Comment by nathan_compton

I think that unless we roll back to hegemonic religious values you cannot enforce anything with them. People need to feel an overwhelming social pressure for social pressure to work. As you say, now that things are secularized, I just don't see it happening. That is why the ban on premarital sex doesn't even work within religious communities today: people can see there are other options and (implicitly) they can see that their community is neither inescapable or always right.

I like this state of affairs, frankly, and I genuinely want to see religion swept into the dustbin of history, so I don't find the idea of relying on it to prevent bad outcomes particularly appealing. Maybe a nice secular set of ideas like stoicism could work. I have no objection to the idea of character formation, values, individual responsibility. But I just have no taste at all for enforcing those things with imaginary stories. In fact, its hardly individual character if the behavior is actually socially enforced.

People should not need to be moral paragons, however, to live a good life. If there are systems which are exploiting ordinary human cognitive biases to make profit the state can and should step in.