How Harm Harmed Us

In The Origins of Sex: A History of the First Sexual Revolution the historian Faramerz Dabhoiwala notes approvingly the remark of John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) that “what any persons may freely do with respect to sexual relations should be deemed to be an unimportant and purely private matter, which concerns no-one but themselves.”  Mill later recorded in his Diary that holding men and women to account for such things, “will one day be thought one of the superstitions and barbarisms of the infancy of the human race.”

Such ‘superstitions’ remained socially powerful in Mill’s world yet were vulnerable to critique. The Evangelical Revival of the eighteenth century had helped shape the morals of the earlier part of the nineteenth, supported by the higher regard accorded to the Anglican Church. The rapid rise in the status of naval chaplains during the period is evidence of this different emphasis by the time of the early nineteenth century. Yet by the end of that century, besotted as it was with the idol of progress, secularism had made huge inroads both at elite and lower levels of society. Darwin and German Biblical Criticism had left their unsettling marks, amidst rising prosperity, the influx of people to the growing urban centres and extraordinarily rapid social changes.

Such cultural changes produced deep contradictions in Victorian England. From Germany, Friedrich Nietzsche was to observe of the English: 

“They have got rid of the Christian God, and now feel obliged to cling all the more firmly to Christian morality: that is English consistency…If the English really do believe they will know, of their own accord, ‘intuitively’, what is good and evil; if they consequently think they no longer have need of Christianity as a guarantee of morality; that is merely the consequence of the ascendancy of Christian evaluation and an expression of the strength and depth of this ascendancy: so that the origin of English morality has been forgotten, so that the highly conditional nature of its right to exist is no longer felt…”

John Stuart Mill stands at the forefront of thinkers who were to supply the English elite with doctrines which could replace what had come to be regarded as dying forms. Unbaptised himself and brought up to take “the strongest interest in the Reformation, as the great and decisive contest between priestly tyranny for liberty of thought,” Mill was to formulate the famous ‘harm principle’ and the oft-quoted observation that, “Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.” 

The harm principle was, Mill proposed, that “the sole end for which mankind are warranted individually or collectively in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number is self-protection… the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community against his will is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not sufficient warrant.”

Mill had much more to say about this principle and was certainly not as crude in his thinking about morality and society as are many who parrot his principle as the last word in this area. Yet, how we understand what constitutes ‘harm’ is notoriously difficult to reach consensus on.  Mill’s speculations on sexual ethics give us more than a clue to where his moral emphasis emphatically does not lie.

And it is precisely this area of ethics that is most likely to be undermined by philosophical systems that set out to ‘revise’ and ‘reform’ what our frustratingly plural, non-reductive moral common-sense alerts us to in our concrete and distinctive personal encounters with evil. Mill was committed to Utilitarianism as well as his ‘liberty principle’ and in that commitment viewed ethics excessively in terms of ‘social ethics’, minimising what is central to Christian life which, while not blind to such matters, has less to do with them than some imagine and is above all concerned with the ‘personal’ (for which read, ‘private’).

Mill himself ‘disapproved of disapproval’ of the actions (seen themselves as non-harmful) of other people who would be harmed by such a stance.  And indeed, ‘harm’ now extends widely, through legislation and mores, to include the ‘harm’ of hurt feelings, though only those of specifically designated groups. The UK’s Conversion Practices Draft Bill 2026 applies to those it classifies as having a ‘particular sexual orientation’ and ‘particular transgender identity’ and characterises as serious ‘abuse’ expressions intended to cause the person (who could be, for example, a trans-identified child or spouse) to reject such orientations or identity and which cause serious alarm or distress. In other words, it condemns on grounds of ‘harm’ words which honestly and even consensually question certain ‘experiments of living’ with a view to preventing harm and improving lives. And for this Mill can be held accountable. For by changing the nature of moral judgement, Mill insists that it becomes paradigmatically ‘immoral’ to express moral disapproval in contexts not sanctioned according to his ‘harm’ principle and in light of his views on liberty. 

So, for example, when confronted with the polygamists of Utah, Mill was to write:
“…it is useful that while mankind are imperfect there should be different opinions, so it is that there should be different experiments of living; that free scope should be given to varieties of character, short of injury to others; and that the worth of different modes of life should be proved practically, when anyone thinks fit to try them.” 

The combination of tolerance for ‘experiments of living’ (as though the moral life and its progress could be understood in the same way as the natural sciences!) together with heavily moralised condemnations of those who dare to judge such experiments as evil, is a hallmark of our age. While Mill is revered, his contemporary critic and one-time admirer, the abrasive James Fitzjames Stephen is largely forgotten. He responded in Liberty, Equality, Fraternity to Mill’s kind of tolerance in typically blunt fashion, focused most memorably on Mill’s tolerant discussion of whether a person should be free to be a pimp: 

“How can the State, or the public be competent to decide that gross vice is a bad thing? I do not think the State ought to stand bandying compliments with pimps…My feeling is that if society gets its grip on the collar of such a fellow it should say to him, ‘You dirty rascal, it may be a question whether you should be suffered to remain in your native filth untouched, or whether my opinion about you should be printed by the lash on your bare back. That question will be determined without the smallest reference to your wishes or feelings; but as to the nature of my opinion about you, there can be no question at all.’”

Fitzjames Stephen was a criminal lawyer and admirer of Thomas Hobbes who lost his faith but not his sensitivity to what resignation to evil looks like.

Such sensitivity should go hand in hand with a recognition that our accountability extends well beyond the ‘social’ or judicial and reaches down towards that deep wound which infects our entire species and constitutes the blinding blindness that leads us to seek in social ethics both redemption and escape. That escapism is far more a sign of the infantilism of our own age – an age which would doubtless have shocked Mill, but for which he prepared the way. 

Dr Anthony McCarthy is Director of the Bios Centre (www.bioscentre.org) and a Visiting Scholar at the International Institute of Theology in Trumau, Austria. He is writing in a personal capacity.