Laws and Morals

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                        Laws and Morals

Laws are the body of rules which are recognised as binding among the people of a community or state, so that they will be imposed upon and enforced among those persons by appropriate sanctions. Morals on the other hand are beliefs and values which are shared by a society, or a section of society; they tell those who share them what is right and what is wrong.

According to Hart, moral rules can be distinguished from legal rules and other social rules in several ways. Disagreement to the content of legal rules can be resolved by reference to statues or by the opinions of the judges, and even if those who disagree with a particular rule generally accept this as a perfect way of determining what the rule is. There may also be considerable disagreement to the content of moral rules, and there is generally no accepted way of resolving such disputes.

Also legal rules can be changed by performance, but morality changes only gradually if at all. Morals rules are not subject to deliberate creation, abortion or change: legal and other changes may cause changes in public attitude, as in the case of laws legalising homosexuality or prohibiting various forms of discrimination, but nothing can bring about an instant change in morality.

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Even though Moral rules commonly require considerable sacrifice, and strong social pressure is applied to keep them in place. Once a moral rule is regarded as not worth maintaining - the rule is disapproving of premarital sex (sex before marriage), for example it stops being a rule. This is not so with legal rules as shown by the Abortion Act 1967 and the Sexual Offences Act 1956.

The famous Hart-Devlin debate rose up a lot of points about Law and Morals, Professor Hart argued that using law to enforce moral values was unnecessary, undesirable and morally unacceptable. He ...

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