Thursday, December 29, 2016

Where's the harm?

Two thoughts about harm, neither of which is perhaps very interesting (although if they are uninteresting because they have been expressed before I'd be grateful for a reference).

The first is about Mill's so-called harm principle, which says, roughly, that adults from civilized countries should be allowed to do whatever they like as long as they don't harm anybody else. As is well known, he does not say what he means by harm. Generally, I believe, it is taken to mean direct physical or financial damage, but there is no obvious reason why this should be so, and it isn't what Mill says. (For instance, why count a small physical harm as more significant than a great psychological harm?, or a great but indirect financial loss as less important than a small, direct financial loss?) In fact Mill clearly does not believe that people should be allowed to do whatever they want as long as they don't directly harm others. For instance, he thinks it's OK to compel people to give testimony in court or to help defend their country from attack. And you should not be allowed to sell yourself into slavery, since this would be giving up your freedom.

So it's more that there is a certain sphere within which you should be free than that you should have virtually unlimited freedom. But this limited sphere of freedom includes some very vague terms, such as freedom of "tastes and pursuits," which seems to put us back in the realm of freedom to do what you like as long as you don't harm anyone else. Except that this is explicitly not what Mill means, and we still have not defined harm. So I wonder whether Mill is really saying anything at all. That is, does the harm principle, or at least Mill's harm principle, really exist?

Speaking of harm, Judith Thomson sees no morally significant difference between killing and letting die. If, because I want you dead, I fail to intervene when I see you accidentally eat poison then this is just the same, morally speaking, as if I deliberately poison you. On the other hand, Henry Fonda does no wrong if he fails to cross the room and touch my head, even if his doing so (and nothing else) would save my life. This is because I have no right to his help, and hence his inaction is not unjust. If he crossed the room and killed me, though, then this would be unjust killing. I have no right to his help, but I do have a right to his not harming me. But harming is the same, morally, as not helping. So I'm struggling to see how Thomson thinks of this. I imagine she has addressed it somewhere (unless I'm hallucinating the problem), but I don't remember reading about it.  

(This is one of three or four posts I started before Christmas and didn't post because I didn't get around to editing them. Apologies if it is still only half-baked.)    

10 comments:

  1. same problem with virtue ethics and the like, to get anything done one has to talk in terms of at hand specifics and not some vague generalization so in effect there can't literally be applied virtue ethics or the like.
    see what you think of:
    https://www.english.upenn.edu/~cavitch/pdf-library/Fish_FreeSpeech.pdf

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    1. Some virtue ethics focuses on specifics. For instance, in a discussion on Facebook recently a friend of mine asked something like "OK, so it's dishonest. But is it unethical?" I think Anscombe might say that this question has already been answered once we've settled that the act in question is dishonest. She might even question the meaning of a question like this (or "It's murder, but is it wrong?").

      But the application of virtue ethics, or any other kind of ethics, isn't going to be (or shouldn't be) automatic, without at least implicit reference to what is reasonable. And of course what is reasonable can be disputed.

      I haven't read Fish's essay carefully yet (not recently, anyway) but I gather he wants to make a point somewhat like this. Anyone who defends free speech means to defend free speech within reason, and what that is does not (necessarily) go without saying. To think otherwise is to engage in fantasy. I still think (and perhaps Fish would agree) that it can mean something to say that one believes in free speech. It might mean, for instance, that you are against censorship even of neo-Nazis or other people you regard as utterly unreasonable. As long, presumably, as they abide by certain norms (e.g. not directly inciting immediate violence). They must present their unreasonable thoughts in a reasonable way. It seems intelligible either to support or to oppose this kind of freedom.

      Perhaps Mill's harm principle is just like this--a coherent (albeit vague) proposal that we be more tolerant. It's just so vague that I wonder whether it really has any content at all.

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    2. the virtue ethics i'm most familiar with is in medical ethics and it starts from very vague principles like valuing "autonomy" or "justice" or the like (there's actually something akin to this in the later derrida on Democracy, Hospitality, etc), here is where I think Witt on familial resemblances and perspicuous reminders is a helpful corrective.

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    3. Oh yes, I know that kind of thing. It's all a bit vague.

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    4. yes and a bit worrying since they cloak their decisions in the high-minded rhetoric of the virtues as if they were serving some higher beings/logics, plus tends to get tied into hagiographic great man/saint modes.

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cDUy4943jD0

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    5. One good thing about references to autonomy and justice and so on in medical ethics is that they can encourage people to look at an issue from multiple angles. That kind of complication is useful, I think. But any system or theory runs the risk of simplifying distortingly instead, especially if badly used. (Not that simple moral clarity is always bad.)

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    6. if we could find people who could own up to what they are framing/projecting onto these situations that could be helpful but I think we would need to test if looking from multiple angles actually helps, the danger in all of these sorts of generalizations is that most folks aren't, capable of thinking thru potential implications of using differing tools/rubrics, often hard enough to find personnel who can use them more or less as designed, part of why I think this sort of philo needs to be tied into something like ethnography or Actor-Network-Theory to see what is actually being done in the name of.
      just came across:
      http://imperfectcognitions.blogspot.co.uk/2016/12/post-hoc-ergo-propter-hoc-some-benefits.html

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    7. Could be. Looking from multiple angles seems like a good first step for most students, but I don't know what actually is done in the name of such theories. And I have my doubts about what any one course can do.

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  2. "We have sinned in thought and word and deed, and in what we have left undone."

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    1. Yes, there are sins of omission. But I think the doing/not preventing distinction is important. Thomson seems both to rely on it and to deny it, which would be a problem. Perhaps I should just go back and re-read what she says.

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