In our daily lives we make a radical distinction between the rules that govern our intimacies and those that govern our posture towards those with whom we are not intimate. The rules of the public sphere exist to maintain the kind of distance that makes it possible to live without existential involvements, to negotiate our path through the world of strangers with minimum entanglements and always by negotiation and consent. These rules must be anchored in law if they are not to be exploited by the predators and egoists, who will use them to their own advantage. For example, the public display of sexuality and sexual readiness, which seeks to rewrite all distant and objective relations as forms of entanglement and intimacy, must be strictly controlled. If it is not, then people will begin to see the public sphere as merely a messy and promiscuous version of the private, one in which they are at risk from the predators, and constantly invited to perceptions and emotions that are incompatible with a life among strangers.

If we look at matters in that way, we can, I think, see another approach to the question of law and morality than that advanced by Mill. It is not that the law should withdraw from the moral sphere, making no judgment as to right and wrong, and concerning itself purely with the maintenance of rights - including the right to be wrong. Nor is it merely there to protect the individual from harms wrought by others, leaving him free otherwise to wreak whatever he chooses on himself. The law is there to maintain a public sphere, in which freely chosen relations between strangers are the norm. The law may permit activities between consenting adults that it forbids in public: but the goal may be less to permit private freedoms than to prevent their public display.

On that view, there really is such a thing as "public morality", which it is the business of the law to enforce. Of course, it is not the morality of the animal rights activists, nor is it offended by the wearing of fur (unless in the manner described by von Sacher-Masoch in Venus in Furs). It is the morality of public decorum, which seeks to confine those activities which have no part in the free society of strangers, to the sphere where they belong.

Decorum is not just an optional addition to the public sphere: it is the sine qua non of its existence.