Official: Travel broadens the mind
Apr. 14th, 2005 11:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sawylIn his essay On Liberty, John Stuart Mill states:
"As soon as any person's conduct affects prejudicially the interests of others, society has jurisdiction over it, and the question whether the general welfare will or will not be promoted by interfering with it, becomes open to discussion. But there is no room for entertaining such question when a person's conduct affects the interest of no persons beside himself"
Mill goes on to state that opinion, even when offensive to others, should not be curtailed under the harm principle. For example, he says:
"There is no parity between the feeling of a person for his own opinion, and the feeling of another who is offended at his holding it; no more than between the desire of a thief to take a purse, and the desire of the right owner to keep it."
In an attempt to clarify questions of offense, the American philosopher Joel Feinberg wrote an essay entitled A Ride on the Bus. This invites the reader to imagine themselves traveling on a bus, with no alternate means of getting to their destination without suffering great inconvenience. During the trip, a number of different, potentially offensive events occur in such a way as to encourage the reader to consider what would offend them sufficiently to cause them to get off the bus.
Picking a random example, I wonder where Feinberg would place having to listen to a woman having a loud conversation her cell phone about her boyfriend's piles. Probably towards the mild end of the scale and probably in the irritation category...
"As soon as any person's conduct affects prejudicially the interests of others, society has jurisdiction over it, and the question whether the general welfare will or will not be promoted by interfering with it, becomes open to discussion. But there is no room for entertaining such question when a person's conduct affects the interest of no persons beside himself"
Mill goes on to state that opinion, even when offensive to others, should not be curtailed under the harm principle. For example, he says:
"There is no parity between the feeling of a person for his own opinion, and the feeling of another who is offended at his holding it; no more than between the desire of a thief to take a purse, and the desire of the right owner to keep it."
In an attempt to clarify questions of offense, the American philosopher Joel Feinberg wrote an essay entitled A Ride on the Bus. This invites the reader to imagine themselves traveling on a bus, with no alternate means of getting to their destination without suffering great inconvenience. During the trip, a number of different, potentially offensive events occur in such a way as to encourage the reader to consider what would offend them sufficiently to cause them to get off the bus.
Picking a random example, I wonder where Feinberg would place having to listen to a woman having a loud conversation her cell phone about her boyfriend's piles. Probably towards the mild end of the scale and probably in the irritation category...
