Volume 5, Number 7 · November 11, 1965
There Oughta Be a Law
By Henry David Aiken
The Enforcement of Morals
by Patrick Devlin
Oxford, 139 pp., $4.00
Everywhere, including England, the English are celebrated for their toughminded passion for facts and cases, and for their indifference to, or incapacity for, general ideas. The truth, I am convinced, is just the opposite. Ever since the times when John Locke lit the fuse for the social and political explosions of the eighteenth century with his doctrine of natural rights, and Jeremy Bentham, the great legislator's legislator and moralist's moralist, hypnotised an era with his ideal of the greatest happiness of the greatest number (which certainly might have been better dubbed the principle of inutility), English thinkers have displayed a constant and insatiable appetite for the more imponderable questions of political, legal, and moral philosophy. So impatient are the English of concrete, remediable social ills that they are unable even to discuss the revision of their archaic laws against buggery without entering into an interminable hassle over the general relations, both de facto and de jure, between positive law and moral law. And while individual English immoralists sweat out their (allegedly) miserable existences, there rises above the darkling cities of the English plain an ever-expanding cloud of acrimonious controversy over the propriety of legal enforcement of something called 'morality as such.'
Review, 3543 words
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