians and likewise condemned by God Himself) we could not repress a cynical laugh. 

Really.  So, maybe the great and glorious and oh-so-authoritative UN committee on human rights would disclose by what authority it asserts that the unborn child is inhuman or non-human.  By what standard does the UN asserts that homosexuality is moral, and a human right.  The only possible response the committee could make to such interrogation would be to claim that somewhere along the line, some UN body (possibly the committee itself) took a vote on the matter and decided by some sort of majority that "a" was ethical and "b" was not.  To which we retort, any morality grounded on votes is not morality at all.  It is mere relativist bumpkinism.  It is nothing more than standover tactics by a majority against a minority.

Hypocritical Cant

So, What's Wrong With . . . ?

We have all heard of "convenient Christians"--folk who seek to maintain a Christian façade when it is socially, politically, or personally convenient to do so.  But, it is all part of acting out a persona.  Such people are rightly called hypocrites, an epithet of disdain.

But far more common, yet equally despicable is the hypocrisy of Unbelievers.  It is impossible to describe adequately the tawdry hypocrisy of Unbelievers prattling on about this evil and that wrong whilst they know--and we all know--they don't believe a word of it.  Oh, maybe they tell themselves they are true born again believers, who detest whatever particular ignominy of the day.  But in truth they have no foundation, no principles, and no ethics upon which their high dudgeon can be sustained.  At best it manifests mere cant.

Since Unbelievers reject the Living God, anything is possible and acceptable in principle.  Anything which is allegedly not acceptable or wrong or immoral is not actually, for "wrong" and "immorality" have no ultimate or operational meaning.  What is "wrong" to one is "right" to another.  One man's treasure is another's rubbish.  Who knows?  Who cares? 

We suspect that more than the odd couple know this to be the case.  That is why Unbelievers are so shrill about their moralities and their principles and their ethics.

Letter From America (About a Dishonest Englishman)

A Response to Richard Dawkins

He and his supporters have a right to their atheism, but not to intellectual dishonesty about it.

By  Dennis Prager 

October 1, 2013 12:00 AM

National Review Online

This past Friday, CNN conducted an interview with Richard Dawkins, the British biologist most widely known for his polemics against religion and on behalf of atheism.  Asked “whether an absence of religion would leave us without a moral compass,” Dawkins responded: “The very idea that we get a moral compass from religion is horrible.”

This is the crux of the issue for Dawkins and other anti-religion activists — that not only do we not need religion or God for morality but that we would have a considerably more moral world without them.  This argument is so wrong — both rationally and empirically — that its appeal can be explained only by (a) a desire to believe it and (b) an ignorance of history.

First, the rational argument.

If there is no God, the labels “good” and “evil” are merely opinions.

A Man In Full

They Always Punish Prophets

Ariel Castro is a prophet, and we need many more of his ilk.  Of course, he has also committed acts of murder, kidnapping, rape, slaving, and torture--but that's beside the point.  These things are nothing because . . . well, read it out of his own mouth. 

The man convicted of holding three women captive in a house he turned into a prison and raping them repeatedly for a decade has been sentenced to life without parole plus 1000 years.  Ariel Castro, 53, apologised to his victims in a rambling, defiant statement before he was sentenced. He blamed a sex addiction, his former wife and even the FBI for not thoroughly investigating the abductions while claiming most of the sex was consensual and that the women were never tortured.

"These people are trying to paint me as a monster," he said. "I'm not a monster. I'm sick."  [NZ Herald]

Sure he did all these things.  But he was sick.  And the ones truly to blame are those who did not observe and diagnose him skilfully and early enough so that he would not have committed all those crimes and despicable acts. 

Castro is a poster boy for our world.  Evil is not evil; it is merely an illness.  And you can treat illnesses, right?

The Uberman As Paper Tiger

The Christian Sense of Wrong and Right

The Highwaymen made famous a song written by Jarvis and Cook about two kids raised . . .

In the crystal sense of wrong and right
We were born and raised in black and white . . . 

but the very concept of right and wrong--of morality--has come under serious attack in the past 150 years.

Nietzsche was perceptive and prescient upon insisting that there was a connection between God and ethics, between God and morals.  Kill God, and anything goes.  But, for Nietzsche there was a "trade off".  Kill God, and we kill off morals.  But we are left with man.  Man can grow and develop to be an Uberman, a man with a big chest, a being who would take the place of God and determine his own morals, a morality that was worthy a superman.  Nietzsche sought to kill God off in order to enable man to take His place and assert himself as a demi-god. 

The West has lived with the notion of a dead God and big-chested men for over 150 years.

Man As Animal

 Unleashing Sin

One of the abiding lusts of Western pride is the lure of a perfect society brought into being through human ingenuity, planning, and enlightened application.  No matter what problem we face, throw enough resources at it, study it to death, put a management plan in place, and hey presto, the problem will be solved. 

Such approaches may work well when we are dealing with problems arising out of the non-human natural order.  They fail miserably when we are dealing with human beings.  Why?  Precisely because man is not a cipher.  He is not the impersonal product of impersonal natural forces.  He is altogether more wonderful and complex: he is a moral agent made in the image of God.  When sin entered the human race through Adam and spread to all mankind "descending from him by ordinary generation" the wondrous complexity and moral agency of mankind became perverted.  The sophisticated complexity of humanity became a spectacular resource for cunning, duplicity, and evil.  

But modern man has "advanced" to the point where he sees himself as a sophisticated animal, nothing more.

Letter From America (About Moral Schizophrenia)

Postmodern Prudes 

In the age of relativism, popular morality hasn’t so much disappeared as become schizophrenic.

By Victor Davis Hanson
April 18, 2013
National Review Online


More than 500 people were murdered in Chicago last year. Yet Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel still found time to berate the fast-food franchise Chick-fil-A for not sharing “Chicago values” — apparently, because its founder does not approve of gay marriage.

Two states have legalized marijuana, with more to come. Yet social taboos against tobacco smoking make it nearly impossible to light up a cigarette in public places. Marijuana, like alcohol, causes far greater short-term impairment than does nicotine. But legal cigarette smoking is now seen as a corporate-sponsored, uncool, and dirty habit that leads to long-term health costs for society at large — in a way homegrown, hip, and mostly illegal pot smoking apparently does not.

Faux Outrage

When the Amoral Profess Morality

The amoral brigade regularly festoons itself with faux outrage.  We have in mind occasions when Christians are exposed as having been engaged in sinful practices, sometimes extremely bad ones. 

The Christian position on such travesties is sound, sure, and consistent.  The Christian Gospel teaches that all men, all men, are totally depraved--by which we mean that the thoughts and intents of the heart are evil.  So it is not unexpected that from time to time professing Christians fall into sin once again.

The amoral brigade shrieks, "Hypocrisy!".    No--hypocrisy would be if the lapsed believer and the Christian Church attempted to justify, explain away, excuse, or in any other way deny the evil and sinfulness of the person's actions.  After all, we believe that Peter--an apostle, no less--publicly denied the Lord thrice, despite the fact that he had heard the solemn utterance of our Lord that the one who denied the Christ before men would be denied by that same Christ before His heavenly Father.

Oxymorons Aplenty

Private Religion Only Need Apply

One potent component of Tolkien's Lord of the Rings is the author's ability to describe and convey the slime, the decay, the degradation of Mordor and its works.  It befouled everything it touched. 

We have seen Mordoresque societies in recent history.  These have not been fictional representations.  They are the real article.  Peter Hitchens reflects upon life in the Soviet Union as he experienced it for years as a foreign correspondent.  Reading these words makes Reagan's "honorific", the Evil Empire appear apt.  But we must bear in mind that the Soviet Union was overtly created to be the first atheist civilization--the first self-conscious civilization of Unbelief.

Without God, Without Creed, Part IV

The Necromancer is Back, and He is Cloaked in Morality

By the nineteenth century the church had so occluded the Gospel and the true faith with human idolatries that it was severely compromised.  This was true throughout Europe and the UK.  It was also true in the United States.

By making the creation autonomous--its own centre of authority over against the Living God--it was forced to "redefine" God Himself.  Like a Hollywood makeover, God was now conceived of as a localised authority--one centre of power alongside a host of others.  God was now unofficially an idol--a creation of human imagination and invention.  Baalism has returned to God's covenant people.  God became a localised deity, no longer the One Who was infinite, eternal and unchangeable in His being, wisdom, power, holiness, goodness and truth.  He was no longer infinitely transcendent.  Consequently, He was no longer infinitely immanent in the Creation.  He was a demi-creature.

The outcome would be the same as had occurred in ancient Israel.

Another Empty Shibboleth

The Non-Possibility of Not Legislating Morality

We hear repeatedly that the state has no business legislating morality. This is errant nonsense. Every piece of legislation, every fabric of the law necessarily involves enforcement of some moral doctrine or view or ethic. To suggest that only "value free" laws are acceptable is, itself, a deeply value inherent position; to codify that position into law necessarily involves enforcing that particular value and its value system upon the community.

Micah Watson, visiting fellow at Princeton University, has written a short essay exploding the popular canard that the law cannot enforce morality and that morality should not be legislated.

Why We Can’t Help But Legislate Morality
by Micah Watson
November 4, 2010
All legislation is moral. The sooner we recognize this fact, the better.

“You can’t legislate morality” has become a common turn of phrase. The truth, however, is that every law and regulation that is proposed, passed, and enforced has inherent in it some idea of the good that it seeks to promote or preserve. Indeed, no governing authority can in any way be understood to be morally neutral. Those who think such a chimerical understanding is possible could hardly be more wrong. For, in fact, the opposite is true: You cannot not legislate morality.

It is of course true that some laws will be better conceived than others, and many may fail entirely to achieve their purpose. But that they have a purpose, and that the purpose includes at least an implicit moral element, is incontrovertible. One need only ask of any law or action of government, “What is the law for?” The answer at some point will include a conception of what is good for the community in which the law holds. The inversion of the question makes the point even more clearly. What would provide a rationale for a law or governmental action apart from a moral purpose?

The “good” here in question is not merely the product of passing fads or idiosyncratic preferences. When something is wrong, it is not wrong merely because it offends someone’s personal taste. The governing authority’s power to pass and enforce laws takes account of the beastly side of human nature while holding that some wrongs are so fundamental that they demand a robust and coercive response. If there are truly deeds that are gravely morally wrong, then it follows that there must be an authority established to command that such deeds be avoided and to punish the transgressors who commit them.

As Hadley Arkes has argued, if it is wrong to torture other human beings, then we do not content ourselves with mere tax incentives to encourage citizens to stop. We know that the wrong of torture requires that this choice be removed altogether from the domain of what is acceptable. You can enjoy the symphony, a NASCAR race, or the latest offering at the movies, but the logic of morals and law removes the option of torturing your neighbor for your weekend’s entertainment—even if your neighbor annoys you.

Of course, some choices will fall within the discretion of a polity’s citizens. Not every decision has profound moral consequences. But even drawing the line between morally innocent choices and morally culpable choices demonstrates our moral understanding. Abraham Lincoln made this clear in his debates with Stephen Douglas when he noted that Douglas’ professed ambivalence about whether states voted for or against slavery showed that he did not think slavery belonged in that category of actions that are truly morally wrong. If you don’t care which way a state votes on slavery, then you clearly don’t view it as a horrendous moral evil. Rather, you treat it like a state lottery: it is fine if the people want it and vote for it, and it is fine if they don’t.

The logic of morals, then, means that there can be no right to do a wrong. Built into the notion of wrong is the corresponding truth that an authority is right to punish perpetrators of the wrong. The idea that government can act as a neutral arbitrator between competing notions of the good life is ultimately incoherent because the idea itself promotes an underlying conception that this arrangement will lead to the best state of affairs.

It is a historical irony that the most famous attempt to sever the connection between law and morality illustrates the enduring link between the two. This attempt was made by Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes in his 1897 address at the graduation of Boston University Law School, “The Path of the Law.”

Holmes argued that high-minded moral concepts only detract from a clear understanding of what law is and what it should do. Holmes proposed to completely eviscerate moral considerations from our understanding of law. “For my own part,” he said, “I often doubt whether it would not be a gain if every word of moral significance could be banished from the law altogether, and other words adopted which should convey legal ideas uncolored by anything outside the law.” To understand law, Holmes declared, we must adopt the point of view of a “bad man” trying to avoid getting in trouble rather than start off with idealistic concepts of moral improvement and the good life.

Unfortunately for Holmes’ argument, his denial of the link between law and morality can only be made by invoking the language of morals and law. To understand the law, he suggests, is to look at the law as the bad man does. But this raises a question: How, might we ask, are we to truly understand what it means to be a “bad man” and what it means to be a “good one”? Is it not telling that Holmes’s very attempt to expurgate morality from the law itself depends on making a moral distinction? If Holmes is using the terms “good” and “bad” merely as descriptive statements about how some men see themselves (the bad men looking to keep out of trouble, and the good men thinking that they are beholden to some external morality), then he is doing more than attempting to separate morality and law; he seems to be denying morality altogether. Yet he explicitly denied any moral skepticism in his address.

But if Holmes is using the normative words as truly normative, then he cannot help but back himself into the logic of morals by requiring us to make a judgment about good and bad men. That is, he requires us not merely to make moral judgments distinguishing between “goodness” and “badness” (and thus better and worse, right and wrong) but also to associate “badness” with those who do not see a link between morals and law. Whatever his intentions might have been, Holmes winds up illustrating the link between the logic of morals and the logic of law.

To legislate, then, is to legislate morality. One can no more avoid legislating morality than one can speak without syntax. One cannot sever morality from the law. Even partisans of the most spartan libertarian conception of the state would themselves employ state power to enforce their vision of the common good. Given this understanding, the term “morals legislation” is, strictly speaking, redundant. The real question is not whether the political community will legislate morality; the question is which vision of morality will be enforced and by what sort of government.


Micah Watson is William E. Simon Visiting Fellow in Religion and Public Affairs at the James Madison Program at Princeton University, and Director of the Center for Politics & Religion at Union University in Jackson, Tennessee. This article is adapted from an essay on morals legislation in a forthcoming volume honoring the work of Hadley Arkes edited by Robert P. George, Francis J. Beckwith, and Susan J. McWilliams.

Copyright 2010 the Witherspoon Institute. All rights reserved.

Once we have got beyond the inane shibboleth that morality ought not be legislated, and morality cannot be (successfully) legislated because laws which enforce morality will always be ignored, we get to the far more helpful and constructive discussions. Among these are:

* Since all law is the enforcement of morals and an implicit system of morality, whose morals and ethics and what system is applicable and appropriate?

* Where can the distinctions be drawn between sins and crimes (the latter being extreme immoral actions which require state sanction and punishment?

* When does an act become public, rather than private, making it subject to public law (aka, public morality)?

* What wrongs and immoral acts are outside of the purview of the sanction of the state, such that no law ought to be written interdicting them, and how ought such questions to be decided?

Debate and research over these issues is far, far more fruitful and constructive.
Hat Tip: Justin Taylor