Must We Pay for the British Museum?: Taxation and the Harm Principle

John Stanton-Ife

doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198798439.003.0003

Must We Pay for the British Museum? Taxation and the Harm Principle

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Chapter › peer-review

Abstract

One of the best known and most influential ideas in the history of liberal political philosophy is the harm principle. State coercion can only be legitimately imposed to prevent harm to others, as John Stuart Mill famously argued. Joel Feinberg in his four-volume magnum opusnum opus spent much of his career exploring the implications of the harm principle for the criminal law. Feinberg’ s work has proved valuable both for those sympathetic to the idea that the principle is a fundamental constraint on criminalization and for those opposed to that idea. Far less studied is the potential place of the harm principle in the context of taxation. This paper attempts to reflect on the matter by focusing primarily on the legitimacy of taxes raised to support high culture, esoteric scholarly activities, and so on. I consider especially two versions of the harm principle, Feinberg’ s own and that of Joseph Raz.

Original language	English
Title of host publication	Philosophical Foundations of Tax Law
Editors	Monica Bhandari
Place of Publication	Oxford
Publisher	Oxford University Press
Chapter	2
Pages	35-56
ISBN (Electronic)	9780192519368
ISBN (Print)	9780198798439
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198798439.003.0003
Publication status	Published - 16 Feb 2017

Publication series

Name	Philosophical Foundations of Law
Publisher	Oxford University Press

Keywords

Law
Philosophy of Law
Tax law
Harm principle
Taxation
Public expenditure
Liberalism

UN SDGs

This output contributes to the following UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)

Access to Document

10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198798439.003.0003

Cite this

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title = "Must We Pay for the British Museum?: Taxation and the Harm Principle",

abstract = "One of the best known and most influential ideas in the history of liberal political philosophy is the harm principle. State coercion can only be legitimately imposed to prevent harm to others, as John Stuart Mill famously argued. Joel Feinberg in his four-volume magnum opusnum opus spent much of his career exploring the implications of the harm principle for the criminal law. Feinberg{\textquoteright} s work has proved valuable both for those sympathetic to the idea that the principle is a fundamental constraint on criminalization and for those opposed to that idea. Far less studied is the potential place of the harm principle in the context of taxation. This paper attempts to reflect on the matter by focusing primarily on the legitimacy of taxes raised to support high culture, esoteric scholarly activities, and so on. I consider especially two versions of the harm principle, Feinberg{\textquoteright} s own and that of Joseph Raz.",

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