PHIL 3040 Lecture Notes - Lecture 14: Wolfenden Report, John Stuart Mill, Totalitarianism
4 Dec 2018
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According to wolfenden committee such as private behavior such as homosexuality was not the proper concern of law. The committee viewed the proper concern of law along millian (john. Stuart mill) lines to be the protection of individuals. The committee"s recommendation, according to devlin, decisively separates crime from sin, the divine law from the secular and morals from the criminal. Devlin rejects such distinctions because in his view they are not good for moral law and even worst for criminal law. He argues that morality and religion are conjoined in such a fashion that the former cannot exist without the later. The dominant morality of western civilization is the morality of. Develin argues that the justificatory ground for the authority of the state to enforce the law has to be drawn from moral standard, and in that from christian morality. Thus he concludes that the only acceptable ground for criminal law is moral standards of a given society.
