The Changed Nature of the Harm Debate

Roach narrates that whether criminal law should be restricted to addressing proven harms is a classic debate. John Stuart Mill and other liberals argued that the criminal law should only respond to proven harms in order to ensure restraint and avoid imposing society's view of the good life on individuals. Patrick Devlin and other conservatives argued that such an approach was too restrained and the criminal law could be used to express society's disapproval and even disgust at practices it deemed objectionable. He comments that parliamentarians should not abdicate their responsibilities of assessing the relative harms of criminal law.