Nordicßearskin said:
How should the state be defined, what roles should it fulfill and how should they be accomplished?
I see the role of the political state as organization of the group of people that define the state.
As an organized body (a group of people with authority placed on them), the government has certain responsibilities to provide for the people in its care, to support and protect them, and to maintain their identity --i.e. its primary role is to keep the group's existence as a group. It has an auxiliary role to represent the group to other groups.
In order to accomplish this mandate, the government defines smaller groups of people (called departments) who devote their energies to defining and executing particular mandates in support of the government's mandate: provision of goods and services, support, protection, identity, external relations, etc., and since all this takes money to accomplish in a capitalistic setting, finances.
The departments, in turn, define smaller groups variously called divisions, branches and sections, each with the mandate to define and carry out tasks to support the one above. Lastly, there's the lowly government workers, who actually make things happen. ...You can tell I work in government, can't you?
Nordicßearskin said:
In particular, should a particular morality have a place within the governance of a nationstate, and if so how should that morality be determined?
Since governments are made of people, and people have particular moralities, there is room in a government for a group's morality to have a place. In democratic societies with multiple moralities, it's up to the voters.
How the morality should be determined depends on what sort of political structure has evolved for the nation.
