I prefer to unask the
question by asserting that
laws have no business governing
morals and
morals lie outside any
laws one cares to set.
Morals, after all, reflect a person’s vision of the world, his or her perspective of right and wrong, applicable and not applicable, best and worst. Everything a person does, thinks, and feels is determined by that person’s vision of the world.
If you wish to instill healthy, productive morals in a society, then give the society a healthy, productive vision of the world. If this can be done, most laws will hardly be necessary.
But while many people have what we can call a healthy, productive vision of the world, our culture as a whole doesn’t. As such, we have to start enacting laws to hopefully control their behavior after the fact. Laws are always punitive. They don’t prevent a behavior; they address what we’ll do when the behavior arises. They don’t really address the moral issues, although many of them purport to be morally based. They have little to do with morals at all, which is why so many of them have never worked.