the virtues of vice

An old bit of doggerel goes,

Vice is nice,
But incest is best.

Was there ever a time when people did not seek out excuses and explanations that would ease the very real repercussions of their oh-so-scrumptious vices? There seems to be a hard-wired bit of circuitry in the human constitution that does precisely this ... whether in little matters or large.

Good and bad don't interest me as much as the interest in or demand that bad behavior be seen in a more favorable light. And every once in a while, as in this strangely-truncated blog post, there is a serious attempt to assess the virtues of vice.