Reviews for Legislating morality

The average rating for Legislating morality based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2012-09-10 00:00:00 Christian Ederer Hart defends JS Mill's proposal that laws regulating "self-regarding" vices ought to be abolished, pushing back against a fairly unconvincing argument by Lord Devlin and a much stronger one by James Fitzjames Stephen. Stephen claims that morality is largely upheld by cultural norms, and that these norms need the support of law to be sustained to any productive purpose. Hart's response to Stephen rested on an empirical claim: "in any full investigation of the part played by legal prohibition in sustaining the conviction that conduct is morally wrong, we should have to distinguish between various types of immorality. Some, like fornication, though they may be quite sincerely condemned morally, represent temptations to a majority of men; others, such as incest or homosexuality, are practices for which most men may feel aversion and disgust. In relation to the latter it would be very surprising if legal prohibition were a significant factor in preserving the general sense that the practice is immoral." In the fifty years since legal prohibitions have been removed, the general sense of the morality of homosexuality has clearly changed radically. In the 1960s, allies of racial segregation opposed federal legislation under the slogan: "You can't legislate morality". In both cases, it is clear that legal change has done much to reorient society -- not least by reshaping its moral opinions and customs. As a result, Hart's reasoning now seems more than a little dubious -- even if public policy has, on some issues, moved closer to his preferences.

Review # 2 was written on 2021-02-05 00:00:00 Todd Johnson A challenging + insightful exploration of morality, criminal law, and the limits of freedom with equally as insightful critiques of John Stuart Mill, James Fitzjames Stephen, and Lord Patrick Devlin. Woohoo! “The real solvent of social morality, as one critic of Lord Devlin has pointed out, is not the failure of the law to endorse its restrictions with legal punishment, but free critical discussion. It is this—or the self-criticism which it engenders—that forces apart mere instinctive disgust from moral condemnation.”