Beware! Slippery sophists at work

In an oldish youtube of Peter Hitchens and brother Christopher the former makes a very slippery argument which is not uncharacteristic of him to the effect that liberty if perverted into licence will produce a backlash of authoritaianism and he states it in his matter of factness tone of voice as if it were an indisputable fact rather than a very dangerous fallacy and I shall hopefully explain why it is just such.

For a start he does not define terms.Just what does licence mean,it is a purposely undefined loaded term which may well mean any action of which Peter the stern moralist personally disapproves.Who know what he intends,we can surmise it would encompass such things as pornography and drug consumption and as a matter of fact I now recall he does refer to the former in the American context of the founding fathers who when framing their document on liberty ie the Constitution were so moral they could never have dreamed that an avalanche of porn would descend on the continent a few centuries after the document had been finished.

So liberty means comporting yourself in an upright moral way and if you deviate from the path of righteousness,well liberty is not for you and it will be  taken away from you.In the guise of forestalling authoritarianism Peter Hitchens end up advocating it.A very strange way of coming at liberty indedeed.