Ethics

Is there any instance where a philosophy of "Do anything unless your maliciously causing harm" could be seen as wrong?

Comments

A moral code that allowed you to do anything that did not involve causing harm maliciously would be by many people's lights too permissive. (a) First of all, we probably wouldn't want to confine our attention to harmful actions performed from malice. There are many cases where an agent seems to act wrongly by causing harm, even if he did not act with malice. For instance, typically if I cause you harm negligently, I wrong you in a way that is prohibited by morality and law, even if I did not harm you out of malice. (b) But behavior needn't be harmful to be wrong and even regulable. (i) For instance, most people think that unsuccessful criminal attempts (e.g. attempted but unsuccessful murders or assaults) are wrong and punishable, even if no one is in fact harmed. (ii) Many kinds of infidelity (e.g. adultery, promise-breaking, etc) seem wrong, even if no one discovers the infidelity or is harmed by the undetected infidelity. We may not want the law intruding to correct these wrongs, but that doesn't mean that the infidelities are not wrong. (iii) Many people also think that bestiality is wrong, though it's not clear that anyone is harmed by it. (iv) Though liberals tend to distinguish between harm and offense and tend to be more keen to restrict harm than offense, most liberal socieities do countenance restrictions on public nuisances and indecency. Joel Feinberg makes a strong case for the Millian liberal to permit some forms of offense regulation in volume two -- Harmless Wrongdoing -- of his four volume Moral Limits of the Criminal Law. He motivates the permissibility of nuisance regulations by appeal to a series of imaginary Bus Rides in which individuals do progressively more offensive things on public transportation and appeals to a Balancing Test, which balances the expressive interests of offenders and the reasonable sensibilities of their audiences, to determine when nuisance may be regulated. So it seems clear that a moral code that objected only to malicious harm would be far too minimal.

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