Is Causing Offence Enough to Justify a Ban?

Someone plays a video aloud in a quiet carriage, irritating the other passengers. We may criticise the person or ask them to use headphones. But is the reason simply “I dislike it”, or that the behaviour interferes with other people's use of a shared space? Those are not the same claim.

In On Liberty (1859), John Stuart Mill argued that coercion over a competent adult is justified to prevent harm to others, not merely to improve that person's welfare. The principle was chiefly a boundary on legal and social coercion; it did not say that every unpleasant act deserves approval. The dispute then shifts to what counts as harm. Bodily injury is relatively clear, whereas persistent noise, threats and exclusion may undermine the conditions of others' agency through accumulated interference.

Offence is an experience of disgust, shock or insult. Harm usually involves a more stable setback to interests, capacities or rights. Offence alone cannot automatically establish a case for prohibition, or the most sensitive or numerous group could control everyone else. Yet it is not weightless. Its intensity and duration, whether it can be avoided, how easily the actor could prevent it, and how a public space is shared all matter.

My judgement is that the move from discomfort to prohibition needs publicly testable reasons. A quiet-carriage rule is defensible not because one style of music is distasteful, but because unavoidable sound occupies shared attentional space while headphones impose little cost. We should also separate legal bans, venue rules and personal criticism: the same discomfort may justify a polite request without justifying state punishment.

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/On_Liberty/Chapter_1