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    The threshold of risk required to justify regulation unde... — Carmelics
    Home/Justice & Punishment
    HistoryEditSee Inverse

    The threshold of risk required to justify regulation under the harm principle should vary inversely with the magnitude of the harm risked.

    Justice & PunishmentRights & Liberty
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    Reasons For

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    Reason for
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    • 1.The harm principle can be applied prospectively to prevent actions that risk harm, not only actions that cause certain harm.
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    • 2.Mill requires only that an action risks harm, not that harm is certain, for the harm principle to apply.
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    • 3.A lower probability of harm is sufficient to justify regulation when the potential harm is greater in magnitude.
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    Reasons Against

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    Reason against 1 of 2
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    • 1.Mill's harm principle was designed to protect individual liberty from majoritarian paternalism, not to create a utilitarian risk-calculus for regulation.
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    • 2.An inverse-threshold rule transforms the harm principle from a liberty-protecting constraint into an expansive regulatory license, inverting Mill's original purpose.
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    • 3.Feinberg's careful reconstruction of Mill in 'Harm to Others' shows that probability and magnitude are not interchangeable variables but distinct gating conditions.
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    Reason against 2 of 2
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    • 1.Varying regulatory thresholds inversely with harm magnitude collapses into precautionary principle reasoning, which Bernard Williams and others showed is subject to paralysis under catastrophic-risk inflation.
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    • 2.Once magnitude can lower the probability threshold toward zero, nearly any human activity becomes regulable by hypothesizing sufficiently severe downstream harms, destroying the principle's action-guiding specificity.
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    Justice & PunishmentRights & Liberty

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    Consequentialism1 linked

    Related

    A lower probability of harm is sufficient to justify regulation when the potenti...An inverse-threshold rule transforms the harm principle from a liberty-protectin...Feinberg's careful reconstruction of Mill in 'Harm to Others' shows that probabi...Mill requires only that an action risks harm, not that harm is certain, for the ...
    +4 moreShow less
    Mill's harm principle was designed to protect individual liberty from majoritari...Once magnitude can lower the probability threshold toward zero, nearly any human...The harm principle can be applied prospectively to prevent actions that risk har...Varying regulatory thresholds inversely with harm magnitude collapses into preca...

    Similar

    A lower probability of harm is sufficient to justify regulation when t...88%Even weak sufficiency of the harm principle requires supplementation b...83%The harm principle cannot be equated with permitting regulation of all...81%Mill requires only that an action risks harm, not that harm is certain...81%

    Source

    AI-extracted1/3 agreementValid
    SEP: mill-moral-political
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    Second, Mill envisions that the harm principle is something that we can apply prospectively to prevent someone from acting in certain ways and causing harm. In many cases all we could reasonably know is that a given action risks harm. Fortunately, this seems to be all that Mill requires (IV 10). There are interesting and important questions about what threshold of risk must be met for purposes of the harm principle, which Mill does not address. Presumably, the threshold should vary inversely wit
    Extraction notes

    Validity: Extracted via Max plan + API grounding/validity checks

    Details

    Type
    claim
    Perspectives
    3 (1 for, 2 against)
    Edits
    1 edit