Legislating Morality

Someone's prescriptive moral beliefs or preferences are always imposed on others in a given legal system.  Any set of laws reflects what some person or group of persons thinks should be enforced, even in the case of a nihilistic rule maker.  A law always represents, at the very least, someone's preference about how things should be.  The asinine saying "You can't legislate morality" is a pathetic and untrue excuse, something that either morally weak or intellectually inept people hide behind.  Of course moral obligations can be codified into legal prescriptions!  Someone's moral ideas are always legislated, and if a law should be a certain way, then that law can and should be that way.

With this established, the issue is not whether morality can or can't be codified and legislated, at least to some extent.  The needed course of action is as follows: investigating if moral truths exist, learning how one can know what the standard is, and discovering how we can and should codify moral obligations into law, and realizing which ones have the ontological status of political-legal laws and which ones the government should not enforce (if a distinction between some offenses means that not all of them should be legally punished).

To use a Biblical example of the latter point, rape and malice are both sins, but the Bible prescribes capital punishment for rape (Deuteronomy 22:25-27), while malice is not even a crime--it is a sin, but not one punishable by Mosaic Law.  Not all sins are crimes, but all crimes are sins.  Just because something is wrong doesn't mean it is objectively a criminal offense in metaphysical terms.

If we are obligated to govern a certain way, cries of "impracticality" or "difficulty" will never alter the exact moral obligations of lawmakers.  Obligations exist whether or not we want them to, whether or not we even know of them, and whether or not we think we can fulfill them.  The idea that morality cannot be legislated is untrue as it is, but it is often resorted to as a fallacy-riddled cop-out to avoid confronting moral responsibilities.  The fact that some people believe it shows just how unsound their minds are.