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    LoyalLoyalJusticeJustice
    Made withinDC&Austin
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    Home/Original/inverse
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    Inverse View

    It is not the case that The threshold of risk required to justify regulation under the harm principle should vary inversely with the magnitude of the harm risked.

    ?Set your confidence on the premises below to see your aggregate.

    Reasons For

    2 perspectives
    Reason for 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 for 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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    Reasons Against

    1 perspective
    Reason against
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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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