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74 S. Cal. L. Rev. 361 (2000-2001)
Us and Them and the Nature of Moral Regulation

handle is hein.journals/scal74 and id is 371 raw text is: US AND THEM AND THE NATURE OF MORAL REGULATION CHARLEs H. WHrrEBREAD* What is morality in any given time or place? It is what the majority then and there happen to like, and immorality is what they dislike. The Dialogues ofAlfred North Whitehead If your morals make you dreary, depend upon it, they are wrong. I do not say give them up, for they may be all you have, but conceal them like a vice lest they should spoil the lives of better and simpler people. Robert Louis Stevenson, Across the Plains Conventionality is not morality. Self-righteousness is not religion. To attack the first is not to assail the last. Charlotte Brdnte, Jane Eyre I. MORAL REGULATION AS THE FOUNDATION OF THE SOCIAL HIERARCHY During the early eighteenth century, constables in towns throughout Connecticut were directed by statute to restrain all such as they judge to exceed their social conditions and ranks.' Exceeding one's social conditions most often meant engaging in the several sins and offences of swaring, curseing, profaincing Gods holy name, Sabbath abuseing, drunkenness, fornication, and adultery.2 Today, in New York City, * George T. and Harriet E. Pfleger Professor of Law, University of Southern California Law School. I wish to thank Chris Brown and Larry Bolton, my research assistants, for their hard work. I. ALAN HUNT, GOVERNIG MORALS: A SOCIAL HISTORY OF MORAL REGULATION 232 n.8 (1999) (quoting STEPHEN FOSTER, THEm SOLrrARY NVAY: THE PURITAN SocIAL ETHic IN THE FIRST CENTURY OF SErrLFmNT IN NEv ENGLAND 29 (1971)). 2. Il at 232 n.3 (quoting a 1691 Virginia law).