That is, on a pragmatic level, we deal with the ambiguity of Mill’s principle by passing laws which reflect most people’s idea of what constitutes harm. If I tell a dirty joke in public, and you complain about it, have I harmed you or not? Who’s to say? As generations of Mill’s critics have pointed out, what counts as harm is often a matter of interpretation. Put simply, the harm principle states that we should all be able to do whatever we want, as long as it doesn’t harm anyone else. That’s because numbers are the only thing that can ultimately adjudicate one of the key principles of liberalism: the harm principle, formulated by J. If the claim is instead, As a Mexican, I can tell you that by wearing a sombrero to a Halloween party you’re insulting Mexicans, that might seem to justify further action, even if the crucial claim that all or most Mexicans would care about this isn’t backed up.īut the question of how many people the complainants actually have on their side is even more fundamental than that. If someone says, I don’t like white people wearing sombreros, we have no reason to treat it as anything more than an individual opinion. Complaints about cultural appropriation, for example, rely on the usually unchallenged idea that one representative of a group can speak for all or most of that group. The claims of the activist minority often draw much of their strength from a tacit assumption that they represent a far larger body of opinion. What we often see today is instead a kind of tyranny of the minority: a system in which a particularly extreme and motivated fraction of the populace can wield outsized power in the face of a majority which is either too indifferent or too scared to oppose it. For centuries, theorists have worried about the potential of unrestrained democracy to lead to a tyranny of the majority, in which majority groups ride roughshod over the rights of minorities. The number of complainants can often be quite small. And not only that-persistent complaints by activists have even led to books being withdrawn from publication, shows being cancelled and people being sacked. As well as allowing more people to have a say, the web has enabled small bands of especially vocal activists to dominate the conversation. And that’s exactly what happened-partly thanks to social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, which allow people to post their views on pretty much anything, from what to do about Brexit to whether the earth is flat.īut the conclusion that the internet has made things more democratic is less clear than it might seem. Instead, the public sphere would be irrigated by new voices, the voices of ordinary people. From now on, the great media conglomerates would no longer dominate the conversation. When the internet first became part of mainstream public life, one of the great hopes it seemed to hold up was that of an expansion of democracy.

Tyranny of the majority definition