‘The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.' - John Stuart Mill, On Liberty.
According to the English philosopher John Stuart Mill, we should be tolerant of how anyone wants to live, provided we are tolerant of them, not harming anyone else. This is known as the harm principle. It's generally defined as the concept of Negative Liberty - freedom from interference.
"Your freedom to swing your fist ends where my nose begins." That sums up the harm principle.
In the essay On Liberty, John Stuart Mills pondered how much control society has to prevent or allow a person's actions. He argued the only purpose for which power can be exercised over any member of a civilized community against his will, is to prevent others' harm. His liberalism was a promotion of individual liberty. People, and the state, should allow individuals to live as they wish. The government shouldn't interfere in people's lives. Protecting the individual against the power of the state and belief in strongly opposing authoritarian and totalitarian regimes that restrict people's freedoms were some of the ideas expressed in Mill's writing.
How much freedom should people be entitled to? How tolerant should we be in society? A follower of the Harm Principle allows offensiveness. He said, "to prohibit everything but the norm would have the effect of stifling innovation.”
Toleration is something to be desired; however, accepting too much tolerance can have negative effects. With the harm principle, we can tolerate one's behavior unless it poses a threat to another person. We can be intolerant of the actions that cause harm to others. But even with the Harm Principle, toleration can still run into contradictions. The principle only deals with harm to others. What about people who pose harm to themselves? Should tolerance allow the self-destruction of the individual?
It's not unusual to face a dilemma when trying to draw a line between offensive acts and harmful ones. Some might interpret running naked in public as an offensive act. Others may see it as harmful towards children. Similarly, the public display of affection between a homosexual couple could be viewed as offensive and may be seen as harmful to children. Many may find the idea of a homosexual relationship, even if behind closed doors, more offensive than an intimate heterosexual liaison in public.
In a similar vein, some things may be judged offensive if conducted in public but might be condoned if it's done in private. On Liberty makes it clear that the toleration of some things, in private, is necessary. Also, some things which are objectionable to the current generation may be acceptable to the next. To Mills, to move society forward, experimentation is a necessary virtue.
Most agree they don't want the government to control every aspect of their lives. I used to think that was the case. That statement may not be as true as it once was, especially after seeing how people behaved during the recent pandemic. However, there will always be disagreement about what is and isn't an acceptable level of intrusion into our lives. Some people believe a healthy society requires some paternalistic behavior by the state. The question is, how much is too much?
How much should the government intervene to protect us from ourselves? We must be careful. After all, we could start unnecessarily interfering in people's lives because we perceive their actions as harmful to themselves. This can lead to the curbing of individual freedoms and liberties. The Harm Principle states the government may interfere with one person's liberty only to prevent harm to another--it doesn't say that the government must always intervene.
A person's own good is not sufficient to warrant the restriction of his liberty. If you care about someone, you can debate with them the reasons to change their behavior and show them the error of their ways, but you can't force them not to do what they like, so long as they're not actually harming anybody else.
The Harm Principle is not designed to guide individuals' actions but restrict the scope of criminal law and government restrictions of personal liberty. Dislike for a person's actions or even social disapproval isn't enough to justify government intervention unless they actually harm someone else. Unfortunately, it’s not entirely substantiated in practice.
For example, take the case of a charming gregarious person who lives in Brooklyn. On summer evenings, he enjoys occasionally drinking a bottle of beer outside of his apartment. He's not interfering with anybody—he's engaging in the tradition of hanging out on his stoop and talking with his neighbors.
A police officer sees this and cites him for drinking alcohol outdoors in an open container. This gentleman thinks this is incredibly unjust. One might suggest that he's drinking alcohol, and if consumed in large enough qualities, it could have deleterious effects. That may be true, but even if he does drink to excess, he's only harming himself, not other people. As a rational competent adult, he should be allowed to make that decision. Not allowing him to do so, is to treat him as if he's a child.
Rational adults should be allowed to do as they wish, provided their actions harm nobody else, but people may legally damage themselves with drugs, alcohol, or other dangerous activities. Some people have protective tendencies that may arise from a moral concern for helping others. They may even feel compelled to stop an individual who is in the process of self-harm. But is interference the morally acceptable course of action? Shouldn't we allow adults to learn from their own mistakes, even when some forms of self-harm may provide good grounds for doubting a person's rationality and possibly the ability to be a fully functioning member of society?
Let's also talk about the word' harm.' What exactly does Mill mean? Without an adequate definition of the word harm, it becomes difficult to derive a meaningful definition of the offense. Without it, judgments of rightness or wrongness are in danger of becoming blurred. Physical forms of harm may be easier to diagnose and quantify than other forms of harm like financial or emotional harm due to neglect. There are also related questions surrounding freedom of speech and offense.
Many will accept some level of paternalism by the state, but where is the line drawn? Paternalism towards children who needed protection is acceptable, but is it acceptable towards adults of sound mind? When is the right age to grant children the same freedoms over their lives as adults? And at what point will adults need protection from themselves?
Many argue that the state should play a bigger role in limiting personal behavior. I disagree.
On Liberty was published in 1859. The essay gives a structure to discuss how free a person should be to live life as they please. For people today, this principle embodies truths of tolerance, liberty, and accountability to which the best of our societies aspire.
In my opinion, the Harm Principle is essentially sound. J. S. Mill is still relevant today, even after nearly one hundred and fifty years.
Thought-Provoking Articles:
“Scenes from 2030” – Writer T.E. Creus’s vision of life in the year 2030, in Off-Guardian. Hopefully, it won’t come true
“Disease is the newest excuse for segregation” – “The notion that separation is safer than integration is dangerous and contrary to the good life as we’ve come to understand it over half a millennium,” writes Jeffrey A. Tucker for AIER
“The Texas Neanderthals were right” – Texas governor Greg Abbott ended the state’s mask mandate in early March and since then cases, hospitalizations, and deaths have all plummetted, Sean Collins reports in Spiked
“Dr. Fauci, Tear off these masks” – Once Covid deaths drop to the level of flu deaths, which may happen in the U.S. within the next month or two, the masks can go, says Nicole Saphier in the Wall Street Journal
“Vaccine Passports” – Tom Woods talks to Dave Smith, host of the Part of the Problem podcast, about vaccine passports, and just how bad an idea it really is
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Clayton Craddock is an independent thinker, father of two beautiful children in New York City. He is the drummer of the hit broadway musical Ain't Too Proud. He earned a Bachelor of Business Administration from Howard University's School of Business and is a 28 year veteran of the fast-paced New York City music scene. He has played drums in several hit broadway and off-broadway musicals, including "Tick, tick…BOOM!, Altar Boyz, Memphis The Musical, and Lady Day At Emerson's Bar and Grill. Also, Clayton has worked on: Footloose, Motown, The Color Purple, Rent, Little Shop of Horrors, Spongebob Squarepants, The Musical, Evita, Cats, and Avenue Q.
If only my fellow Americans had even the slightest motivation to uphold for themselves one of the most crucial liberties of all, FREEDOM FROM DEBT, perhaps one day at long last I would know what it really means to live in 'a free country.' But no, Americans can't amass debts fast enough, if to borrow means they can augment their lifestyles sooner rather than later. The impulse to always possess the latest of everything and to show off a standard of living that is primarily meant to give the right impression to others is a self-destructive one, and it has cultivated a culture of governance which assumes increasingly that money can always be found (or fabricated out of thin air) to pay for whatever silly world-savery is currently trendy.
That perennial debtor, Alexander Hamilton, who died intestate leaving a wife and nine children in beggary, and who in life failed at every single business venture he ever put a hand to, and even had to borrow continually for years to pay off a married woman who conspired with her husband to blackmail him over her having been his mistress, gave us this model of a system of government which relies continually on the leveraging and rescheduling of debt, and it has been a curse to this civilization ever since.
Perhaps, arguably, one has the 'right' to go into debt up to one's eyeballs in order to have a tenuous hold on a standard of living one could not otherwise even begin to afford, but why? A life of making payments and of being continually at risk of losing the 'everything' which never belonged to oneself in the first place looks to me like a life hardly worth living. I have been mystified my whole life why my countrymen find such rigid servitude appealing. I want no part in it. and never did. I prefer genuine freedom, however unfashionable it may appear.
Look up the Non-Aggression Principle. What (principled, actual) Libertarians live by. All the Freedom and Liberty- as long as you are not harming someone else or taking their stuff. The state is the biggest aggressor of the NAP and the Harm principle.