Analysis Of Devlin's Lens

In the core of his ideas, Devlin presents a sense of common morality amongst the common people of the society. That common morality, Devlin claims, should be considered when applying the law on the citizens of the community, in other words, laws should be based on moral values of the society, thus moral incompetence should be considered as harm towards the society as a whole. On the other hand, Miller claims that the law should only intervene in a citizen’s life when actual physical harm is being done to another person, and when it comes to moral issues, each person has the freedom to consider what is moral and immoral to him and act upon that in his private life. In my opinion, the law should only interfere when actions carry physical harm …show more content…
Miller also claims that morality, whether right or wrong in the eyes of the society is a free choice, for example someone can choose to open up a pornography store. If we were to consider this from Miller’s point of view, this person is harming no one, thus should not be stopped or prosecuted for doing so. On the other hand, from Devlin’s perspective, such acts effect the society as whole, the society is being harmed indirectly, for example this person who is selling pornography material is advertising such immoral material and making its access much easier, thus influencing the society’s moral values. However, it is still a matter of personal liberty, because the person who is going in the pornography store is intending to do so, and if the store is acting by the law, no one under the legal age will be allowed to go in the store, thus not breaking any defined laws, regardless of its effects on general moral values. And this was proven in the case of (Case story) where (Conclusion). Thus, we can conclude that in some cases, what might seem immoral and dangerous towards the society, could be completely legal and should not be stopped just because some people think it is …show more content…
The common moral values are what the average person believes is right or wrong. Thus, Devlin points out that these values should be considered whenever the law is being implemented on citizens. It may sound logical or at least carries a bit of sense. However, the idea of right or wrong is far more complicated and broader than what the average person might think. For example, it was wrong back in the dark ages to deny that the world is flat. If someone was to claim the earth is round or anything else but flat was punished by death, because that would be against what the church believed, thus against the common beliefs of the people. Even though no one was harmed. If we were to take that to our time, it would seem very odd for someone to be interfered with just because the common people don’t think what someone is doing is right. After all, who are we to decide what is right or wrong. In some cases, we cannot decide what is right or wrong in the smallest issues in our daily lives. The idea of a harm based law seems far more logical to our world today, because we cannot decide what is right or wrong, but we know that anything that causes harm to another party is wrong, that is why I believe the laws should be based on harm criteria and not moral judgments. One example I would like to bring up is a poll done by Angus Reid Public Opinion (Citation). The polls were performed in USA, Canada