Abstract

Mill's passion for individuality drives the protection in the harm principle, and the restriction of morality to the enforceable. This calls for compensating widening of the conception of harm. The result is a radical reshaping of the principle of utility as governing the art of life as whole, and of the whole conception of utilitarianism and of a utilitarian morality. His harm principle fully accepts that human relations occasion mutual harms, and turns, in the assessment of any restriction, to local fact on whether it serves 'general utility'. It becomes extremely difficult to locate what fundamental principles of moral requirement Mill would actually accept, and to judge the extent they would differ from the common sense intuitions for which he shows such great respect.