Moral Issues

Abstract

The general issue of the relationship between morals and the law is one of the fundamental issues of our time, indeed of any time. That debate was excellently expressed by a now famous interchange in the UK in the 1960s, known as the Hart-Devlin debate (see Devlin, 1963). Lord Devlin’s original paper compared morals and torts (the civil law of wrongs). He distinguished between those things that are wrong in themselves (for example, those things that impinge on the sanctity of life), and those things that are wrong because they are prohibited (for example, a minor breach of a trading act). As Devlin wrote, ‘real crimes are sins with legal definition’. Devlin’s view is that lawmakers need the stuff of morals in order to fashion the law.