Outside sexual abuse, however, many believe that sexual behaviour ought to be subject to nothing more constrictive than one's own personal values. Indeed, any denial of this freedom (such as the Christian view of homosexuality, a view enthusiastically shared by other religions) is thought to reveal bigotry and prejudice. Such a liberated judgment running contrary to the instincts of all traditional societies could hardly have happened without such medical technology of contraception, but it was certainly also a kind of moral revolution.

Just that revolution is part of the reason my question is so difficult to answer-indeed, even to pose. Since the very word "moral" had in past times been narrowed (as in expressions such as "moral turpitude") to its sexual implications, many simple people concluded that our fluidity about sexual judgments signified that the whole area of morality had become merely a matter of taste. Expressions such as "immoral behaviour" in the past referred to sex, and it was sex (and to a lesser extent violence) that basically concerned the control exercised by the Lord Chamberlain in the London theatre, and the Hays Office in the American cinema. In this central liberation of the last century, the connection between sexuality and commitment weakened dramatically. Many sins, such as adultery for example, could technically be avoided by the simple expedient of not getting married at all. As Cole Porter so famously put it, anything goes.

In order to release ourselves from the simplicities of the view that morality is simply a matter of  "values", we need to look to the structure of the virtues. Some virtues may be classified as "departmental" because they relate to specific activities; others are "regulative" in terms of the contingencies of actual situations. Thrift is clearly a departmental virtue, prudence or discretion are regulative. The popular salience of the departmental virtues goes up and down according to circumstances, and particularly to our insatiable appetite for convenience. Thrift, for example, is at the mercy of credit availability, and punctuality seems less important in the era of the mobile phone.

It is the decline of regulative virtues that is most evident in the  21st century. Perhaps the most basic of the regulative virtues is common sense. And here we do encounter something that is so remarkable as to reveal a dramatic decline in the moral life. No society could work unless its members had an inbuilt sense of how things are and ought to be, and this sense cannot be taught in abstractions or read off from codes, of which the currency of rights is the dominant corruption of our time. Yet today failures of common sense are the common currency of our daily understanding. We find that social workers, council employees, even policemen fail to live up to the standards that used to be encapsulated in, for example, the fictional Dixon of Dock Green. Officials who cannot rescue a drowning child because they have not been given the appropriate training, and policemen whom the law requires to warn householders against protecting their property in any way that might threaten danger to the intruding burglar, are denizens of the surreal world we have managed to create. Common sense is supremely lacking in many cases that come before employment tribunals, and in many sexual harassment cases, which the more robust women of earlier times would have disposed of with a fast word or a brisk slap.