12/30/2023 0 Comments John stuart mills harm principleLibertarians work with a very stringent notion of harm only harms to liberty, property, and personal security count. (Harcourt, 1999, 10-14) This is because R.V Brown had in mind defending the accumulative interpretation of the harm principle from the position most antithetical to it, libertarianism. In this essay R.V Brown mostly focus on forms of pollution as examples of accumulative harms. Public opinion, ostracism, harassing environments, and pornography are all accumulative harms. Protection, therefore, against the tyranny of the magistrate is not enough there needs protection also against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling, against the tendency of society to impose, by other means than civil penalties, its own ideas as rules of conduct on those who dissent from them. The accumulative harm cases, however, cannot be said to involve harmful conduct no individual, maliciously or recklessly, causes the accumulative harm2. Sometimes one individual source of pollution may cross the threshold into harm all by itself, but often many sources are needed. ![]() (Kernohan, 1993, 2-5) Feinberg describes the accumulative harm of air pollution like this: Most often, an accumulative harm will also be a public harm, a harm which cannot be done to one individual without at the same time being done to a whole community or populace, but there is no conceptual necessity to this fact accumulative harms may be serious individual harms. It is a harm to another person brought about by the actions of a group of people where the action of no single member of that group is sufficient, by itself, to cause the harm. An accumulative harm is a harm done by a group, not to a group. But these two notions come apart in the prevention of accumulative harms. All harmful conduct, by definition, results in harm, and, most often, harms result from harmful conduct. Harms, though, are setbacks to people's interests whether or not brought about by harmful conduct. Hence individual harmful conduct must be identified in order to use the harm principle. ![]() Harms must be assigned to individuals in order for legal mechanisms of guilt and liability to work1. (Kernohan, 1993, 2-5) The harmful conduct interpretation fits most naturally with the background, individualist assumption of our legal system regarding the assignment of blame and responsibility to individuals. Should the principle offer protection against harms or only against harmful conduct Harmful conduct is activity done either maliciously or recklessly that causes harm to others. There is a related ambiguity in the interpretation of the harm principle. Mill's harm principle should be interpreted as requiring political interference to prevent them. Following Feinberg, R.V Brown call these "accumulative harms," and argue that, even on a stringent conception of harm. (Kernohan, 1993, 2-5) Certain harms, however, had an interesting structure which straddles these extremes sometimes activities which, individually, are merely annoying, innocuous, or even beneficial add up to doing physical damage or severe harm. On the other hand, if we count only physical damage to persons as harm, most every activity will be permitted and there will be little scope for the political protection of persons. If we count mere hurt, offence, annoyance, and mental distress as harms, the principle will countenance political interference with nearly every activity, and liberty will amount to naught. 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." The problem with applying Mill's principle is determining what is to count as a harm1. This view is put forward in his famous harm principle, the principle that, ". Mill, the prevention of harm is commonly thought to delimit the extent of permissible political interference with a person's liberty1. John Stuart Mill's Harm Principle of Institute] John Stuart Mill's Harm Principle Similarly, in an early essay in 1973 en d Moral Enforcement and the Harm Principle-an essay which would sketch the contours of his later four-volume treatise on The Moral Limits of the Criminal Law-Professor Joel Feinberg rehearsed Mill's harm principle and he, too, pared the principle down to its original, simple formulation
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