Morals and the law
One has to recognise that there are individual differences: despite that equality before
the law is designed to ensure that the universal agreed values are applicable to all, and
not manipulated to favour some over others. The law, then, is concerned with general
principles rather than with accommodating to particular instances.
There was a seminal debate, in the 1960s and beyond, that considered the relationship
between morality and law. That debate in the UK was between Mr Justice Devlin (1963)
and Professor Hart (1987). It involved such issues as requiring values in order to
formulate a just law, how one accommodates a liberal society containing divergent
values, law is formal by essence and, as such, can be circumvented by subversive
strategies. Moral breaches may not be excused on technical grounds, as may legal
breaches. Perhaps that tendency to codification has reached the highest and most
representative institutional supra-national level. An interesting example is provided by
the UN Declaration of Human Rights, whose list may be considered among the most
qualified attempts of working out generally acknowledged principles by setting out the
widest-accepted values of the human society.
A major issue is to what extent morals should ever invest the law. There seem to be
a number of essential differences between morals and law. They “travel” along parallel
dimensions, but respond to different premises: law to utility and convenience, morals to
shared values rooted in a community or group. They respond to different logic: law is