one lives in society means that one is bound to observe certain conduct toward the others in society. The first element of such conduct is not to injure the interests of one another, and such interests should be considered rights; the second is that each person should bear his share of the labors and sacrifices incurred for defending society or its members. The individual whose conduct becomes such as to affect prejudicially the interests of others may be punished because at that point society has jurisdiction over such conduct. The fact that the individual has sovereignty over his own actions until those actions become prejudicial to the interests of another, however, means that society has no right to interfere in those actions until they become prejudicial to the interests of another. This assumes that all the people involved are adults and have the ordinary amount of understanding.
Mill emphasizes that it would be wrong to think that his statement that it is not acceptable to interfere with the decisions of an individual if those decisions do not
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