Hmm. I'm not sure how the story is an example of legislating morality "going wrong" except insofar as it's, you know, an attempt to legislate morality. As such an attempt, if the cop knew he had the authority to enforce his judgment, it seems like it'd work fine. What's morally odious about it is just that it's an unwarranted attempt to impose one particular view of morality through the medium of law.
What "going wrong" (by the lights of the attempt to legislate morality) would be would seem to be something more like: we outlaw abortion and the total number of abortions does not decrease (much), but rather it just means that more women have them done under unsanitary conditions and are harmed thereby. In that sort of case, you'd be thwarting the very moral values you were attempting to legislate.
On another note, it's not impossible to reconcile a committment to government as a system for protecting fundamental rights and making society run with a committment to government as a system in which citizens can reach their full moral potential. After all, one of the major reason we want rights protected and society running relatively smoothly is so that people can live good (in the Aristotelian sense of *eudaimon*, not *just* morally good) lives. One attempt (and I'm biased, because I basically agree) is Mill's in On Liberty. In a nutshell: the only way to find the best life is by experimentation; one role of government is to preserve the ability for citizens to freely choose and experiment with forms of life without undue interference from others.
One thing to keep in mind is that a lot of the social control stuff in Aristotle is supposed to happen in the course of moral *education* - laws serve a moral purpose for adults mostly when those adults have had defective upbringings that have left them without a properly developed moral sense. So you can have a basically libertarian society that's still committed to a morally loaded education (in citizenship values, etc.) for its youth - after all, turning a bunch of unsocialized psychopaths loose in capitalism is a recipe for disaster (cf corporate personhood in law). This is why marketizing education (through vouchers, e.g.) isn't necessarily a good idea (OK, it's a bad one) - educators are very often in the position of providing a service that their customers will only desire *after* they've received it, and so normal supply-and-demand won't work properly. But I don't think it's incompatible with some basically libertarian approach to policy - since it would be a fallacy to regard children as the kind of rational choosers that it assumes.
Of course, it bears keeping in mind that the government isn't the *only* potentially tyrannical structure (*pace* Reagan). Mill worried a lot about the 'tyranny of the majority' (which is what I think we're sliding dangerously towards now, illiberal democracy). And freedom can be infringed upon by the family, the culture, corporations, religious organizations, etc. - many of which will move to fill the power vacuum where government recedes from social control (cf, like, the entire 80s and 90s). Sometimes the way to preserve liberty is to use one power structure to check the influence of another. Dewey's Liberalism and Social Action is a useful corrective on this point. :)
no subject
What "going wrong" (by the lights of the attempt to legislate morality) would be would seem to be something more like: we outlaw abortion and the total number of abortions does not decrease (much), but rather it just means that more women have them done under unsanitary conditions and are harmed thereby. In that sort of case, you'd be thwarting the very moral values you were attempting to legislate.
On another note, it's not impossible to reconcile a committment to government as a system for protecting fundamental rights and making society run with a committment to government as a system in which citizens can reach their full moral potential. After all, one of the major reason we want rights protected and society running relatively smoothly is so that people can live good (in the Aristotelian sense of *eudaimon*, not *just* morally good) lives. One attempt (and I'm biased, because I basically agree) is Mill's in On Liberty. In a nutshell: the only way to find the best life is by experimentation; one role of government is to preserve the ability for citizens to freely choose and experiment with forms of life without undue interference from others.
One thing to keep in mind is that a lot of the social control stuff in Aristotle is supposed to happen in the course of moral *education* - laws serve a moral purpose for adults mostly when those adults have had defective upbringings that have left them without a properly developed moral sense. So you can have a basically libertarian society that's still committed to a morally loaded education (in citizenship values, etc.) for its youth - after all, turning a bunch of unsocialized psychopaths loose in capitalism is a recipe for disaster (cf corporate personhood in law). This is why marketizing education (through vouchers, e.g.) isn't necessarily a good idea (OK, it's a bad one) - educators are very often in the position of providing a service that their customers will only desire *after* they've received it, and so normal supply-and-demand won't work properly. But I don't think it's incompatible with some basically libertarian approach to policy - since it would be a fallacy to regard children as the kind of rational choosers that it assumes.
Of course, it bears keeping in mind that the government isn't the *only* potentially tyrannical structure (*pace* Reagan). Mill worried a lot about the 'tyranny of the majority' (which is what I think we're sliding dangerously towards now, illiberal democracy). And freedom can be infringed upon by the family, the culture, corporations, religious organizations, etc. - many of which will move to fill the power vacuum where government recedes from social control (cf, like, the entire 80s and 90s). Sometimes the way to preserve liberty is to use one power structure to check the influence of another. Dewey's Liberalism and Social Action is a useful corrective on this point. :)
Blah blah blah.