Any movement for public (or family, or group) morality has ever, and quickly, confronted the problem that vice is, relatively and usually, tastier, more colorful, more fun.
There are two coordinate pairs of basic tactical responses.
One pair is that of rewards and punishments: the virtue of this pair is that there isn't any confusion about the difficulty (say) of a particular virtue, or the gratification (say) of a particular vice. We link the difficult virtue with a separate and second thing, a gratifying reward. We link the gratifying vice to a separate and second thing, a painful punishment.
The main benefit of this first pair is that the vice and virtue are distinct, and that can lead to a growth of systematic thinking -- of seeing that good and evil are important in themselves, over and above the pleasure and pain of the stimuli we linked. The problem is that folks will attempt to evade or game the linkage, and will generally be able to do so unless we make the setting and the links so rigid that this very rigidity creates its own problems.
I call this first pair the moral pair.
The second and other pair or approaches is that of improving the desirability of the virtue, in itself, and of making the vices noxious: thus the great cathedrals have visual beauty, hymns and pipe organs, the wafting scent of the ages and the incense. And vices can be rendered bitterly shameful, risky to health, and furtive. We culture the vices and virtues, hybridizing them into new strains that mitigate the astringency of pure virtue and the devil-may-care blitheness of pure vices. We make the virtues more hardy and colorful; we make the vices feebler and more distasteful.
The benefit of this second pair is that it operates directly on the virtuous and vicious objects and is much harder to evade. The problem is that by so doing, we require that people not see through what we have done, to unravel it by too much moral analysis. (Failed rewards and punishments are easier to repair or replace; failed culturations of virtue and vice are disastrously difficult to address.)
I call this second pair the cultural pair.
Imagine a 2x2 grid of these two pairs, and plotting approaches within it. You would end up with one descriptor of approaches to public morality: that of the Mormons, or of the YMCA, or of the Soviets, and so on.
And we can add a third dimension - that of whether the emphasis was more on the heightening of virtue - a flowering vision of the dancing, dizzying arts - or on the subduing of vice - a severe and Cromwellian formality.
Will virtue become more earthy and voluptuous (Vatican City) or will vice be evaporated into the airy lightness and sublimity of the formalist's vision (the Shakers)? I have always tended toward the latter - but with a sidelong and sighing ache for the former. That is, I am transported by a Quaker foursquare church more than by a Botticelli, but, ah, glory to Botticelli!
That 2x2x2 cube is what I have in mind when I talk about the differences among serious approaches to public morality.
