s no individual is entirely isolated, injuries to one's own self or property may do harm to one's dependents, and they may reduce the resources of the community at large. In the absence of such harm, there is still the harm, some would claim, that the person's bad behavior does as an example to others. In defense of his principle, Mill points out first that conduct that harms the self may also violate a specific obligation, automatically taking it out of the category of acts that harm only the self. He claims, in addition, that society can afford to countenance "conduct which neither violates any specific duty...nor occasions perceptible hurt to any assignable individual except himself." Society, Mill argues, surely has better means that punishment of improving the conduct of its members toward themselves. By turning from the power of education to the use of coercion, society harms itself in many ways. But the strongest of all the arguments against the intereference of the public with purely personal conduct is that when it does interfere, the odds ar
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