I hope the government would recognize the popular standards.
Ryan, in many parts of the world, following the "popular standards" for moral behavior means that there are some very bad laws.
In some places,
by law, a woman can not go outside her own home unescorted by an adult male -- not even to the doctor's office with her child in a life-threatening emergency. In such places, women are usually nothing but property, and it is illegal to educate them or allow them to become educated.
In some parts of the world, the popular standards force women to be circumcised. (Female circumcision, for the uninformed, means they cut off the only dangly bit a female has, and it affects her ability to enjoy sex in about the same way that cutting off your feet would affect your ability to enjoy polka dancing.)
In the antebellum American south, the popular standards made slavery not just acceptable but necessary if one was going to run a successful family farm.
In colonial America, the popular standards led to burning women suspected of witchcraft -- who had usually done nothing more wrong than to be unpopular in a viciously legalistic society.
In America a century ago, the popular standards led to Jim Crow laws and lynchings of 'uppity niggras.
Are all of these things right? Should each and every one of these things have been legal (or even
required by law), since the governments involved all used the popular standards when they decided to pass such laws?
Some people would say that it is moral for women to be forcibly circumcised and for blacks to be forced into slavery or for women to be forced to remain in their own homes unless an adult male escorts them or for Jews to be forcibly herded into concentration camps or ...
After all, these things are morally required by the standards of the communities they happen in, aren't they? All these horrids appealed to the "popular standards" at the time and place they were enacted.
Either the "popular standards" for morals is a valid and reasonable way to decide what should be legal, or it is not. I say that it is
not a reasonable method of deciding what should be legal, and I call for my witnesses all the people who have ever been murdered by their neighbors simply for being the wrong color, having the wrong gender, worshipping the wrong god, or loving the wrong person and thus offending the popular standards of their societies.
That, btw, was one reason why the Founders ended up insisting upon a Bill of Rights. Most of them really believed that they'd created a near-ironclad system of gov't wherein individual rights were inviolate. BUT they were realists, even cynics, and wanted to be sure.
So they tacked on the Bill of Rights, which many of them thought unnecessary, but which also made it perfectly plain that the will of the majority was not the standard by which we judge new laws.
My point is that the entire reason for governments to exist is because there are certain rights, rights that a human being is born with, rights which cannot morally be denied to him. Among these are the right to life (you cannot kill or maim me), liberty (you may not imprison or enslave me), and the pursuit of happiness (you may not stop me from doing what I would like to do, so long as I am not harming others).
All laws which violate these basic rights are bad laws. Not coincidentally, laws which attempt to enforce the "popular standards" usually manage to violate some or all of these basic rights.
You'll have to find a more solid ground to stand upon than simply "popular standards" if you want to convince me that you have a right to dictate what your neighbors smoke.
pax
A desire not to butt into other people's business is at least eighty percent of all human wisdom . . . and the other twenty percent isn't very important. -- Robert Heinlein