hi this is dr. Gregory Sadler I'm a professor of philosophy and the president and founder of an educational consulting company called reason IO where we put philosophy into practice I've studied and taught philosophy for over 20 years and I find that many people run into difficulties reading classic philosophical texts sometimes it's the way things are said or how the text is structured but the concepts themselves are not always that complicated and that's where I come in to help students and lifelong learners I've been producing longer lecture videos and posting them to youtube many viewers say they find them useful what you're currently watching is part of a new series of shorter videos each of them focused on one core concept from an important philosophical text I hope you find it useful as well if there's one central concept or rule that is associated with John Stuart Mill's essay on Liberty it is what has come to be called the harm principle and in fact this is often taken as a summary of everything that's important about the work in general which is unfortunate because it is worth actually looking at all of the arguments and the examples that he uses because it flushes out this principal the principal is a skeleton you might say and the flesh and organs and inhabiting life comes from the arguments and examples provided in the rest of the work how do we know that it is so absolutely central well he tells us in the introduction the object of this essay is to assert one very simple principle so you might say well that's great why not a pamphlet instead of just a long ish you know book well because this principle itself is going to be simple to express but complex in its application and in its explanations so what is this about he says that this one single principle governs absolutely the dealings of society with the individual in the way of compulsion and control whether the means used be physical force in the form of legal penalties or the moral coercion of public opinion so he's looking at the legal realm the governmental the political realm and he's also looking at the broader social and cultural realm as well which could extend very you know I think quite reasonably into the economic realm and other things as well the aesthetic realm and so he's asserting that this applies both to what the government does and to what other associations other things do that affect individuals so what is the principle word from word it runs like this the only purpose for which power may be rightly exercised on any member of a civilized community against his will is to prevent harm to others a lot of people miss read this and they think that you know it means that the only purpose that any power that any person whatsoever uses against another person is to prevent harm to others there's a couple provisions in there that we actually need to look at mill uses this term member of a civilized community if you read other works by John Stuart Mill particularly his discussion of representative government but also you know his discussions in utilitarianism you realize that he does not mean this to apply to every single culture he has a you know kind of euro centric view that thinks that certain cultures are going to be more developed than others and perhaps this harm principle may not apply with within some of the less developed ones it also doesn't apply equally to adults as it does to equally to children as it to adults in part because children are not yet completely rational even most adults are not completely rational in mute in Mills view either and then that against his will that's quite important as well if somebody enters into an agreement say a legal contract where they say I can be fined if I don't deliver these goods that is you know in accordance with his will he may not like it at the time that he has to pay up that there's some legal damages when he engages in shifty or you know corrupt behavior but that wasn't actually against his will so there's a lot of things being covered here so agreements would you know limit this to some degree but it's still a very wide application and Mills argument for this running throughout the work is not based on something like rights to expression or property or anything like that he says this can actually be argued for on the basis of utility or usefulness so there's there's a basis for it that it's not simply being asserted as such so let's actually look at what he says here in this this paragraph a little bit more he says that the only purpose for which power can rightly be exercised preventing harm to others his own good either physical or moral is not a sufficient warrant why would he bring that up well because in our own time but even more so in Mills time and even more so in times before is this notion well I'm gonna exercise coercive power on you so as to conduce to your own good to keep you from doing something stupid to yourself or damaging yourself in the process or damaging your prospects or ruining your reputation that was viewed as as legitimate by many people even to the point of being able to say persecute those who hold the wrong opinions because it's damaging to them to believe the wrong things so this is really a rejection of two things that aren't brought up as such in the essay but which we can certainly highlight one of them is what we would call perfectionism this notion which mill does share that human beings can be more or less developed that you know we have a you know sort of scale or continuum and we can move along that from our you know less realized state to a more realized state now Mill doesn't agree that there's like one single way to attain human perfection or if you don't like the word perfection use the word development use the word fulfillment but he thinks that you can't use force to get people to go there or what we call paternalism paternalism is when we say well you're not competent to make judgments for yourself so I'm going to step in as sort of like a good father and make the judgments and determinations and decisions for you and if you don't like it I'll give you a spanking or I'll take something away from you I'll ground you will punish you I'll give you extra work to do I'll deprive you of opportunities until you fall in line so you know prime example of paternalism of this sort is when we restrict people's food choices in the open market saying you know sodas aren't good for you which is quite true and you can't be trusted to make your own decisions about it because look at you you fat slobs you keep drinking you know giant fountain drinks you you clearly have no self control we're gonna come down on you and say you shall not do that well that's paternalism Mill thinks that that is wrong when it's being exercised for the good of that person which might not actually be there good so you can't exercise power on an individual just to try to move them towards their good or to prevent them from harming themselves so long as that harm is not affecting others another prime example of this in our own time that this argument often gets made about are what we call victimless crimes for example taking certain kinds of drugs obviously you know many drugs have some pretty severe effects on the person over time and you know if we're getting to the point where say like using crack cocaine or heroin or crystal meth tends to lead to a process of engaging in crime in order to be able to buy more of it okay mill would say that's fine you can you can restrict that but if the person is actually able to like sit in their own apartment and enjoy their drugs and you know not affect their relationships and their work and their neighborhood mill would say you have no business using legal penalties or even moral coercion of public opinion against those people so he goes on and he says a person cannot be rightly compelled to do or forbear because it will be better for him to do so because it will make him happier because in the opinions of others to do so would be wise or even right now notice what he says next this doesn't mean that we have to be totally hands-off he says that we can try to persuade them we can engage in our own freedom of expression and every time that we see the person say like man I wish you wouldn't do X because it's hurting you that's perfectly fine to do he says there are good reasons for remonstrated with him remonstrated as oh can't you see how this is harming you holding you back reasoning with him persuading him in treating him but there are no good reasons for compelling him or visiting him with any evil in case he do otherwise and then mill says to justify that the conduct from which it is desired to deter him must be calculated to produce evil to someone else the only part of the conduct of anyone for which he is amenable to society is that which concerns others so if my you know heavy drug use or you know drinking or tobacco use or whatever it's going to be is and indeed affecting others in negative ways prime example of this with tobacco you so secondhand smoke smokers would say I have the right to smoke it's my body I can do what I want and then you know we've discovered scientifically that it's actually quite bad for other people to be in there while other people are puffing away and filling their with with smoke and it has deleterious effects on those people who didn't choose that then you can say okay no you can't do that and then we can have laws like indeed we've passed saying you can't smoke in public buildings or you can't smoke in restaurants or you can't smoke in bars and we could do similar things about other drugs if we know for example that becoming addicted to opiate medications is not only going to harm the person which it does but also have a negative effect on all sorts of other things that impinge upon other persons then we can we can restrict it and Mill says that in that case the harm principle doesn't apply says in the part which merely concerns himself his independence is of right absolute but when it comes to other people society has a stake in it so we can in fact prevent harm to others for example other people coercing other people he's got some very interesting examples discussed within the work you know one one prime example that he discusses quite late in in the work in Chapter four is the practice of polygamy among the Latter day Saints of his time he says I you know it's interesting that we don't seem to have a problem when people in other cultures are doing this but when they're english-speaking we say it's absolutely wrong and Mill ends up staking a position where he says you know those women can you know it's a matter of religion which is a voluntary thing if they want to they can leave I think if Mill were to actually look at it closer up and talk with a number of them he might say oh actually they are being coerced they're out in the middle of nowhere they're dependent so if we're for coercing others then the state or public opinion can indeed bring coercive force against us if I'm beating my kids and you know we've decided as a society that beating is is wrong which thing thank goodness we certainly have then the state can come in and punish me I you know I can't justify it by saying it's it's my family my rights begin at the door your rights and they're well because somebody else is being affected somebody else should not be harmed so the harm principle does have quite a scope what does it actually apply to in Mills view in Chapter two he is going to discuss freedom of thought and what we nowadays call freedom of expression freedom of opinion in his view and freedom to publish those opinions he'll also talk about you know character and and what we nowadays call lifestyle the way in which we live and then in later chapters he's going to discuss associations with other people and even trade trade provides an interesting set of examples he says that you know the state for example can tell you you can't trade in poisons but in general we should we should stick with free trade going back to the the Association and lifestyle things here there's a nice pass from Chapter four in which he explains this a bit that I think could be quite helpful for understanding it he says that here we go when we look at how we regard other people whether we think that they're decent people or disgusting people or somewhere in between how they've developed in terms of human nature whether they're nearer to the ideal perfection of it or grossly deficient in these qualities we're going to have sentiments right we'll have admiration or the opposite of it which we might call disgust and he says that though doing no wrong to anyone a person may act so as to compel us to judge him and to feel to him as a fool or as a being of an inferior order since this judgment and feeling are a fact which he would prefer to avoid it is doing him a service to warn him of it beforehand as of any other disagreeable consequence to which he exposes themselves so you know we see somebody behaving badly and we say hey you know not gonna bring any force to bear on you but quit acting like a jackass because people don't like that don't be a jerk that's not violating the harm principle as a matter of fact it's perfectly fine to do that he says it would be well indeed if this go to office were more freely rendered than the common notions of politeness and present permit and if one person could honestly point out to another that he thinks him in fault without being considered unmannerly or presuming and he says we have a right also in various ways to act upon our unfavorable opinion of anyone not to the oppression of his individuality but in the exercise of ours very important point there can't oppress their individuality so he says we're not bound for example to seek his society we have a right to avoid it though not to parade the avoidance we have a right to choose the society most acceptable to us we have a right and it may be our duty to caution others against him we may give others a preference over him and optional good offices except those which attended ISM improvement so he says in these various modes a person may suffer very severe penalties at the hand of others for faults which can directly concern only himself but he suffers these penalties only so far as their the natural and as it were the spontaneous consequence of the faults themselves not because they were purposively inflicted on him for the sake of punishment so you know the harm principle allows us to say I'm not going to go to your party as a matter of fact I don't even want to talk to you I'm not going to friend you on social media I may in fact block you so long as we're not producing some sort of coercive that harms the person it would be different if I say well if you want to be hired for this government position which is open to everybody you have to friend me on social media that would be wrong according to the harm principle so this gives you some idea of the scope of it to reiterate you know the only purpose for which power of this this sort coercion penalties may be rightly exercised against a person's will is to prevent harm to others that's the harm principle one of the key ideas of Liberty you