The ideas for this have been running around my head for a few weeks, but I think I have them in some kind of order now. I’m not trying to come up with any definite answers, but frame a few questions I’ve been thinking about recently.
At its very core, the basic principle behind Mill’s On Liberty, the Harm Principle, is that each person should have the freedom to do whatever they want, as long as it causes no harm to others. This is the heart of modern liberal philosophy, and generally the first principle I turn to when making a philosophical decision. Obviously, however, a principle this simple is going to require some expansion to apply in a lot of circumstances, especially when many people or factors are involved.
What counts as harm?
Firstly, not everyone is going to have the same concept of harm. Many people will think of purely physical or quantitative harm, e.g. ‘I will be injured’, or ‘I will be poorer’. On the other hand, there are many other factors that could be considered. Given that we are talking about liberty, some people will consider harm to their personal freedoms or human rights, such as right to privacy, freedom of speech, freedom of religion. These are relatively obvious examples that most people could subscribe to, but what happens when you get to social rights, such as the right to collective bargaining? Some people will consider the loss of these rights as causing real harm to them, whereas others will not believe it to be harm. Here the principle suddenly becomes less clear; the person choosing to act may not feel that they are causing harm, whereas the person affected by their actions may feel they have been harmed in quite a definite way. My initial reaction here would be that the action does breach the Harm Principle, as the person affected is, subjectively at least, feeling harm; harm is a subjective concept, so if you feel it, it must have happened. A more complex solution might be to weigh the liberty of the person acting against the harm felt by the person affected. However, this begins to suggest that, as not everyone acknowledges the type of harm, it is somehow less serious, or less important. This, along with the idea of ‘weighing’ the two beliefs, begins to add an element of subjectivity into what, until now, was a (mostly) subjective principle.
Proportionate harm
So far the assumption seems to have been that the acting and the harmed parties begin in a neutral position, with the acting party ending up better off and the harmed party worse off. This misses the scenario where the acting party is choosing to act to avoid or rectify some kind of harm to himself. Here, there is potential harm on both sides, and a balancing act is required; is the harm to acting party if he does not act greater or lesser than the potential harm to the harmed party if he does not act? Again, the most obvious solution to this is to balance the potential harms against both parties; whichever option causes the least harm is probably optimal. However, this again brings an element of objectivity into the equation. Unless both harms can be neutrally quantified, the parties are probably going to have different opinions of which option causes the most harm (presumably skewed towards which causes them the most harm).
This is where the concept of proportionality has crept into the law, most clearly in human rights law; the action must have a legitimate aim (here, the prevention of harm to the acting party) and the result must be proportionate to the harm caused to the other party. The problem here is that you will often have the different parties placing a different value on each of the rights or harms; the most prevalent example is placing different amounts of importance on freedom of speech and the right privacy.
Subjectivity v. objectivity
So far, the solution to these problems seems to be to weigh up the two potential options; where the action is taken and where the action is not taken. This takes the Harm Principle out of the almost purely subjective system, whereby it is causing harm to someone that must be avoided. To balance the two options fairly, you need an outside perspective on the two actions (the more legally minded will see this as where the courts come in). Suddenly this is less subjectively liberal, and the good of others must be considered. Furthermore, the subjective values both parties place on the harms/liberties caused must be balanced, again making the decision more objective. In making these balancing decisions, some kind of value must be placed on each of the harms caused, and one party is inevitably going to be left unhappy with the final outcome. While this is a pragmatic necessity (the other option is to spend all day debating it and not reaching a solution), the problem is that placing a different value on a harm to the person who is being harmed may in itself be a harm to that person; are you harming their own freedom of thought?
If there was a perfect solution to any of this the world would be a happier place. On a much larger scale, democracy is the closest we’ve come to placing a value on harms and rights in a large population. On an individual level, however, these problems are still going to come up on a regular basis. While almost everyone has the ability to think objectively to a greater or lesser extent, when it is the good of one person against another operating in a near-vacuum, with greatly differing opinions on the extent of the potential harms, I’m not sure it is possible to come up with a purely rational decision.
