There are fashions in morals as there are in everything else, but though fashions in clothing or music are usually harmless and sometimes amusing, the oscillation between reactionary and liberal moralities is another matter, especially when its direction is reactionary. Alas, I perceive just such a movement occurring now; which invites comment and an assemblage of reminders.

Here are some straws in the wind. Mr David Cameron, perhaps the next Prime Minister, has announced a policy of tax breaks to ‘support marriage’. At time of writing the policy’s details are still in flux, but its aim of providing a money inducement to people to get and stay married – which at a minimum specifically means acquiring a relevant piece of paper from the municipality – has a clear premise. It is that there is something about that piece of paper which turns long-term committed relationships into something ‘proper’ and worthy of reward. In the background of this view are residues of theology and control of sex, and a wish to revive and re-emphasize ideas of social acceptability, in effect by making the state a third contracting party to relationships.

Mr Cameron says his policy is based on the claimed fact that when both parents in addition have a municipal document, their children do better than if the municipal document is absent. This claimed fact is one that needs inspection, now that magical thinking about these matters is less common. In the long and unhappy history of Church and state interest in licensing cohabitation and reproduction, the argument for marriage was not about children but the supposed magic: marriage was a ‘sacrament’, ‘ordained of God,’ and so forth. The obvious fact that children flourish if they have a plurality of kind and happy adults caring for them is these days somehow parlayed by moralizers into pieties about marriage, leaving the ‘sacrament’ part to be taken care of by the wedding dress industry.

In a speech outlining his tax breaks Mr Cameron further said that the media and advertisers should be discouraged from flaunting saucy, explicit, flesh-revealing images (he ignored a cry of ‘Page Three!’ from the audience, because The Sun is on his side) in order to protect children. Moves to turn public space into a kindergarten are one of the earliest signs of moral chill, and one of the surest. Other people call it censorship, but not Mr Cameron; challenged directly about this, he did not reply.

These moralistic indications from the Conservative Party, not hitherto best known for keeping its trousers up and its hands out of tills, tend in the same direction as another of those laborious Labour government initiatives consisting of all gesture and no thought, namely, its efforts to deal with prostitution by prohibition and criminalisation. It passed a law last autumn criminalising customers of sex workers if these latter had been trafficked. Now, genuine trafficking is an extremely horrible crime involving kidnapping and coercion. Someone who had sexual relations with the victim of such treatment is surely committing rape. As this latter point suggests, there are laws already in place to punish the crimes implicated in genuine trafficking. The Labour government, with its bad habit of duplicating existing laws, and too often on the basis of bad thinking, was unable to resist gesture politics here.

For one thing, the definition of trafficking is so broad that it obscures the serious problem of real trafficking. So if a young gay man comes to the UK from Poland (where homosexuals are persecuted) to work in the sex industry, and if a friend helps him make any of the arrangements involved in moving to Britain and finding somewhere to stay, he is thereby officially ‘trafficked’ and his friend and his clients are officially criminals.

Many people find it hard to believe that some other people might actually choose to be sex workers. They deny that anyone would become a sex worker if not coerced by pimps, drug habits, or desperate poverty. This is the thinking behind the current Glasgow campaign to stamp out prostitution by criminalising its customers. Glasgow City Council’s hope is that the Scottish Assembly will adopt the same measures for the country as a whole. The sponsors of such measures, convinced that sex work is always unwilling and horrible, would accordingly be surprised when they hear about, for example, Tuppy Owens and the Tender Loving Care (TLC) Trust, which puts disabled people in touch with sex workers willing to help them with their needs. Think of the deprivation experienced by, say, armless or paralysed men and women; think of the extraordinarily warm imagination of those who recognise that deprivation, and respond to it. A Times article reported that “The TLC has helped hundreds of people with disabilities… many sex workers offer a concession to disabled clients who genuinely cannot afford what they offer.”

Like most other activities, sex work has a large lower end where drug addiction, violence, disease and misery are rife: not all or even many sex workers are Belles de Jour. Does it solve such problems by driving it further underground, further into the arms of crime, further into stigma and exclusion? Laws against brothels force sex workers onto the street, alone, in all weathers, when they could be safer and warmer in a house together. Less stigmatization of everything to do with the sex trade would encourage its workers and clients to access health advice and care, and to reduce the abuses that too easily occur when it is driven into the shadows. If the example of Prohibition in 1920s America teaches anything, it is that prohibition and criminalisation make all problems worse.

There is of course a better alternative in all these matters. Families with children should be helped to stay flourishingly together, however constituted and whether or not a marriage licence has been bought. People abused, coerced, harmed, no matter in what line of work, should be protected. Addicts should be helped, and criminals given less opportunity to exploit human misery in any respect. This applies to the areas where matters of morality tip over into problems; by no means all of them do, and those that do not should never be the business of the police or even of finger-wagging prudes.

Fetishizing marriage, calling for censorship, promoting ‘wars’ on drugs and prostitution through the criminal law, are the unintelligent reflexes of moralizers who do not want anyone else to do, be or see what they themselves dislike or are frightened of doing, being and seeing. In the days of Mary Whitehouse, who did not want anyone else to see on television what she personally disapproved of, the great puzzle was why she had bought a television without an ‘off’ button. Today’s new moralizers have to be reminded that if they seek to do good, it is best done through working along the grain of human nature, not against it, and in particular by sympathetic, constructive and tolerant means. But first they have to be sure that their moralizing impulse is not simply a matter of having forgotten where the ‘off’ button is when they are tempted to meddle in other people’s lives.

AC Grayling is Professor of Philosophy at Birkbeck, University of London; author of over twenty books on philosophy and other subjects; and a columnist for The Times.