Week 4 — Liberty on Trial: The Harm Principle and an Argument of Your Own — Traditional alternative (no AI)

Introduction to Political Science Free sample edition

Traditional alternative (no AI), unpublished. In the course this is a separate assignment that ships unpublished beside the adaptive assignment: same objective, no AI. An instructor who prefers it publishes it and unpublishes or deletes the adaptive one, as the note at its top says.

Instructors: publish this instead of the adaptive version if you prefer, and unpublish or delete the adaptive one.

Assignment 4 of the term — put four rules on trial under Mill's harm principle, build an argument of your own with every premise labelled, and explain the principle to someone who has it backward.

This week you learned the vocabulary people fight over when a rule asks some of them to give something up: justice, the two senses of liberty, the three questions of equality, Mill's harm principle, and Rawls and Nozick on a fair society. Week 1 gave you the empirical/normative distinction and argument analysis, and Week 3 laid out the ideologies that disagree about these words; this assignment puts all of it to work on rules you choose. In this assignment you work two short counting problems, interpret each one, and explain the harm principle to someone who has never studied political theory. This week's lecture tutorial, quiz, discussion, and Political Analysis Workshop practice the same ideas from other angles.

The task

You will choose one setting you know (a campus, a workplace, a club, an apartment building, or a town) and write four proposed rules for it. Treat every rule as illustrative: it does not have to exist, and no real person or current law belongs in it.

Work these two problems, showing how you got each count:

You test 4 proposed rules against Mill's 2 pinned sentences, checking each rule against each sentence. How many rule-sentence checks do you record?
You build an argument with 3 empirical premises and 2 normative premises. How many premises do you label by kind?

Beside each count, add the interpretation that makes it political theory:

Problem 1, the rules on trial. Write four proposed rules for your setting: one that restricts adults for their own good, one that prevents harm to other people, one that restricts something because some people find it offensive, and one hard case where the risk to others is real but uncertain. For each rule, record the result the harm principle gives (permitted, ruled out, or hard case) and check it against both of Mill's pinned sentences from On Liberty (1859), Chapter I, quoted exactly: "the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others" and "His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant." For the hard case, say what further empirical judgment and what further normative judgment it needs. Then, for one rule, say whether it limits negative liberty or positive liberty, and why.
Problem 2, an argument of your own. Pick one rule from Problem 1 and write a one-sentence thesis on whether your setting should adopt it. Support the thesis with five premises: three empirical (each one something a person could check) and two normative (each one argued from values), and label every premise by kind. Name one assumption your argument needs, and say what a reader would have to accept for it to hold; finding it is not admitting a flaw. Say which question of equality (opportunity or outcome), if any, your thesis touches. Then state the strongest counterargument charitably, as its defenders would put it, drawing on either Rawls's difference principle or Nozick's entitlement theory, and keep each idea with the right thinker. Finish with your reply.

Explain it to a non-expert

A neighbor tells you, "Mill said the government can stop anything that offends people or that is bad for them." Write a 3–5 sentence message to that neighbor that explains, in everyday words, what the harm principle actually allows and what it rules out, uses one of your four rules as the example, and names one limit of the principle, such as a case it does not settle by itself. Explain any technical term in everyday words. More than one good answer is possible.

For a different, ungraded example, imagine a volunteer at a neighborhood recycling drop-off explaining the sorting rules to a newcomer. Model answer: "We keep glass apart from paper because broken glass ruins a whole bale of paper, so one mixed bag costs everyone. That is the reason for the rule, not anyone's taste in tidiness. If you are unsure about an item, set it on the side table and someone will check it. The limit is that sorting rules differ from town to town, so what works here may not match the place you came from."

Use that pattern for your message to the neighbor, with your own wording and evidence.

Show how you got each count. A reader should be able to reproduce both counts from the values above without guessing which values or steps you used.

After you finish, reread your work and revise at least one rule, premise, or explanation. Then add a short reflection (3–4 sentences) on one of two options of equal weight, your choice: (a) which rule or premise you changed and why the new version is better; or (b) which premise you first labelled with the wrong kind, and how you caught it.

Deliverables

Submit a single argument file containing:

the two counts, each with the values and the operation shown;
your four rules on trial (each with its result, both pinned sentences quoted exactly, the hard case's further judgments, and one rule's sense of liberty);
your argument (a thesis, five premises labelled by kind, one named assumption, the equality question, a charitable counterargument from Rawls or Nozick, and your reply);
your message to the neighbor; and
your revision note with the reflection option you chose.

Keep it to roughly two pages. Clear and accurate beats long.

Choose how you show it. Present your work as written text, or as a recorded audio or video explanation of about four minutes with a transcript, or as a labelled argument map with a short note. Every form is graded by the same scoring criteria. Submit in any accessible file type or as a link; a recorded response may be submitted as audio or video with a transcript, or as text.

How you'll be graded

The full analytic rubric is attached to this assignment in Canvas.

Academic integrity and AI use

This version is designed to be completed without AI: do the counts, the rules, the argument, and the writing yourself, without any AI tool. Quote only Mill's two pinned sentences, exactly, and state Rawls's and Nozick's ideas in your own words. Submitting AI-generated work as your own, or copying another student's argument, is an integrity violation under the course policy.

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