But other senior figures in the Church, as well as members of the rank and file, feel strongly that it must recognise that public morality has changed.
I probably have a different sense of morality to most people... I have changed my ways and am a reformed character now.' Jane Clark, his wife, on the Harkess affair: "If you bed people of below-stairs class, they will go to the papers".
You want Robert Redford or Robert DeNiro to be just like the cab driver in New York... so that's what we want, we want reality now... .. "I think the world has changed, morality is different.
He observes that public expectations regarding morality and what constitutes an impermissible violation of the right to privacy has changed over time.
What had changed in those years was the public awareness of gays and lesbians in society and the public and legal understanding of both the morality and wisdom of laws discriminating on the basis of sexual orientation.
And the changes in sexual morality have led directly to the breakup of families and it is children who suffer the most.
First of all, what place does morality have in this?
Does morality have a purely consequentialist structure, as utilitarians claim?
It may sound obvious but, in one important respect, it radically changes how morality has often been understood.
Morality has empirical significance.
