Law and morality — homosexuality; recreational drugs; gambling
Reading: Mackie, ch. 10 section 2 In this and the following lecture we shall be looking at some of the connections between law and morality. morality. There are a lot of questions here here that we shall not be looking at, perhaps the most fundamental of which is one of the central issues in political philosophy: is there a moral obligation to obey the law? Obligations That question does, however, however, permit us to notice explicitly the fact that there are a variety of obligations. We may be obliged by the rules of a game or a professional professional association; we may be obliged by the law and the state's enforcement machinery; we may be obliged morally. morally. One of the questions in applied ethics concerns the extent to which the law should should be lending its support to morality morality.. I think this is an issue in which Mackie's conception of morality in the narrow sense, contrasted with a broader sense, can play a useful role. We can see this from his own claim that "great parts of what both the criminal and the civil law enforce, at all times and in all states, are also requirements of morality [in the narrow sense] — not killing or assaulting other people, honesty, respect respect for property and other rights, the keeping of agreements, and contributing in various ways to a community's organized joint purposes" purposes" (p. 234). In these areas we have, have, and need for a stable society, society, first the mechanisms of morality (principles, rules, feelings and dispositions), second "the formulation and authoritative statement of laws", and third the routine enforcement of those laws; and we need these to be in reasonable harmony with each other. The law and morality in the broad sense It is when we move from this thi s comparatively uncontentious central central core to issues that belong only to morality in the broader sense that serious serious problems arise. We can postulate contexts in which this extension is itself unproblematic: a society in which there is consensus on broader issues and in which there is virtually no hypocrisy hypocrisy.. I leave it to others to indicate whether any such contexts can be found in human history. history. What we certainly do find, and the context context in which we certainly certainly are living, is rather different in these two ways that Mackie picks out: there are different, incompatible preferred ways of life, and "there is often a discrepancy between the morality to which people pay lip service and that which they seriously prescribe to themselves" (p. 234). On the first issue, of incompatible preferred ways of life, it might be pertinent, and relevant to the regional scene, to make a distinction Mackie overlooks between the conditions of a benign "plural" society and those of a society where groups not only adopt incompatible codes of conduct but also think each other seriously deficient because of this. (This may well be the condition condition of an explosive plural plural society — many cultures have have traditionally been hostile to outsiders. outsiders. It is also noteworthy that in many cases the moral hostility is overwhelmingly one-way: one-way: many people detest a homosexual way of life, but homosexuals need not condemn heterosexuality for others; prostitutes do not need to think that sex within marriage is wicked.)
One solution, typical of benign plural societies, is to have a multiplicity of legal systems corresponding corresponding to the various segments segments within it. So Muslims follow Muslim conventions regarding marriage, inheritance, etc., and the legal system enforces these in that segment of the community; Hindus likewise follow their conventions; and so on. One may need ways of dealing with with problems created at the interface interface between communities, but there is nothing in principle to prevent one finding them. The more awkward case is where the ways of li fe are not only incompatible but mutually (or in one direction) condemnatory. condemnatory. These are typically ways of life within what in some respects sees itself (or is seen by prominent segments within it) as one community (cf. (cf. Mill's remark that while some of his audience might have no serious objection to Muslims [assumed to belong to a different racial group] practising polygamy they might feel very differently about some of their own embracing Mormonism and doing likewise). As a wild but not I hope unfounded generalisation about the history of law, what we find is that the morality in the broad sense (preached and/or practised) of some among the dominant segments of a society society has very often infused infused the law. With a growing realisation of the contrast underlying Mackie's narrow/broad conceptions of morality, morality, there is a tendency for the law to be liberalised in the direction of allowing people with divergent values to live and let live, rather than for some to be be condemned and legally sanctioned. The legal enforcement of morality This tendency, tendency, and the arguments surrounding it, can be clearly seen in the 1957 Wolfenden Report in the UK (The Report of the Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution), and the debate on its approach between Lord Devlin (beginning with a 1959 lecture, reprinted as chapter 1 of The Enforcement of Morals) and Professor Hart (notably in the 1962 lectures published as Law, Liberty, and Morality ). ). Devlin quotes the Report's account of the function of the criminal law: "to preserve public order and decency, decency, to protect the citizen from what is offensive or injurious, and to provide sufficient safeguards against exploitation and corruption of others, particularly those who are specially vulnerable because they are young, weak in body or mind, inexperienced, or in a state of special physical, official or economic dependence" (para. 13, in Devlin, p. 2). It sees the importance of individual i ndividual freedom of choice and action in matters of private morality as far outweighing any wish to equate crime with moral wickedness, so private morality should not be the law's business (a notion obviously close to the ideas of Mill we have already met). Devlin argues that a society requires a public morality: "what makes a society of any sort is community of ideas, not only of political ideas but also ideas about the way its members should behave behave and govern their lives" lives" (p. 9). One of his main examples is marriage, where he says a society has to choose monogamy or polygamy and cannot have both. "The institution of marrriage marrriage would be gravely gravely threatened if individual judgements were perrmitted about the morality of adultery; on those points there must be public morality" (p. 10 — note, though, that he admits that adultery is not a crime and later agrees that it ought not to become one). A consequence, he says, is that "society is justified in ta king the same steps to preserve its moral code as it does to preserve its government and other essential institutions" (p. 13).
Devlin goes on to accuse a ccuse the Report of inconsistency in its acceptance on the one hand that certain things are wrong and yet on the other that the law should refrain from direct action, except except in cases of corrupting the young young or exploitation. One instance concerns the Report's endorsement of laws against ponces although the Report itself admits that typically they no more exploit prostitutes than any other agent exploits his clients. "If the exploitation of human weakness weakness is considered to create a special circumstance there is virtually no field of morality which can be defined in such a way as to exclude exclude the law" (p. 12). Devlin gives other instances instances of the law, and not merely Wolfenden's recommendations, recommendations, becoming distorted by trying to serve purposes for which it is not intended — the severe punishment then given to abortionists because illegal abortions were dangerous, and dangerous because they were illegal (p. 24). Hart responded to Devlin by accusing him of confusing the true claim that a society has some moral beliefs in common with the false one that a society is strictly identical with its entire morality at a point of time, so that any change in morality destroys it. Devlin reasonably replies (footnote, (footnote, p. 13) that he did not suggest suggest that there could be no change, merely that some matters went deep enough to constitute the lines of the tolerable for a group of people. He admitted, even, that the limits of the tolerable itself do change (p. (p. 18). I think that the Mackie contrast contrast may indicate a way to distinguish the relative importance of different elements i n a society's moral cosmos; what one wants to say to Devlin is that the degree of outrage felt for homosexuality is disproportionate to its role in a social formation — it is evident we can live and let live here. Again, he overemphasises the importance of consensus consensus on one particular form of marriage in a society: plural societies manage with several, and several societies are arguably moving towards what one might call the disestablishment of marriage altogether (for my remarks on the desirability of such a move, see a conference paper with that title). My own view, view, with benefit of forty years' hindsight, is that Devlin was overhasty in identifying the strength of popular support for elements of his supposed public morality and blind to the possibility that gay men, for instance, would wish to endorse their own way of life, and that things can go on quite nicely when they do so. (Of course, controversy controversy continues, continues, and inconsistencies abound.) Note that the argument cannot be simply " a group of people can survive and flourish with a certain number of them doing X, so there need be no law against X" since that is true if X is murder, murder, rape, theft, etc. It is, rather, rather, "once everyone's fundamental rights to progressively choose how to live have been assured by laws corresponding to the core of morality, some can pursue X, others Y, and there need be no law restricting their freedoms here."
Functionalism and the conditions for the continuing identity of a society Before moving on, it may be worth while to notice a general difficulty in identifying enduring institutions such as societies. We can make the point by contrasting the reality of social life with a popular picture, summed up elegantly in Shakespeare's Coriolanus by the Senator, Menenius: There was a time when all al l the body's members Rebell'd against the belly, belly, thus accused it: it : That only like a gulf it did remain I' the midst o' the body, body, idle and unactive, Still cupboarding the viand, never bearing Like labour with the rest, where the other instruments
Did see and an d hear, hear, devise, instruct, walk, feel, And, mutually participate, did minister Unto the appetite and affection common Of the whole body. body. The belly answer'd-'True 'True is it, my incorporate friends,' quoth he, 'That I receive the general food at first, Which you do live upon; and fit it is, Because I am the store-house and the shop Of the whole body: but, if i f you do remember, remember, I send it through the rivers of your blood, Even to the court, the heart, to the seat o' the brain; And, through the cranks and offices of man, The strongest nerves and small inferior veins From me receive that natural competency Whereby they live: and though that all at once, .... Though all at once cannot See what I do deliver out to each, Yet I can make my audit up, that all From me do back receive the flour of all, And leave me but the bran.' What say you to't? First Citizen It was an answer: how apply you this? MENENIUS The senators of Rome are this good belly, belly, And you the mutinous members; for examine Their counsels and their cares, digest things rightly Touching the weal o' the common, you shall find No public benefit which you receive But it proceeds or comes from them to you And no way from yourselves. While this analogy has been a mainstay of much sociological theorising, an important point is that societies are not unified in the way almost all animals are. There is really no problem in telling whether we have the same cat or dog as we had yesterday, yesterday, nor — leaving aside a side the philosophical perplexities of personal identity we briefly touched on last week — is there with individual people. Similar things can be said about the flourishing, development, development, or deterioration of these these things. But when we have groups of people in interaction, there is nothing analogous to the entire animal vis-à-vis its organs. We have have to decide whether Russian Russian society survived survived the Revolution, and we have to decide any evaluations about things getting better or worse we may want to make, by reference to other things, not by consulting "Russia". We have, have, in Mackie's contrast contrast between the concerns of morality morality in the narrow sense and those of a broader morality, morality, an indication of the extreme case of breakdown: when social life becomes becomes a war of all against all. But that thankfully is very rare; the changes we actually find may invert the power relationships of definable groups or reveal radically different ways of life being practised — whether
these differences are enough for one society to have ended and another to have begun is a matter for judgment, and will be relative to our particular interests in a particular context. Paternalism Part of Devlin's case for the law to enforce positive morality was an appeal to certain features of contemporary English law that he said could only be explained on that t hat basis. Hart responded to this by suggesting suggesting that much of what we we find can be explained, not by an attempt to enforce morality, morality, but simply by paternalism: the attempt to protect people people from themselves. themselves. So, while Devlin claimed that the fact that consent of the victim is not usually allowed as an excuse against criminal prosecution showed that the law was attempting t o uphold certain standards of behaviour, behaviour, Hart suggests that the law here might merely be trying to protect people from themselves. Hart stresses the extent of such paternalism (unwelcome to one of Mill's persuasion that people ought not to be interfered with in such a way — in a later comment, Devlin criticises Hart for suggesting he is still within a Millian perspective when he has dumped a crucial part of Mill's position). position). Hart makes the point that the law that that makes selling certain drugs without a prescription a criminal offence is clearly not aimed at the fault of the seller so much as at protecting possible buyers (Hart, p. 32). He suggests that Mill's opposition to these developments developments stems stems from an excessively narrow conception of what a typical member of the public is like: "Mill endows him with too much of the psychology of a middle-aged man whose desires are relatively fixed, nor liable to be artificially stimulated by external influences; who knows what he wants and what gives him satisfaction or happiness; and who pursues these things when he can" (p. 33). Another example our two authors briefly touch on concerns cruelty to animals. Devlin (p. 17) suggests we are legislating against the cruelty of torturers; Hart (p. 34) that we are concerned with the suffering of the animals. Hart has a third approach to some cases: the law is not to be seen as enforcing a particular morality but rather as protecting the public from offences to public decency. decency. Conjugal sex is not illegal, but in a public place it is (p. 45). So, he suggests, we should see laws against bigamy (in a context where there is no law to stop people doing everything else a bigamously married trio might do) as addressed to the feelings of outrage of those who cleave to traditional monogamy. It seems to me that these alternative accounts may do something to undermine Devlin's case, but a point remains that that Hart cannot escape. Harm and offence are seriously indeterminate notions. On one side there there are indubitable cases — one could package cyanide in a colourful wrapper and sell it to children as a sweet; it would do undeniable harm to any child child who ate it. We could could probably agree upon equally straightforward cases of outrage and offence to a mutually supported public decency. decency. But, as Hart is prepared to agree as far as offence goes at least (cf. (cf. p. 47), it soon becomes a nice question whether we are faced with "genuine" harm or offence, of a kind that the law should be taking into account. As we reach this area, area, the grounds for thinking something harmful or offensive shift away from straightforward factual connections with pain, suffering or death towards something more purely evaluative. So if we have laws in these these areas, they are enforcing
someone's contentious view of what a person's good consists in; they may not have to be viewed as punishing moral wickedness, wickedness, but in as a s much as they penalise certain forms of behaviour it is easy to think that they do so, particularly if one does not agree about the harm in question. In his later comment on Hart (ch. 7 of The Enforcement of Morals ), Devlin makes much the same objection to Hart's invocation of paternalism. He contrasts "physical" or bodily harm and "moral" "moral" harm, and asks whether Hart is restricting himself to the former. He suggests that this cannot be the correct interpretation of the paternalism, if such it be, involved in, say, forbidding euthanasia or not letting consent nullify assault for a masochist, and goes on to make my point that we cannot easily tell when the physical ends and the moral begins.
It is not surprising then that many people have come to think that consuming or possessing various substances is wicked because they have been banned, possibly with an eye originally to paternalistic avoidance of self-harm, although the actual harm may be difficult to discern. discern. Hart, according to Devlin, is in danger of seeking greater rationality in the actual law at any one time than the conflicting pressures of broadly liberal politics, paternalistic concerns, entrenched interest groups, entrenched but pretty arbitrary ways of thinking, and temporary moral panics permit. It seems to me that this can be amply documented from the incoherence of present legislation in many jurisdictions on recreational drugs vis-à-vis tobacco and alcohol or of local legislation on gambling. A case you may want to consider in this general area is that of performanceenhancing drugs. These are banned by sporting sporting bodies, even if not usually usually by lawmaking bodies. One consideration consideration is, again, paternalistic: many of these these substances have nasty side-effects, so athletes are being protected from premature debilitation by being prevented from consuming substances that might give them a temporary advantage. Another thought is that using using these substances is some sort of cheating — it is of course breaking the rules laid down by various sporting authorities, but the point here is that it is also a morally morally repugnant way way of gaining gaining an advantage. advantage. But it is difficult to see how to sustain a distinction between acceptable substances (the beef-steaks boxers boxers used to eat) and unacceptable ones. ones. As Chadwick has recently recently noted, the boundary between drugs and food is being erased by various nutrients, and in any case it was always more a functional issue rather than something intrinsic to particular substances (Ruth Chadwick, 'Novel, Natural, Nutritious: Towards Towards a Philosophy of Food,' Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society , vol. 100, pp. 193-208 (2000).)
Ed Brandon Last revised 3 November. Return to Schedule Schedule;; return to PH19B Home Page. Page.
