Search

People are sometimes distressed by the bare knowledge that lifestyles are being practised or opinions held which they take to be immoral. Is this distress to be regarded as harm for the purposes of Mill's Harm Principle? I argue, first, that this is an issue that is to be resolved not by analysis of the concept of harm but by reference to the arguments in On Liberty with which the Harm Principle is supported. Secondly, I argue that reference to those arguments makes it clear beyond doubt that, since Mill valued moral confrontation and the shattering of moral complacency as means to social progress, he must have regarded moral distress as a positive good rather than as a harm that society ought to intervene to prevent. Thirdly, I relate this interpretation to Mill's points about temperance, decency and good manners. I argue, finally, that my interpretation is inconsistent with Mill's underlying utilitarianism only if the latter is understood in a crudely hedonistic way. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article comments on the central to the political theory of John Locke, Great Britain's empirical philosopher, in which he claims that individual property rights are possible in a pre-political state of nature, and that these are based, not on the consent of mankind, but on the unilateral appropriative acts of those who are to have the rights in question. At first sight, it seems as if Locke favors the former alternative. Time and again, he stresses that man enters political society to preserve his property. The government, he argues, is obliged to secure every ones property by providing against those defects that made the State of Nature so unsafe and uneasie.