The second great debate, carried on for much of the same time, is related in some ways but conceptually quite distinct from the first. The second debate centers on adverse legal, especially criminal, treatment of so-called victimless immoralities. This debate started in its current form in the late 1950s. In 1957, a blue ribbon commission headed by Sir John Wolfenden recommended to the British Parliament that it decriminalize private homosexual behavior between consenting adults. TheWolfenden Report ignited the most celebrated jurisprudential debate of the twentieth century, which involved a series of scholarly exchanges between Oxford legal philosopher H. L. A. Hart and High Court Judge Patrick Devlin.
Societies routinely survive changes in the basic moral views of their members.
It is absurd to suppose, Hart concluded, that when such a change occurs, we must say one society has disintegrated and been succeeded by another. Devlin's apparently conservative criticism of the Wolfenden Report was hardly traditional. Devlin comes off, to put it just one way, as the one in moral hyper-drive, but he is no natural lawyer at all. He was conservative in his social theory, but not in morals. In a speech subsequent to the Maccabaean lecture, Devlin attacked the traditional claim that law ought to inculcate virtue as not acceptable to Anglo American thought.