The Worst Bus Ride Ever

Joel Feinberg presents a whimsical and devastating critique of Mill’s harm principle in his book Offense to Others. He asks us to imagine we are riding on a bus and presents us with 31 offensive stories.

Some of these stories are absolutely absurd: picnicking passengers eating their own vomit, a group of mourners bashing in a corpse’s face with a hammer, various bizarre sexual acts. This article channels the same energy as a dark comedy.

However, Feinberg affronts our sensibility like this for the purpose of critiquing Mill’s harm principle. According to Mill in On Liberty, the government only has the right to criminalize actions that directly harm the well-being of others. Otherwise, people are free to do as they please, because Mill believes that people will naturally work toward virtue when they have the freedom to exercise their rationality.

Feinberg uses the dreadful bus ride as a counterexample to Mill’s harm principle, claiming that these stories are not stories of harm but of offense, yet we still have strong intuitions that the state should have the right to outlaw most of these actions. Apparently there are some actions that almost everyone can agree are not harmful but should be outlawed.

The bus ride thought experiment places us in the concrete world rather than in the abstract world that philosophers so often inhabit. Feinberg says that “There is a limit to the power of abstract reasoning to settle questions of
moral legitimacy,” so we need to engage our imaginations in the philosophical process (Feinberg, 10).

Not only does engaging our imagination in the bus experiment make the article more interesting, it also makes Feinberg’s argument more effective. Concrete stories, arguments, and ideas are stickier than abstract ones. I’ll probably remember this article years from now just because of how surprising and concrete the bus story is. We can learn an important lesson from Feinberg: shocking and concrete ideas make powerful arguments.

Works Cited:

Feinberg, Joel. The Moral Limits of the Criminal Law. 1988.