God forbade...must reading!

Harm principle





   John Stuart Mill's On Liberty addresses the nature and limits of the power that can be legitimately exercised by society over the individual. The harm principle holds that each individual has the right to act as he wants, so long as these actions do not harm others. If the action is self-regarding, that is, if it only directly affects the person undertaking the action, then society has no right to intervene, even if it feels the actor is harming himself. He does argue, however, that individuals are prevented from doing lasting, serious harm to themselves or their property by the harm principle. Because no-one exists in isolation, harm done to oneself also harms others, and destroying property deprives the community as well as oneself.



    Mill argues that free discourse is a necessary condition for intellectual and social progress. We can never be sure, he contends, that a silenced opinion does not contain some element of the truth. He also argues that allowing people to air false opinions is productive for two reasons. First, individuals are more likely to abandon erroneous beliefs if they are engaged in an open exchange of ideas. Second, by forcing other individuals to re-examine and re-affirm their beliefs in the process of debate, these beliefs are kept from declining into mere dogma. It is not enough for Mill that one simply has an unexamined belief that happens to be true; one must understand why the belief in question is the true one.


   Social liberty for Mill was to put limits on the ruler’s power so that he would not be able to use his power on his own wishes and make every kind of decision which could harm society. In other words, people should have the right to have a say in the government’s decisions. He said that social liberty was “the nature and limits of the power which can be exercised by society over the individual”.



   "Society can and does execute its own mandates: and if it issues wrong mandates, or any mandates at all in things with which it ought not to meddle, it practices a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression. Though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself.”



    Ayn Rand, philosopher and novelist, wrote against the idea of tyranny of the majority. She says that individual rights are not subject to a public vote, and that the political function of rights is precisely to protect minorities from oppression by majorities (and that the smallest minority on earth is the individual).

  
   American political theorist John C. Calhoun developed the theory of concurrent majority to deal with the tyranny of the majority. It states that great decisions are not merely a matter of numerical majorities, but require agreement or acceptance by the major interest in society, each of which had the power to block federal laws that it feared would seriously infringe on their rights. That is, it is illegitimate for a temporary coalition that had a majority to gang up on and hurt a significant minority. The doctrine is one of limitations on democracy to prevent the tyranny.
 
 
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