public morality condemning homosexuality as repugnant to rightthinking persons. Defining society as a body having community of ideas. about politics and morals, he hastens to conclude that society cannot exist but by enforcing its moral notions. Our morals came to us thru Christianity, he says, but they remain "built into the house in which we live and could not be removed without bringing it down." Even an atheist is bound: "if he wants to live in the house, he must accept it as built in the way in which it is." Taking a cue from Wolfenden language, he argues that if corruption of youth justifies legal intervention, then, corruption of any citizen does, since immoral acts corrupt those involved and society as well.

"All sexual immorality involves the exploitation of human weaknesses. The prostitute exploits the lust of her customers and the customer the moral weakness of the prostitute. If exploitation of human weaknesses is considered to create a special circumstance, there is virtually no field of morality which can be defined in such a way as to exclude the law."

Curious logic! If all "exploitation of human weakness" (how broadly he uses that phrase) is the concern of criminal law, we then lose entirely the concept of individual responsibility. He misses the point of the reformists' urging of more severe penalties for corruption of minors. It is not merely that sexual acts are supposed to corrupt minors (arguable), but rather that minors (and certain other classes of presumed incompetents) are supposedly not responsible for their own acts, as the ordinary citizen is presumed to be.

Sir Patrick does not say what human weaknesses are exploited by masturbation, yet it would be rash

to interpret the omission as approval of solitary emission.

How, he asks, are society's moral judgments identified? By legislative caprice? By statisticians of majority opinion? Or by total consent of all citizens? No. The Hon. Justice Devlin finds the moral judgments of society. to be "based not on theological or philosophical foundations," but clearly displayed in the "feelings" of "the reasonable man" (as distinguished from the man who reasons, or is rational). In such ungovernable reactions as "repugnance" and the like displayed by the random "man on the Clapham omnibus," Sir Patrick finds his half-conscious morality of common sense.

He pays lip service to "the old and familiar question of striking a balance between the rights and interests of society and those of the individual," but denies the existence of private morality. To override individual conscience where it conflicts with public morals, society, he says, needs to be motivated by "intolerance, indignation and disgust," i.e., "the forces behind the moral law." Admitting that limits of toleration shift, he denies that moral standards shift (despite moral variance already noted between Old and New Testaments, and varied Christian sects). After citing several things formerly but no longer tolerated, he surprisingly says "over all tolerance is always increasing," adding that society may be on its way to dissolution. He cautions against law following new tolerance too closely. Privacy ought to be respected, he adds, in enforcing law (at police discretion) but not in its formulation.

Decrying the Wolfenden attempt "to find some single principle to explain the division between sin and crime," he insists that morality is simply what "the reasonable man believes to be immoral." This is to

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