The Right to Do Harm (John Speaking)
						MAIN PATH: Fred
				Fred

The right to do harm? I never thought of it that way. It seems like common sense to say that we shouldn't do harm to others; and yet, maybe that's too simple.

When you think of it, we do assume a right to do harm in a lot of cases. For example, it's common for a political group to boycott a product or a manufacturer. We've seen grape boycotts to help farm workers. There was a threatened boycott of Idaho potatoes a few years ago over abortion issues. African Americans down south years ago sometimes boycotted stores that wouldn't hire blacks. The assumption behind any of these actions is that the boycott does harm to someone and that we have a right to do it anyway. We use the right to do harm to get someone to do what we want. Or the situation may be even simpler. It may not involve moral issues or the desire to get anyone to do anything. For example, in the 1970s and 1980s, millions of people chose to buy Japanese rather than American automobiles. This caused major problems for the American companies. Loosely speaking, we could say that they harmed those companies. But the companies had no right to keep consumers from doing what they did.

Judith Thomson has written about harm. Her terminology is a little different from what we've been using. She talks about having "claims" against others requiring them to do or not do something. I'll try to summarize her view of basic moral rights or claims:

• We have claims against others that they not cause us harm, where harm includes bodily impairment, psychological impairment, and disfigurements.
• We do not have claims against others that they not cause us distress, when that distress exists in part because of our beliefs. She calls this "belief-mediated distress."
• There are many cases in which someone causes our condition to worsen, but we do not always have a claim against them that they not do what they are doing. Whether we have such a claim depends on the legitimacy of the means they use. (I may worsen your financial condition by selling my stock in your company. But I have a right to sell the stock, and therefore you have no claim against me not to do so.)

One of the questions this raises for us is whether speech is a legitimate means that people have a right to use (at least in a broad range of cases) even when they harm others or worsen the condition of others in some way. Another way to put it is "Should we protect speech even when it causes harm?"

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