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 civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.It is clearly false. Punishment clearly involves harm. Some punishments will always correspond to no likelihood of present or future harm, or- in the case of innocents wrongly convicted- no past harm.
Violently interfering with liberty of action- most notably by killing people- is a learned work skill which generates a particular sort of esprit de corps and organizational skills. It may be that the future fitness landscape is such that the only way to prevent the impending extinction of the race is cultivating this learned skill and exercising it occasionally upon innocents who can't retaliate.
In any case 'harm' is 'anything goes'. Clearly, burning you to death to prevent you harming your immortal soul is entirely praiseworthy. The problem here is 'Knightian Uncertainty', we don't know all possible states of the world. This means there is no statistical way to decide if harm is more probable than not in any interaction. Thus no action guiding 'principle' can be established because there is no objective probability distribution and vector of Expected Values. A person with a higher propensity to 'catastrophic thinking' would be justified in refusing to interact with anybody while an unimaginative person with no empathy would go around like a bull in a china shop doing incalculable harm.
Mill was a stupid cunt who died long ago. Why bother with him?
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