And it Harm None
It is surely the case that many a book simply demands to be written, in spite of the flaws within its argument. One such is surely John Stuart Mill’s book Liberty. On the one hand the certain theme of Liberty feels bewitchingly easy. Humans, the argument runs should be free to do and to believe what they want, and when they want; so long as that action or that belief harms no other humans. One can as one reads the book easily imagine the elation in Mill’s eye at this point. Here, he thought at last, was a definitive workable definition of Freedom. Freedom might be not definable in the positive (it is so hard to say what freedom is). But, that does not matter, so long as one defines the negative case. That is, so long as one defines what one is not free to do. In everything else, one is free to do what one wills! Not only have the philosophical debates of two thousand years or so been ‘solved’ at a stroke, but also the insipid danger of democracy, that it can easily slip into the tyranny of the majority over the minority, is guarded carefully against. No one, the argument runs, can have the right to oppress another group, unless that ‘other’ poses some risk.
Toleration is thereby wired into a democracy, or at least it should be. And yet, as every undergraduate knows, this is the point where the argument flounders. What after all, is harm? What is a threat? Is education also harmful? What about advertising? Or wearing a veil? Or talking about talking about terrorism. Harm seems to modern eyes to be everywhere! Parents, doctors, politicians, children, all are ‘harmful’; all must have their freedom curtailed. We live then in a society almost hypnotized by harm, as to claim one is being harmed (by another) is to claim the right to curtail that other’s freedom. How does one understand this flaw? One could of course appeal to the history. Mill was writing of a society which was radically changing, from an agrarian to an industrial way of life. It is hardly surprising that he failed to understand that some of the complexities of the latter world, would elude him. The harm which he writes of, is therefore rooted in the simplicity of feudal societies (where harm = torture), and is not adequate to understand ‘modern life’. Such an argument is worthy in its way, and yet it fails to grasp the accord between freedom and harm, which surely is at the heart of the argument on Liberty. That is, the claim that to curtail another’s freedom, one needs to appeal to harm as a principle: Do so and Harm, freedom and oppression, thereby become intractably intertwined.
A strange three cornered relationship results. In one corner there is freedom, which endlessly attempts to demonstrate that certain practices are harmless in themselves. - Or only harm the ‘consenting’ adults taking part. For example the entire argument about the ethics of sexual liberation was reduced to an argument about harm. If the sex was ‘consenting’ (that is, I suppose if both parties not only wanted it, but could be expected to have made that decision freely), then it was not a matter of state concern exactly who slept with whom. In the other corner, there are the forces of oppression, which can only operate if they manufacture some new ‘harm’ criterion. Whole industries therefore exist to engineer new ways to understand what it is to harm another, and thereby new means and mechanisms for oppression. For example, one can with varying degrees of sense, ask questions about the rights of parent to harm their children. That is, one can wonder at what point the state intervenes to prevent such ‘harm’, and at what point the child has a right to redress for bad parenting. One becomes sucked within an entire morass, of ‘harm’ and its demonstration and mitigations.
In the final corner is harm itself. Harm, when it clearly exists, becomes a political nightmare. An apparent harm calls for an oppression. That is, a curtailing of a freedom. And yet it is not at all clear which freedom is involved, and therefore how that oppression might itself be manifested. Harm has a tendency to lead to a deep philosophical debate, about who inflicted what harm, and who (or better what) must be oppressed. For example, a racist murder, and a bungled investigation are clear, and very raw ‘harms’. And yet it is not clear what ‘freedom’ is being exercised and by whom to produce such a harm. The eventual conclusion being, that the harmers were not people but an institution (“the Police are institutionally racist”), and must then be ‘oppressed’ accordingly. Or again, this is surely the problem of the failure of the ‘global’ community to address the problem of global warming. Here is a harm clear for all to see - something needs to be done, some right (be it cheap flights or the right to pour carbon into the atmosphere) needs to be delimited, and yet the harm itself cannot resolve what exact form this oppression should take. Each freedom is thereby free to make a case that it itself is harmless enough (when taken in context), and therefore should be left alone. The entire argument becomes therefore quite irresolvable, while all the while the harm increases, until such a point where something (that is some much wider oppressive measure) will have to be done.
Moreover these conflicts are further complicated by an insidious inversion, which appears native to the struggle itself. Take for example the slogan of ‘political correctness gone mad’. A slogan whose appeal is clearly, initially at least, that it appears to be on the side of freedom. Taken at face value, it is freedom’s lament that some of its cherished customs are being falsely branded harmful. However of course things are not quite that simple. The ‘customs’ involved, be they nativity plays or sending Christmas cards or liking ‘Carry On’ Films, are frequently not under attack at all. ‘Freedom’ is thereby pre-empting a harm argument that has yet to be manifested (or more likely is never to be manifested). In doing so, it itself slips rather neatly into the ‘oppression corner’. The very act of another religion or culture, looking to make a harm based argument for an oppression, becomes quite unthinkable. That is, other faiths or peoples are torn from their right to be harmed and therefore from their right to use that pain to legitimize some new oppression, in its turn. It of course goes without saying that the ‘War on Terror’ represents perhaps the darkest and most extreme form of this modern inversion. A highly oppressive war waged in the name of freedom, a war where one’s talking about an action, and the action itself, become one and the same, so that intention or even wish becomes reprehensible, in the name of liberty!
Modernity whizzes around, inventing and transmuting freedom, harm and oppression, with gay and effortless abandon. It becomes impossible for a single example to hold itself within one corner, but rather it is endlessly buffeted between each and every point, and numerous possible inversions. What makes this exchange so very bewildering, is that the battle is at no point a battle of equals, so much as slips and jumps between axes. To start with a freedom, whose harmlessness must be demonstrated, is not to start with harm and look to an oppression, or yet to start with an oppressive instinct, and look to a harm to justify that oppression. The oppression that freedom seeks to resist, is never simply the same as the freedom which oppression itself (in the name of harm) seeks to enclose; and yet neither harm nor freedom nor oppression can exist without the other. In order that some of these complexities might be examined in detail, perhaps it will suffice to take one example, that of drugs, and examine it from each corner.
Perhaps, with drugs it is best to start with Harm. The problem of drugs is that they harm the individual involved but also that that harm then implicates others - both those who produce the drugs, but also those who are caught up in the Drug lifestyle, and harmed by it for no good reason. The problem from ‘Harm’s concern’ appears to have a simple resolution. It is not the concern of liberty that people kill themselves, only that they on the one hand, effect no other in that death, but on the other hand, that that death is the result of some act which they have chosen and not merely due to accidental pollution. An answer would clearly be not merely to legalize but also to medicalize drugs. Removing them from the culture of ’danger’ and into the humdrum or medical regulation (with all its petty oppressions). However, as is so often the way, the ‘harm based’ argument, is politically impossible, as no one can frame the argument in a way that, given on the one hand the long association of drugs with creative and personal freedom, and on the other with policing, is acceptable. Both sides conspire to rule out a ‘harm only’ solution.
In the concern of freedom, there is the long and somewhat weary claim that drugs only effect the individual involved. It is their choice to tranquilize themselves, and no one has a right to stop it. An argument which immediately becomes caught up in a whole welter of other ‘harm’ arguments, as there are many side effects of death, and ways of dying. The claim that drugs are simply a personal concern, when that personal concern changes the nature of one’s personality, starts to look distinctly problematic. Drugs, in changing personalities, clearly binds up others in that change. Moreover given that very often, it is the drug that is making the call about whether the individual chooses to take it (or not), it becomes unclear at which point a decision to take a drug, ceases to be voluntary. ‘Freedom’ is only free as long as the individual who is free, remains able to remain the same individual with the same ability to make a choice; and when this is compromised, the entire argument starts to look more tricky. Freedom’s claim that an individual must be allowed to be free, at the point of deciding as long as the act that they perform might harm them alone, is, while true in each and every case, only itself as good, if the act of choosing itself does not itself inevitably change the individual themselves, and thereby render the problem of personal responsibility problematic. What responsibility after all, do I have to my subsequent selves? Do I have a right to a living will, when the senile ‘me’ might want to cling to life at all costs? The last point is then almost inevitably caught up with another argument about creativity. Drugs, the argument runs, allows uncreative folk to realize their inner ‘creativity’. They provide a short cut to genius (or its near miss). And yet this appeal to an inner creative genius, confuses two issues. On the one hand there was never any doubt that drugging a part of one’s brain makes one feel good. But there is considerable doubt about whether this ‘good’ is simply something one has a right to be. And even more so whether this ‘feeling’ itself was itself necessarily creative (or not). Mill himself recognized that creativity was qualitative, and multilayered. It is possible therefore that for some individuals, drugs could allow an extra dimension to creativity, and yet this argument cannot itself become generalized One cannot therefore make a simple equation between drugs and ‘personal expression’ (and any attempt to do so is to risk confusing creation and titillation).
From the side of oppression, one once again starts with a cliche and an appeal to harm. Drugs create harm on the macro level of society. Drugs must be regulated because of the harm they are associated with. Endless new instances of such harms are examined, and with each ‘harm’ new regulations devised. However it is clear enough that from this perspective, ‘drugs’ have slipped their meaning somewhat. Where for freedom, taking drugs revolves around a personal choice, and for ‘harm’, it all come down to chemistry, for oppression, drugs are almost inevitably wrapped up within ‘a culture’. What is to be oppressed is an entire way of life (which is demonstrated to be harmful), and nothing as simple as a personal choice. Drugs slip then into a metaphor for policing (‘so much crime is drug related’). That is they become caught within an entire language of oppression, and regulation. To fight a war on Drugs, is to create an enemy who can be freely, and without conscience ‘wiped out’. Liberal societies thereby negotiate a neat little exemption clause in their tolerance. One group at least, the ‘drug culture’ can be oppressed at all costs. (Hence the war on terror and the war on drugs represent twin all out assaults on two different and otherwise problematic sub-cultures.)
Thence drugs of harm, and the drugs of the user or the policeman are very different things which only relate to one another in the inevitable conflicts running between them. And yet running through these conflicts is a clearly ‘inversion’, a point at which freedom and oppression become far more closely intertwined. The entire apparatus of freedom and oppression has one clear effect. The most problematic element of society, that is, the one that perhaps one might have thought would provide the most likely ‘revolutionary army’ are caught up, by the smoke and mirrors of drugs, and thereby trapped within fighting for the right to be tranquilized. All their energy, all their claims to ‘hate the system’ and all their desires for radical social change are effectively negated (or castrated), by binding such people up within a single act of rebellion, which then renders them effectively helpless (and often uncritical). That is, a means of expression is found within the system for elements that might otherwise threaten that entire system. They can ‘bash the state’ and fight oppression, as long as the freedom they so strive for (with an energy worthy of a better cause) is only the freedom to dope themselves up! The very struggle for ‘freedom of expression’ becomes part of a system which oppresses us all.
Perhaps I have moved very far from John Stuart Mill here. And yet the substantive point remains. - Mill was right to understand that a modern definition of liberalism rose and fell by a definition of harm. His error, so gleefully mentioned in every philosophy undergraduate’s rendering of him, was that he mistook the nature of harm. Or rather he failed to understand that the definition of harm that he was using was based upon the old system of government whose destruction he was advocating. The new world which he wanted would involve far more complex relations to harm – and therefore would spawn new axes of oppression and freedom. However even here Mill remains correct in two ways. On the one hand it is clear that the argument about freedom and oppression remains one about harm, On the other hand, the central disjunction between harm and freedom that was critical to Mill, is in fact the norm (albeit in a way far more complex than Mill envisaged). That is, Mill might have made a mistake in restricting his conception of harm to the oppression of the past, which he contrasts with the freedom of the future; and yet he was right to effectively argue that there was a disjunction between the harm that oppression cites, and the harm that freedom seeks to defend itself against. The two are not simply the same, and liberalism is caught up in the consequence of that disjunction. So that, what was for Mill merely a historical fact, has become for us, one of the deep problems of modernity.
