Freedom in the public domain

In his normblog profile today Chris Dillow cites John Stuart Mill's famous principle:

That the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.

Here's an item about that:

Copenhagen – When Flemming Rose heard last month that Danish cartoonists were too afraid of Muslim militants to illustrate a new children's biography of Islam's Prophet Muhammad, he decided to put his nation's famous tolerance to the test.

The cultural editor of Denmark's largest newspaper, Jyllands-Posten, then recruited cartoonists to depict Islam's Prophet Muhammad and published them in the paper.
.....
"Some Muslims are asking for an apology pointing to a lack of respect," he says. "They're not asking for respect; they're asking for subordination - for us as non-Muslims to follow Muslim taboos in the public domain."

And read the rest. Mill's prevention-of-harm principle is not without its philosophical difficulties: it requires a definition of what constitutes 'harm'. But one thing that is clear is that the notion of harm cannot be drawn so widely as to accommodate merely the giving of offence, or else you can kiss individual liberty goodbye. The things that offend different people are just too many and too various, so that including 'offence' within 'harm' would make the latter into a uselessly wide category. Liberal societies today need to reaffirm Mill's principle in the most forthright terms.