> Correct me if I'm misunderstanding you: do you think that if you were to take a representative sample of the population of a Western European country or the US, they'd be just as opposed to regulating fear caused by gay people having sex in private and fear caused by someone coming up to a Jewish person and saying that all Jews should be kicked in the face?
I think there would be significant policy disagreements, but I think those policy disagreements would overwhelmingly cash out in whether they considered the relevant fear valid or not, which comes down to the fear-reality relation I mentioned.
> I agree, but this is precisely the problem with the harm principle. You can overload 'harm' with (what I consider to be) a silly harm, such as causing fear of the 'gay agenda' because gay people have sex in private, and a more serious harm, causing fear of being punched in the face.
Right, but you can't do that in my extremist formulation because it specifically doesn't acknowledge fear as harm. I'm sure it can be abused, but you have to try at least a bit harder than that. :)
> My point is only this: the idea that only contact, physical harms are in the domain of society's lawmakers is highly suspect. If lawmakers are granted the power to regulate mental harms (and in some cases they already are in most countries including the U.S.), we can have a discussion (or at least a preference, if not all parties can come to a rational well-grounded principle) on which of those harms can be regulated - and in my view, in most Western societies, the people would be much more likely to say that the Jewish face punching situation is much more serious or deserving of regulation than the gay agenda situation.
My point is this: overwhelmingly, most fears the state should address can be justified by appeal to a harm that is not fear in itself. And the remainder tend to be the source of the most explosive controversies of the culture war - precisely because by making the reduction of fear a policy goal in itself, we have opened the door to appeasing hysteria, with all the perverse incentives this implies.