![]() They need to do that to get a sense of what the average person is thinking, not just the small sub-set of people who are particularly motivated to speak up on a particular issue. What other things might help us get a better sense of what people are really thinking? One crucial issue for pollsters is sampling: that is, making sure that they get information from as broad and representative a cross-section of society as possible. But the system is designed to give us a sense of the balance of opinion in society, and some of its slightly unusual features (secret ballot, for example) help it do that better than some of the less formal methods we might turn to. Of course, there’s no absolutely perfect way of doing this, and you might well think that the electoral systems that we have at the moment fall especially far short of perfection. In our representative democracies, that means that laws are made through voting, by politicians who have themselves been selected by some method that is responsive to the popular will. The idea that getting smacked in the face constitutes a harm enjoys widespread agreement, whereas the notion that you saying something that I might not think is true constitutes a harm is not something that most people would agree with, at least not at present.Īnd the procedures we use to make the law are designed to give us a more or less accurate sense of what people’s views really are. That’s why it’s not against the law to say something with which you might disagree, but it is against the law for you to punch me in the face. That is, on a pragmatic level, we deal with the ambiguity of Mill’s principle by passing laws which reflect most people’s idea of what constitutes harm. If I tell a dirty joke in public, and you complain about it, have I harmed you or not? Who’s to say? As generations of Mill’s critics have pointed out, what counts as harm is often a matter of interpretation. Put simply, the harm principle states that we should all be able to do whatever we want, as long as it doesn’t harm anyone else. That’s because numbers are the only thing that can ultimately adjudicate one of the key principles of liberalism: the harm principle, formulated by J. If the claim is instead, As a Mexican, I can tell you that by wearing a sombrero to a Halloween party you’re insulting Mexicans, that might seem to justify further action, even if the crucial claim that all or most Mexicans would care about this isn’t backed up.īut the question of how many people the complainants actually have on their side is even more fundamental than that. If someone says, I don’t like white people wearing sombreros, we have no reason to treat it as anything more than an individual opinion. Complaints about cultural appropriation, for example, rely on the usually unchallenged idea that one representative of a group can speak for all or most of that group. The claims of the activist minority often draw much of their strength from a tacit assumption that they represent a far larger body of opinion. What we often see today is instead a kind of tyranny of the minority: a system in which a particularly extreme and motivated fraction of the populace can wield outsized power in the face of a majority which is either too indifferent or too scared to oppose it. ![]() For centuries, theorists have worried about the potential of unrestrained democracy to lead to a tyranny of the majority, in which majority groups ride roughshod over the rights of minorities. The number of complainants can often be quite small. ![]() And not only that-persistent complaints by activists have even led to books being withdrawn from publication, shows being cancelled and people being sacked. As well as allowing more people to have a say, the web has enabled small bands of especially vocal activists to dominate the conversation. And that’s exactly what happened-partly thanks to social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, which allow people to post their views on pretty much anything, from what to do about Brexit to whether the earth is flat.īut the conclusion that the internet has made things more democratic is less clear than it might seem. ![]() Instead, the public sphere would be irrigated by new voices, the voices of ordinary people. From now on, the great media conglomerates would no longer dominate the conversation. ![]() When the internet first became part of mainstream public life, one of the great hopes it seemed to hold up was that of an expansion of democracy. ![]()
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