The state is not a moral actor. The state is a weapon.

It uses practically unlimited violence to settle disputes between parties. Laws, made by the people, confine the state's actions to specific responses for specific reasons.

The moment you make an "ethical state" is the moment you get a totalitarian state. If the state decides morality, then it is declaring that it has unlimited jurisdiction to use unlimited force. This is why the very fundamental premise of Fascism relies on the construction of "An Ethical State". The state is literally the intertemporal, metaphysical, representation of the people, and exists as the moral ordering of each person in society to that metaphysic. That is why it is totalitarian.