The issue is in the word "merely". Of course the goal of law writ large is to engender "good" conditions in a society by restricting "bad" elements and encoura

The issue is in the word "merely". Of course the goal of law writ large is to engender "good" conditions in a society by restricting "bad" elements and encouraging "good" ones. In this sense the law has a moral quality. Roughly speaking, "law" is morality as practiced by a state. The difference is in the acknowledgment or ignorance of the laws' congruence with the moralities of the citizens' opinions and preferences those laws are meant to represent. One could say the entire goal of democracy is the messy process of aligning the state's morality with the collective morality of its citizens. Fascism is then comparable to defining a single normative moral position and imposing it on the entire populace unilaterally. In short, the question is: whose morals?