The Committee's report was evidently influenced by the liberal thinking of John Stuart Mill, a philosopher greatly admired by Williams, and who used Mill's principle of liberty to develop what he called the "harm condition," whereby "no conduct should be suppressed by law unless it can be shown to harm someone.
The committee reported that, so long as children were protected from seeing it, adults should be free to read and watch pornography as they saw fit.
[2] It found that the existing variety of laws in the field should be scrapped, and that terms such as ‘obscene’, ‘indecent’ and ‘deprave' and corrupt’ should be abandoned as they were no longer useful.
[3] The Committee thought existing laws should be replaced with a comprehensive new statute, under which the availability of material would be restricted so that it did not cause offence to reasonable people, and was not accessible to children.
[3] On the difference between 'obscenity' and 'pornography', the committee found that the word 'obscene' was a subjective term that refers to peoples reaction to material, and that " it principally expresses an intense or extreme version of what we have called ‘offensiveness’.