The Harm Principle

N-Dubz singer Tulisa Contostavlos (Wiseman, 2012) raised an important issue about consent when a tape was released without her permission. This brings to mind 'On Liberty' (1859), in which John Stuart Mill wrote:

'The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.'

This became the core of the 'harm principle'; the idea that only where an individual's actions may harm others can society have a legitimate mandate to outright interfere with individual liberty.

A great part of this harm principle is the promotion of personal responsibility. In being more clearly free to choose, the responsibility for decisions can be more clearly tied to individuals - increasing accountability. With the harm principle individuals can set themselves largely free of outside interference in their lives, through the disciplined exercise of this personal responsibility.

But with self-sovereignty, while individuals hold sole possession of power over themselves, the power of individuals is also limited strictly to themselves. As such, individuals must be aware of and in control of their actions so as not to interfere with the rights of others to choose, nor to force the hand of someone with whom a choice is shared.

'The only part of the conduct of anyone, for which he is amenable to society, is that which concerns others. In the part which merely concerns himself, his independence is, of right, absolute. Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.'

Consider the recent case of N-Dubz singer Tulisa Contostavlos (Wiseman, 2012). An ex-partner released a tape of the pair sharing an 'intimate moment'; which Ms Contostavlos described as 'something he took upon himself, to put the footage online'.

In revealing this information, without her consent, this former partner assaulted Ms Contostavlos' liberty - robbing the singer of the right to choose for herself. Such an act is tyranny; an attempt by a person to increase their own power and importance by stripping someone else of theirs. But as Oscar Wilde put it:

'Despotism is unjust to everybody, including the despot, who was probably made for better things.'

Such despotisms do more than just accumulate power. They assault others by stripping them of their liberty and they assault the aggressor by piling extra responsibility upon their shoulders. But there is a further way that that despotic acts harm both the aggressor and victim.

As with the arguments over positive and negative liberty, all concerned should be wary about the knock on affects of taking away choice from any individual, even for the best of reasons:

'The worth of a State, in the long run, is the worth of the individuals composing it; and a State which postpones the interests of their mental expansion and elevation, to a little more of administrative skill or that semblance of it which practice gives, in the details of business; a State, which dwarfs its men, in order that they may be more docile instruments in its hands even for beneficial purposes, will find that with small men no great thing can really be accomplished; and that the perfection of machinery to which it has sacrificed everything, will in the end avail it nothing, for want of the vital power which, in order that the machine might work more smoothly, it has preferred to banish.'

This 'vital power' being the tools and use of reason - developed in time through the practice of an individual making conscious decisions for themselves. And through denying this to others, by way of petty despotic power-grabbing, an individual will only ultimately harm themselves; both through establishing a precedent of interfering behaviour and through limiting the experience those around them have in making rational decisions.

==========

References:

==========

+ John Stuart Mill's 'On Liberty'; 1859.

+ Eva Wiseman's 'Tulisa is feminism's new hero'; in The Guardian; 24 March 2012.