Egalitarian Justice versus The Right To Privacy

  In 'On Liberty' Mill proposes that we ought to conform conduct and social policy to his Liberty Principle absolutely and without exception—even in circumstances when we reasonably foresee that violating the
Liberty Principle would produce better consequences.

  The argument is that we cannot reliably distinguish the situations in which the Liberty Principle would best be violated from other seemingly similar situations in which adherence despite appearances would be best, so treating the Liberty Principle as an absolute and exceptionless rule predictably does more good than any policy of partial compliance we could devise and implement.

  In other words, we cannot devise any fine-grained policy that carves out categories of exceptions to the Liberty Principle, which would have greater expected utility than the coarse-grained Liberty Principle that allows no exceptions, so adherence to the coarse-grained Principle is best.

  Given the limited knowledge, limited intelligence, and limited altruism of actual human beings, the social rules that it would make sense, on consequentialist grounds, to teach them to obey will need to be more rigid, specific, easy to grasp and apply, and resistant to biassed misapplication than very general and abstract principles.


The real greater good is in your own personal direct natural best interests.

inak povedane, netreba naletiet, ak niekto slubuje nieco, co cloveku nerobi dobre, ze to raz v buducnosti dobre bude - to je klasicka komunisticka demagogia