Wikipedia notes: “The harm principle holds that the actions of individuals should be limited only to prevent harm to other individuals.”
I’ve loved some of my cars and I’ve felt like they were an extension of me. Any harm to these vehicles felt like a harm to me.
Harm reduction, or harm minimization, refers to a range of intentional practices and public health policies designed to lessen the negative social and/or physical consequences associated with various human behaviors, both legal and illegal. Harm reduction is used to decrease negative consequences of recreational drug use and sexual activity without requiring abstinence, recognizing that those unable or unwilling to stop can still make positive change to protect themselves and others.
In his work in progress, Conservative Claims of Cultural Oppression: On the Nature and Origins of Conservaphobia, Rony Guldmann writes:
* Given that the symbolic realism is invariably intertwined with the biological functioning of a symbolic animal, liberalism’s efforts to mark off a sphere of “real” harm-tracking morality from the realm of airy cultural grievances is necessarily parochial, the product of an ethnocentrism that cannot recognize how liberals and conservatives partake of a shared humanity one side of which liberalism discounts.
* We now believe our freedom ends only at others’ noses. But pre-moderns saw things, and had to see things, very differently. That deviant conduct created no tangible harms and transpired out of sight was not dispositive because facially private misconduct was a transgression, not only against others’ sensibilities, but also against the order of things. Given that everyone’s place in this order depended on its continued sustenance, a transgression against it was a transgression against all.
* Steven Smith observes that the harm-principle—according to which the state may only regulate harmful as opposed to merely immoral conduct—has served as “a trusty weapon in the arsenal of liberalism.”22Though conservative defenders of liberty-restricting legislation have sometimes acceded to the principle’s premises and emphasized the harmful “secondary effects” of facially harmless conduct—e.g., pornography’s contribution to urban blight—these arguments have generally been ineffectual, and are also suspected as disingenuous rationalizations for moralistic motivations. Thus, in practice the harm-principle has nearly always yielded liberal prescriptions.
* Much of the legislation that liberals would veto under the harm-principle as unduly coercive can be defended as a response to the “psychic harm” and “communal harm” which the targeted conduct obviously causes. After all, “psychic distress is a kind of mental pain” and “is plainly something that people prefer to avoid.”24There is thus an obvious sense in which conduct that causes it—like the consumption or dissemination of pornography—is “harmful” and falls within the ambit of the harm-principle, irrespective of secondary effects. The same holds true of communal harm: “If people get satisfaction or happiness from living in a particular kind of community, then conduct that subverts that kind of community and thus reduces such happiness inflicts a kind of ‘harm.’
* The triumph of the harm principle is a merely rhetorical triumph, however. For liberals have by “sleight of hand” engaged in “rampant equivocation, trading on more ordinary senses of ‘harm’ for rhetorical purposes while importing technical or artificial conceptions of ‘harm’ in order to secure their desired conclusions.” They have “rigged” the concept of harm by exploiting its commonsense “subject-oriented” meaning—which includes psychic and communal harms—in order to establish the harm-principle’s commonsense rhetorical appeal while then narrowing its application to physical invasions of others’ autonomy when dealing with specific controversies, thus securing liberal outcomes. Liberals are thus “like people who insist that an issue should be resolved by democratic vote while working behind the scenes to disenfranchise groups who might be inclined to vote against their cause.” Their professions to the contrary notwithstanding, liberals do impose their values on others, because their tendentious conception of harm disguises the “quintessentially illiberal practice of treating some people’s ideas of the good life as less worthy,” concealing “how harm principle rhetoric actually works to obfuscate the deeper issues, to conceal real injuries, and to marginalize some conceptions of the good life.”
* Amy Wax observes that rationalistic liberals are unmoved and unimpressed by social conservatives’ “[v]ague premonitions of erosion or unraveling” of the social order, which they dismiss as “an inadequate basis for resisting changes that satisfy immediate needs and urgent desires.” And this is because they understand these vague premonitions as symptoms of a lingering pre-modern sensibility, which cannot be allowed interfere with modern “fulfillment.” Hence Justice Blackmun’s dissent in Bowers v. Hardwick, where he argued that homosexuality in and of itself “involves no real interference with the rights of others, for the mere knowledge that other individuals do not adhere to one’s value system cannot be a legally cognizable interest.” This is how moral opposition to homosexuality must be conceived within a strategic perspective—as mere Hobbesian “annoyance” rather than some disequilibrium in the order of things. Thus understood, the desire to regulate others’ unobtrusive personal conduct out of concern for the “moral fiber of society” is a disingenuous gambit to arrogate state power in the service of merely personal preferences.
* If the desire to place a crèche on public property is a purely symbolic aspiration, then so too is the desire to remove it.
* What some women will dismiss as harmless sexual innuendo acknowledging the basic fact of animal attraction may be experienced by feminists as a denial of their personhood, a degrading fall from the lofty heights of that personhood into merely animal passions.
* [Dan Kahan writes in The Cognitively Illiberal State:] “We moderns are no less disposed to believe that moral transgressions threaten societal harm. This perception is not, as is conventionally supposed, a product of superstition or unreasoning faith in authority. Rather it is the predictable consequence of the limited state of any individual’s experience with natural and social causation, and the role that cultural commitments inevitably play in helping to compensate for this incompleteness in knowledge. What truly distinguishes ours from the premodern condition in this sense is not the advent of modern science; it is the multiplication of cultural worldviews, competition among which has generated historically unprecedented conflict over how to protect society from harm at the very same time that science has progressively enlarged our understandings of how our world works.”
