What Is Mill's Harm Principle?

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There was a principle that Mill introduced with respect to freedom of action of individuals. Mill presented the well known ‘harm principle’ as the only justified boundary of individual’s action. It states that the only action that should be prevented is the action that affects other’s interests. In other words, an individual can do whatever he wants, as long as his actions do not harm others. If those actions only influence him, then nobody including society and government can stop him from doing them. This principle is supported by a psychological theory that says human beings are social animals by nature (Newby-Clark 2010). Human beings need each other because basically, there is a necessity in each human being to interact with others. They rely on each other in running all aspects of life and at the same time, they affect others as well as being affected by others. …show more content…
Connecting Mill’s harm principle with the preceding theory, it implies that an individual should only do good actions such as virtue and generosity since those actions will bring pleasure to people around him, and avoid disgraceful actions since those actions will harm many people. Taking a case as an example, there were two German men vandalized a metro train in Singapore (Agence France-Presse 2015). They actually harmed people who directly or indirectly were associated with it, such as making the government had to hire someone to clean it up and disrupting the passengers’ comfort with an ugly looking train. Thus, the harm principle explicitly suggests that an individual is free to do anything and no one can limit it, as long as his actions do not harm others since the harmful effects will be encountered by many

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