Last year Ben Bernanke, the Federal Reserve chairman, and Henry M. Paulson Jr., Treasury secretary at the time, did irreparable harm to the principle of financial responsibility.
ECMO is an expensive and invasive intervention, and could potentially harm the patient (Principle 2).
The most common context for the invocation of the harm principle is the criminal law.
The table below illustrates some divergence in the views of the leading thinkers associated with the Harm Principle as to the proper limits of the legal coercion.
The basic idea is that the harm principle sets the bar too high and that we can legitimately prohibit some forms of expression because they are very offensive.
Several candidate principles of criminalization are critically discussed (§6), including the Harm Principle, and the claim that the criminal law should be concerned with 'public', rather than merely 'private', wrongs.
Suffice it to say that if we can expand the harm principle from the physical to the mental realm, more options might become available for prohibiting hate speech and violent pornography.
The discussion moves on from the harm principle to assess the argument that speech can be limited because it causes offense rather than direct harm.
It does not, however, seem able to support the harm principle for the coercion based considerations do not neatly settle only on harm-based considerations.
The main argument for prohibiting the Skokie march, based on the harm principle, was that it would cause harm by inciting opponents of the march to riot.
Such statistics do not settle the issue but they do make it more difficult to use the harm principle as the main reason for limiting pornography.
