Studies by University of Melbourne researcher Nick Haslam and his collaborators have demonstrated a trend, beginning in the late 1970s or early 1980s, for concepts related to harm to expand their meanings and applications. For the past forty years or so, many people have contributed, deliberately or otherwise, to concept creep for such words as violence, trauma, hurt, danger, hate, abuse, and, of course, harm itself—the list could become very long. These words appear in our public language with greater relative frequency. They have extended, furthermore, to new kinds of conduct and speech (a horizontal expansion of meaning) and to less dramatic or severe levels of seeming nastiness (a vertical expansion).

This expansion of harm-related concepts shows concern for the welfare and happiness of others, and some specific expansions can probably be justified. For example, we now recognize forms of child abuse that were once viewed as normal aspects of children’s upbringing. Various kinds of physical punishment, psychological sabotage, and sheer neglect that might have been considered unremarkable—or even benign—forty or fifty years ago are now viewed as unacceptable ways of treating kids. They are understood, that is, as forms of abuse. This change seems like an improvement.

But concept creep also has a darker side. As harm-related concepts expand, more and more sorts of behavior come to seem morally questionable or worse. Even in the domain of child rearing, where solicitude for the welfare of growing, dependent people is entirely reasonable, there’s some room for concern about what’s happening. Have baby boomer (and younger) parents gone to an extreme of protectiveness from any possible risk of hurt? Some authors suggest that this can produce mentally fragile young adults who will not, or in a sense cannot, tolerate the slightest disagreement with their opinions and values and who might feel genuinely distressed when they hear their viewpoints being challenged. As a more cynical alternative, have we taught them that it works to signal emotional hurt, mental fragility, and the like? In a society obsessively focused on not bruising anyone’s feelings, this can be an effective strategy for people to get their way, especially if they can claim to be especially “vulnerable” in some respect (vulnerability is yet another concept that has expanded over the past few decades).

That said, the excessive coddling of some children and young adults is not the largest problem here. Too much coddling is better than not enough! But more generally, we can see an erosion of the harm principle, which once had considerable prestige as a barrier to moralistic and paternalistic laws and to harsh social judgments of individuals’ eccentricities. As a reminder, when John Stuart Mill formulated the harm principle in the nineteenth century, it was intended to expand the scope of our personal freedom. The idea was that we should be free not only from official punishments but also from social condemnation as long as our actions were not directly and substantially harmful to others. Harm was supposed to be a narrow concept; the bar for what counted as a “harmful” act was set quite high. Such acts did not have to cause physical injury, but they at least had to be of a type that could significantly set back someone else’s interests as they functioned in society.

That could be done, for example, by telling vicious lies. For instance, if somebody spreads rumors that you’re a pedophile and they’re believed, your ability to sustain a career and an ordinary life is pretty much destroyed.

But it did not count as harmful if somebody merely said—or wrote—something that disagreed with your opinions or values, no matter how committed you might be to them. Doubtless there can be some sting in being disagreed with; it can sometimes be annoying, frustrating, disconcerting, or even distressing. But this was not what was meant by the word harm when Mill and his liberal successors advocated a political-cum-legal principle that would narrow the legitimate scope for social and legal punishments and thus enlarge individual freedoms.

After forty-odd years of concept creep, however, the meanings of words such as harm and violence have greatly expanded, at least in some contexts and when used by many participants in discussion. This has affected how ordinary social interactions are managed, and it has even influenced the development of our civil and criminal laws.

Concept creep, accompanied by what Haslam and his collaborators call harm inflation, therefore crowds out the space for freedom. The expansion of harm concepts reduces the variety of actions that were formerly perceived as merely self-regarding, too trivial, or too indirect in whatever problems they might cause to justify punishments. In the upshot, we now see mere expressions of disagreement branded as “acts of violence,” “harmful speech,” or actions that “endanger others.” Minor or nonexistent social transgressions are now called “dangerous” or “traumatizing.” Honest, relatively unimportant mistakes can now be so “hurtful” that they require expiation through humiliating performances of mortification and shame.

There’s much more to consider about the balance, in these trends, between laudable goals and not-so-laudable effects. It’s always nice to consider others’ feelings—but when it’s taken too far, the downside is restricting everyone else’s freedom and spontaneity to satisfy whatever preferences are expressed by the hypersensitive and the faux-sensitive.

The kindly impulses driving all this are worth recognition. But four decades of concept creep and harm inflation have produced harmful effects of their own. One of them is the chilling of freely expressed opinion, as more and more opinions have come to be viewed as too “harmful,” “violent,” and the like to be tolerated. There’s a road we’re on, where we walk away from free inquiry and open discussion of ideas. Like the road to Hell, it is paved with good intentions.