Should criminal law enforce moral prohibitions?

Purpose and Objectives: The article explores the relationship between morality and criminal law, formulating and describing models of the influence of morality on the criminalization process.

Methods: The article is based on the requirements of comprehensiveness, completeness and objectivity. The main models of the influence of morality on criminal law are described in an overview, based on the classification method. The author also uses comparative legal, empirical and historical methods. The author’s research meets the requirement of interdisciplinarity, as it touches upon philosophical and ethical-legal aspects of the problem.

Results: The authors approved that the moral prohibition is focused on the value-motivational component of the individual’s personality. The criminal law affects the emotional component, producing fear of criminal responsibility.The author concludes that morality does not need criminal law to be sustained, and criminal law does not need to justify morality. There are no clear boundaries between criminal law and morality. Instead, the author suggests that their position should be described in the framework of social norms not by means of Euler circles or drawing borders but by means of layers or "floors". Each of these regulators has its own "problem field". Moreover, morality and criminal law may be overlapped. I’m such case, morality can have a significant impact on the process of criminalization. The author identifies three models of such influence. The first model is inter-normativity. This model describes the natural diffusion of moral and criminal law norms. The second model, legal moralism, describes the enforcement of some moral values by the criminal law. The third model – moral populism – is the appeal to some moral values to promote some solution as universally approved.

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