It’s a free country is the catchcry of many who want liberalised laws on matters concerning morality and their catchcry is ussually appended with another catchcry, which says that what one person does is no-one elses’s business.
The question is, when does what someone else does become the business of others?
If we pay some regard to existing criminal and civil law, there is obviously regulation about the behaviour of other people, even their private behaviours, because even that has effects upon other people. Take, for example, the laws against bigamy. Should it be anyone’s business if someone decides to have multiple wives, or multiple husbands? Society says “yes, it does matter.” So, private behaviour is indeed regulated by public morality and a morality reflected in the laws of the land. The public’s attitude to incest is another example that comes to mind. There are plenty of other examples, but, due to space constraints, I will not list them all. However, these examples invoke the obvious conclusion that there is indeed such a thing as public morality. A society is not simply governed by laws proclaimed by a Parliament, or a Congress, but it also governed by shared ideals and shared conceptions of what is right and what is wrong. Those shared conceptions are a societies moral values. Some are enshrined in the Laws of the land, some are not, but are part of a societie’s accepted conventions.
The institution of Marriage is one convention that is not simply accepted by people in a society, it is also enshrined in legislation. It is a Christian view of Marriage and it is upon that view that western societies have been built. Marriage has always been accepted and legislated as being between one man and one woman. Obvious social benefits arose from this acepted institution and that is why governments fostered and encouraged it. The people demanded it be so. There are, of course, many who couldn’t care less about the institution of marriage, nor its obvious social benefits, but they have been required to accept it as being an integral part of the society into which they have been born. That’s how societies function and flourish. Now, there are those who wish to change the way in which marriage has always been defined and always been accepted and the question is, is the private behaviour of some, if allowed by new definitions of marriage, going to cause harm to society at large?
Some who have posted here have given very compelling reasons as to why and how the redefining of marriage to include same sex couples will cause harm to one of the foundational aspects of society. The “normalising” of homosexual behaviour through the notion of ‘tolerance’ means that the once shared common morality is being broken down. We have seen examples of this with the proliferation of the pornography business. The private behaviours of some and the private desires of some have now become so widespread, so accepted, that even sceptics and champions of the right to freedom of viewing has proliferated to such an extent that even they feel that society is being harmed. Pornography has become “normalised” and yet great harm is now recognised. Still, there are those who champion an individual’s right to indulge. In doing so, they are ignoring societal cost and harm caused by the extension of individual rights. Private behaviour in this matter has become so extensive that it is now of public concern.
Many years ago, a famous English jurist, Lord Patrick Devlin, asked does it matter if one man goes home from work each night and gets blind drunk? He then asked, does it matter if one hundred men go home each night and get blind drunk? Most would say “No, that’s their business.” Devlin then asked, would it matter if half the population went home each night and got blind drunk? The answer, of course, is rather obvious. If we release individuals from accepted norms of behaviour, we encourage society at large to fragment into self serving interest groups and society fractures. Lord Devlin called the shared morality of a society the “glue” which holds society together. If we loosen the grip of that “glue” we are no longer a common society, sharing common ideals.
In the 1960’s Lord Devlin took part in a famous debate with A. L.H Hart, a Philosopher and renowned Utilitarian. Hart championed the rights of the individual, as they are supported by utilitarianism. At the time, Hart was considered the winner of that debate. Today, most people think Devlin was right after all. Individual rights, taken to the extreme, results in little more than unbridled hedonism and allows for society to fracture into special interest groups who have little more in common that whatever laws are passed by the government of the day. That, I suggest, is a dangerous path for any society to take, for it also means that law makers are also unconstrained by any type of shared morality. We see evidence of this in politics today and history is full of examples of empires which have fallen because they lost the “glue” that bound them together.
As Devlin pointed out, even tolerance should have its limits.
Please forgive the interruption.
Huh? Would you mind explaining these two statements?