Adrian Buck’s Reviews > The Enforcement of Morals > Status Update

"There is no more evidence for this sort of Utopia than there is for the existence of heaven"

"[Religious toleration] is practicable because, while each man believes that his own religion, or the lack of it, is the truth or nearest to the truth, he looks upon the alternatives as lesser good and not as evil" In the light of his earlier remarks about polygamy and his later remarks about Marcus Aurelius, you have to wonder whether Devlin would tolerate Islam.

"There may be times in the future, as there have been in the past, when a man has to set himself up against society. But if he does so, he must expect to find the law on the side of society." Not necessarily so, see death penalty.

"If the law on abortion causes unnecessary misery, let it be amended, not abolished on the grounds that abortion is not the law's business." Science and technology change the circumstances of human misery, and not just in ways that support liberalism; the advances in neonatal care make a good argument for restricting abortion.

"At the worst it leaves morality as. mobile as the law; and though it may not be easy to change the law, it is far easier than to change a moral belief of a community." e.g. the recent report on the declining popularity of the death penalty.

"Disbelief in the virtue of chastity is not confined to those who from the purest motives would like to help spinsters to lead a fuller life; and through the breach in the walls made by the new moralist there will come pouring a horde which he would loathe and despise". Actually this is much more true of treason than of immorality.

"that authority should be a grant and liberty not a privilege, is, I think the mark of a free society."

"A free society is as much offended by the dictates of an intellectual oligarchy as by those of an autocrat" - yes, but are the dictates of an anti-intellectual majority any better?

"What Professor H.L.A.Hart calls rationalist morality, which I take to be the morality embodied in the rational judgement of men who have studied moral questions and pondered long on what the answers ought to be, will be blown aside by a gust of popular morality compounded of all the irrational prejudices and emotions of the man in the street."