ABSTRACT
In this selection, Lord Patrick Devlin (1905–1992) defends legal moralism, or the right of society to limit the liberty of its members to prevent them from engaging in activities that the majority of society’s members condemn as immoral. Inspired by the publication, in England, of the Wolfenden Report, which examined the legal provisions concerning prostitution and homosexuality, Devlin drew his examples primarily from the realm of sexual morality. Such an emphasis is informative, because sexuality involves behaviors about which the members of a community may have significantly divided moral opinions, and because such behaviors provide the purest cases of legal moralism. This is so because many sexual activities performed in private by consenting adults may be deemed seriously immoral and yet they are victimless crimes. No one is harmed by such activities, and thus neither the harm principle nor paternalism can be used to justify restrictions on such activities. If society is justified in regulating harmless forms of private sexual conduct, then the justification must take the form of a defense of legal moralism.
