Legal Moralism In Criminal Law

Legal moralism is the view that the criminal law is basically allowed to enforce the moral law. In other words anything that is wrong can be a proper subject of criminal law. If something is wrong it can be criminalized. That’s a very broad view point but that is why legal moralists prefer this view point. Problems can arise when trying to be a legal moralist in a pluralistic kind of society. With the clash of different cultures and religions. Different kinds of groups will have different ideas of what is right and wrong. An example is if you have one religion that believes that eating pork is wrong then we would be able to use the criminal law to say it’s wrong and illegal to eat pork. When someone else that likes to eat pork and answers the question that “I do not think it is wrong to eat pork”. That person that is questioning the law, that person’s liberty is being limited. That person’s freedom to eat pork is being taken away just on the basis of someone else’s moral beliefs.
Given the idea of a liberal democracy, where each individual is supposed to be free to pursue the kind of live that an individual sees worth living to the greatest extent possible given everyone else being equal.
Legal moralism will violate the being equal part of the law. In other words we are elevating the moral views of the anti-pork people above the moral views of the pork liking people. It looks to the point we would be treating the different groups moral values differently. This of course would be unacceptable from the point of view from the idea of our liberal democracy government and what is should be
about. What the legal moralist has to do is look for some kind of overlapping senses. They have to say well it is just not anything that anyone says is wrong can be the proper subject of the criminal law. That can be the basis of making something illegal. It has to be things that are generally agreed on, and that all the different groups are going to basically coverage on. That the groups can agree that those things are wrong and those are issues they can tackle with criminal law. Something that can be agreed upon across the board is something like murder. That any functioning society has to say it is wrong if not the society would not be able to function and it would decay from within. Everyone will agree that murder is wrong and therefor legal moralism can be used to make murder illegal. Issues that may come from this though from all the groups is the actual definition of murder. For example is murdering somebody because of say adultery wrong? Or killing somebody because they are from a different religious, or different ethnic group wrong? This example is to show that if laws are to be made from a legal moralist view then they need to be thought out and have an overlapping conscious of the arguable issue.