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This is the harm principle. It's claimed, by him, to be an objective principle. The problem is that he never satisfactorily defines harm, and this we are returned to a position in which someone in a position of authority decides subjectively on a particular case.
Mill wrote:
"An opinion that corn-dealers are starvers of the poor, or that private property is robbery, ought to be unmolested when simply circulated through the press, but may justly incur punishment when delivered orally to an excited mob assembled before the house of a corn-dealer, or when handed about among the same mob in the form of a placard."
If we follow this logic we get to strange places (perhaps banning the publication of images of Mohammed because it may insight violence a la Charlie Hebdo).
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good point. But I think most liberal minded people would agree that a picture of Muhammad in a newspaper is a very different thing to a picture of Muhammad on numerous placards held by a mob of pergida supporters outside a mosque in Cologne.
One challenges a system of belief, the other challenges for a fight. One is rightly illegal the other is not.
Gndlf
I have always thought that the social and political theory of John Mill (whose ideas were hugely influential in the US Constitution amendments) to be very useful in these cases (emphasis mine):
" He concluded that, except for speech that is immediately physically harmful to others (like the classic example of the false cry of "fire" in a crowded theater, or the incitement of violence towards others, lynching and so forth), no expression of opinion, written or oral, ought to be prohibited. Truth can only emerge from the clash of contrary opinions; therefore, robust debate must be permitted. This "adversarial" theory of the necessary nature of the search for truth and this insistence on the free marketplace of ideas have become central elements of U.S. free speech theory."