Harm Principle
Definition
The idea, associated with John Stuart Mill, that the only legitimate ground for the state to restrict a person's conduct through law is to prevent harm to others, not merely to prevent harm to that person or to enforce a shared morality.
Related terms
- Legal Moralism
- The position, associated with Patrick Devlin, that the state may criminalise conduct simply because a society's shared moral code condemns it, even...
- Codification
- The consolidation of criminal law into a single systematic statute, or code, drafted in advance, as opposed to letting offences accumulate through...
- Criminalisation
- The formal process by which a legislature converts a previously lawful or merely deviant act into a criminal offence, typically by enacting...
- Decriminalisation
- The formal removal of conduct from the category of offence, here applied to the movement away from treating status conduct as court...
- Moral Panic
- A period of intense, media-driven public anxiety about a group or behaviour perceived as an exceptional threat to social order. Coined by...
- Moral Regulation
- The use of law to enforce a shared standard of conduct or virtue, independent of any measurable harm to a third party.
- Overcriminalisation
- A pattern in which legislatures create so many criminal offences, including minor regulatory ones, that the criminal law's reach outgrows its capacity...
- Vagrancy Law
- Legislation that criminalises being without a fixed residence, visible means of support or, in some versions, the act of begging in public.
- Victimless Crime
- An offence built around conduct where no identifiable third party is harmed against their will, typically because the participants consent or the...
- Consensual Crime
- An offence built on an exchange between willing participants, such as commercial sex, where the label victimless is most contested.
- Model Penal Code
- A model statute drafted by the American Law Institute and published in 1962, never itself binding law, but widely adapted by United...
- Nordic Model
- A sex-work regulation approach, first enacted in Sweden, that criminalises the buyer of sex while decriminalising the seller.
Explained in these topics
- The Legislature, Lawmaking, and the Decision to Criminalise
- Role of Legislature in Criminal Lawmaking (UGC-NET Unit II)The idea, associated with John Stuart Mill, that the state may restrict a person's conduct through law only to prevent harm to other people, not merely to prev...
- Victimless Crime: Alcoholism, Drugs, Begging, Sex Work, Suicide (Unit I)John Stuart Mill's test from On Liberty (1859): power may be exercised over a person against their will only to prevent harm to others, not for their own good.
- Victimless Crime and the Limits of Moral RegulationJohn Stuart Mill's rule that the only justification for restricting a person's liberty is to prevent harm to others, not to prevent harm to themselves or to en...