PHIL 3040 Lecture Notes - Lecture 16: John Stuart Mill, Harm Principle, On Liberty
4 Dec 2018
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Document Summary
So far the textbook material has been concerned with the question of what law is; from now on the question changes to what is the proper boundary of coercive law. Answering this question, the following approaches will be examined: the harm principal, paternalism, legal moralism and the offence principal. John stuart mill is the proponent of the harm principle. He believed that democracy was the best form of government. In the following up the principal of greatest happiness he inevitably began to consider how the individual and the government should be related. Mill tells us that historically liberty has been understood as protection against the tyranny of the political rulers whose power was regarded as necessary but also very dangerous. Individuals not only should be protected from the power of an officer of the state but also from the tyranny of the dominant opinion and feeling of the society power.
