How the harm principle was hijacked and weaponised against individual freedom

Letters on Liberty are exactly what they say they are.

Launched in December 2020 and published by the Academy of Ideas, they are short essays (less than 3,000 words apiece), each one dedicated to achieving a freer society.

Titles to date include Risking It All: The Freedom to Gamble (Jon Bryan), The Future of Free Speech (Jacob Mchangama), The Liberating Power of Education (Harley Richardson), and Freedom Is No Illusion (Frank Furedi).

Others include Liberty in a Narcissistic Age (Roslyn Fuller), Greens: The New Neo-Colonists (Austin Williams), and Beyond the Culture Wars (Jacob Reynolds).

Letters on Liberty are published in bundles of three and the latest titles, just out, are Against Reparations (James Heartfield), AI: Separating Man from Machine (Sandy Starr), and Beyond the Harm Principle (Rob Lyons).

All three are worth reading but it's Rob's essay that will arguably be of most interest to readers of this blog.

He takes John Stuart Mill's 'harm principle' – which first appeared in On Liberty in 1859 and is often quoted by libertarians – and demonstrates how it has been hijacked and weaponised against individual freedom.

According to Mill, the actions of individuals should only be restricted or punished if they harm others.

That, of course, was the justification for the smoking ban, which was introduced in the UK after it was claimed, but never remotely proved, that 11,000 non-smokers were dying each year as a result of passive smoking.

The problem, writes Rob, is that, 'If we take the notion of harm to its extremes, almost anything we don't like could be described as harmful', and that's exactly what is happening today.

Today the concept of 'harm' covers not just physical harm but anything that may cause offence and therefore 'harm' us in other ways.

But as Rob correctly points out, 'If we want to live in a free society, we have to tolerate things we don't like.'

How, then, can we rescue the harm principle from the 'meddlesome opponents of freedom'? According to Rob, there is a strong case for amending it as follows:

We should be free to do what we want as long as it does not harm others where they cannot avoid that harm.

Would that make a difference? In theory it might. In practice, I'm not sure. As Rob himself admits:

The trouble with trying to rescue the harm principle, by trying to find a more modest and reasonable version of it, is that reasonableness seems to be in short supply.

Nowhere is this more pronounced than in the war on tobacco.

As we know, anti-smoking zealots are never happy and as soon as they achieve one goal they immediately target another, regardless of whether it's fair or reasonable or based on proven physical harm to others. (Outdoor smoking bans, for example.)

Freedom of speech is also under threat because of perceived 'harm' to others, and Rob covers that issue too.

Beyond the Harm Principle is available to download free here.

Alternatively, to purchase or subscribe to the print edition of this and other Letters on Liberty, click here.

Comments

[Misty]

I’ve always thought that one way of guarding against the “harm principle” being hijacked in the way that it has been by, first, the anti-smoking movement, and now – as predicted – by countless copycat anti-something-or-the-other movements, is that legislation to prevent “harm to another” should only be permitted if that harm can be proven to be caused by one individual directly against another individual. This would prevent single-issue campaign groups, for example, arguing that “costing the NHS money” is an acceptable reason for restrictive legislation (used often by the newer campaign groups because the ban-winning equivalent of “passive smoking” is so difficult to find in other areas). Because the NHS isn’t another individual – it’s a monolithic, taxpayer-funded organisation. And the law was never intended – and certainly should not be used – to protect big organisations or large, mostly undefined groups. The law should be there to protect us individuals from them, not the other way around!

When the Government of the day ushered in the smoking ban, they either didn’t know or didn’t care that they were moving away from that basic tenet of British law being there to protect the individual into another, altogether different, area of the protection of a faceless, nameless, nebulous, fairly indefinable “group.” It’s always been a matter of great concern to me that at the time (or even in the years since) not a single peep nor even the slightest voice of concern has been raised, to my knowledge, by the Law Society, nor even – again, to my knowledge – by any individual member of the legal profession over the massive shift in emphasis that it represented. It was a much more dangerous piece of legislation than, it seems, anyone is prepared to recognise – not even those who profess to be experts in legislative principles and legal matters – and it will remain dangerous until such a time as it is repealed or at least reviewed and amended to bring it into line with the basic tenets upon which British law is, or should be, based. Like a deep-seated infection that’s never really been fully expunged it will continue throwing out secondary infections all over the place, until eventually it takes over the whole organism and destroys it totally which, looking at society today, it is well on the way to doing. It really was, and is, that important. But no-one, least of all lawyers, seem to be able to see it as a major instigator of the bigger picture that we now see evolving unpleasantly around us – with intolerance, division, self-righteousness, and the Victim Olympics now reaching epic, often ludicrous, proportions. And, like any deep-seated infection, ignoring it or refusing to do anything about it certainly won’t make it go away. In fact ….. well, we all know what happens if you ignore these things, don’t we?