Should Law Improve Morality?

Lawyers and philosophers have long debated whether law should enforce social morality. This paper explores whether law should improve social morality. It explains how this might be possible, and what sort of obstacles, factual and moral, there are to doing so. It concludes with an example: our law s...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inCriminal law and philosophy Vol. 7; no. 3; pp. 473 - 494
Main Author Green, Leslie
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Dordrecht Springer Netherlands 01.10.2013
Springer Nature B.V
Subjects
Criminal law
Criminal Law and Criminal Procedure Law
Ethics
Law
Law and Criminology
Legal History
Morality
Original Paper
Philosophy
Philosophy of Law
Society
Theories of Law
HLA Hart
Rape
Social morality
Paul Robinson
Patrick Devlin
Consent
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Summary:Lawyers and philosophers have long debated whether law should enforce social morality. This paper explores whether law should improve social morality. It explains how this might be possible, and what sort of obstacles, factual and moral, there are to doing so. It concludes with an example: our law should attempt to improve our social morality of sexual conduct.
ISSN:1871-9791
1871-9805
DOI:10.1007/s11572-013-9248-3