Okay. I want now to turn to the second question that I had you think about and that was the question is the harm principle inherently conservative? And I want to just put this passage up on the slide. I want you to think about this passage and see if you can see what I might have had in mind. Mill says, an opinion that corn-dealers are starvers of the poor, or that private property is robbery, ought to be unmolested when simply circulated through the press. But may incur just punishment when delivered orally to an excited mob assembled before the house of a corn dealer, or when handed about among the same mob in the form of a placard, acts of whatever kind which without justifiable cause, do harm to others. May be, and in important cases absolutely must be, controlled by the unfavorable sentiments, and, when needed, the active interference of mankind. The liberty of the individual must be thus far limited; he must not make himself a nuisance to other people. But, if he refrains from molesting others in what concerns them and merely acts according to his own inclination and judgment in things which concern himself, the same reasons which show that opinion should be free prove also that he should be allowed, without molestation, to carry his opinions into practice. That is our [SOUND] cost. Now, why would I, in, in trying to get you to talk about the question of whether this is inherently a conservative principle, why would I put that particular passage up on the board? What do you think I'm trying to get at? >> [INAUDIBLE]. >> You don't know. It's not obvious until you dig it out. It's, but you want to take a guess at it? >> Are you going again to Prince's Ball? >> So that's a very good observation. Even though it's not obvious at all from this surface of this passage. That this points to the fact that there's actually a deep underlying identity between the architecture of the harm principle and the architecture of the Prado principle. Think about it this way. What's Mill saying here. He's saying, well, you might take the view that corn-dealers are starvers of the poor, and you totally are free to write letters to the New York Times about it. But, if you say it to a mob outside of the corn-dealer's house where they might actually do something about it, that's incitement. That, that crosses the line. Right? That, that's you're now making yourself a nuisance to the corn dealer. So you can, you may, you're absolutely free to say anything, but incitement's another matter. So, what he's really saying is unless you can convince the corn dealer to stop starving his workers, there's nothing you can do about it. You can't write, you can't, okay. And so, another way of putting it is that, like the Pareto principle, the harm principle is completely procedural right? If you think we talked about the Pareto principle as being bias towards, what, what's it bias towards? Any purely procedural principle is biased towards what? >> Utility? >> Optimality? [LAUGH] >> You, you're both in the general direction, but you haven't quite got it. It's going to be biased towards where you started before you apply the procedure, okay? It's biased toward the status quo. Think about it. When you draw a Pareto diagram, you start somewhere. Let's say you s, you, we, when we talked about this last time, you start, say you're starting at X on that diagram, everything is conditioned by where you started. What's the Pareto's superior group, what's the Pareto's inferior group, what are the Pareto undecidable groups are all determined by where you started with that x, right? But what if the x's unjust. What if the corn dealer really is starving his workers, right? So, there's sort of a garbage in, garbage out problem with purely procedural principles and this is one of the critiques of the Pareto system, right? So if, if we go back to the edge with box diagram, if the status quo is that the corn dealer has everything and the pool worker has nothing then the, you know the, the Pareto superior outcome is that, the poor person starves right? >> Sounds pretty conservative to me. [LAUGH]. >> Yes. So that's the sense in which it's conservative. It's bias towards the status quo right? So it's it's you know, and, and one, what one might say is, it's all very well to tell the person you can write the New York Times about it. But you can't do anything about it. So that's the sense in which by the harm principle doesn't tell you where to start. Just as the Pareto Principle doesn't tell you where to start and therefore, it's saying start where ever you want and then we're going to preserve the realm of voluntary actions. So that's the sense in which both the harm principle and the Pareto principle are ideologically conservative in the sense that they protect whatever is built into the status quo in market transactions. Yeah. >> I have one question. How then to resolve the question of feeling to help someone? So if we adopt the status quo, and we do not act if this is better, then this falls back to the the scale of the, of the harm you presented at the beginning? >> So that is a good question. And I think both Pareto and Mill would say, well, you know, failing to help, I mean, that's really Pareto undecidable, because you're, you know Mel would have to say well if you, if you don't help that poor person out there, I think you're a horrible person. And you know, he's got the all those, it's, you, I can remons with, remonstrate with you, I can plead with you, I can entreat you. I said, how can you be so heartless, but in the end of the day, I can't force you, right? So, I think Mill is a hardboiled libertarian, when it really comes down to it. Unless it's a circumstance of inevitable harm, then, he's got his two tep, step test that we talked about last time. So, let's sum up and see what we're taking away now. One big point is that despite the difficulties and complexities of the rights-utility synthesis, it's had an enormous and enduring appeal. Both as an argument, because people want to be able to put together the notion of protecting individual rights and freedoms. With the notion of creating an efficient, scientifically based way of running society. But it's also been immensely important as ideology, because it, it offers a sophisticated account of human transactions that seems to legitimate the market. And we've seen that, the sense in which it really legitimates the market is somewhat attenuated, particularly these issues about the status quo, which we're going to return to later, on in the course. But, it seems to provide a series of rationalizations. For a way of organizing social interactions that's very friendly to the market. A second big take away point is that you should be skeptical of the hunt for one size fits all answers because even though philosophers tend to work out their ideas in the abstract. It's very important to think them through cases that are much closer to street level, to the where principles actually engage with the world to start seeing the, the, the, the sorts of complexities that abstract ideas are going to have to confront. And so you should never ever decide whether or not you believe a, a philosophical argument, until you start to play it through some real cases that mean something to you. And then you can make a judgement. And then the third big takeaway point that's going to come back to us again and again in the course, is, that, that the enlightenment aspiration, to have straightforward, technical solutions, that, that flow out of the science, and somehow, it's going to get us beyond politics. We'll see, when we do talk about Marx, which we're going to start doing soon, the, the aspiration Marx at one point talks about, the government of persons will be replaced by the administration of things. This is, again, this aspiration to get beyond politics, to get, to get technical answers. It's, it's a very alluring goal but it's very difficult to actually realize in practice. And this is why one of Mills' worries, and I'll end with this, one of Mills' worries was unfounded because he did worry that science would advance so much. That people would disagree less and less, and he thought disagreement was really important, because remember all that stuff we talked about? You've got a, not only hold the right view, but for the right reasons, and if you don't have to defend your views against critics, you're, you're going to turn into a kind of dopey, sheep like- automaton, you're not going to have a vital mind, which is arguing, defending, contesting, really important for Mills. And he did worry that if science advances enough we, we, we won't have that anymore. And he says, at one point here in chapter three, he says, we have a warning example in China. In making a people all alike, all governing their thoughts and conduct by the same maxims and rules; and these are the fruits. The modern regime in England of public opinion is, in an unorganized form, what the Chinese educational and political systems are in an organized form. And unless individuality shall be able successfully to assert itself against this yoke, Europe, nothwistanding its noble antecedents and its professed Chris, Christianity, will become another China. Now of course in the 21st century we worry in a slightly different way about Europe becoming another China. But Mill needn't have worried, as we saw from the examples of marital rape and desegregation, and, strict liability and sexual mores, with respect to minors. The notion we're ever going to reach the world, where liberty's going to be the victim of its own success isn't coming anytime soon. Next, we're going to start talking about Marxism.
