ABSTRACT
In nineteenth century, John Stuart Mill famously laid down one of the cornerstones of liberal values by declaring that the use of ‘coercion’. Expressed as a threshold condition for the justifiable use of coercive rules, paradigmatically for the justifiable use of the criminal law, the Millian principle has it that the target act must be harmful to others. In the twenty-first century, with the rapid emergence of new technologies, there are a number of questions that we might ask about the relationship between law and liberty; and, with technological management in the mix, we need to understand how liberal values might be impacted by this non-normative form of regulatory control. According to such a view of liberty, the relationship between liberty and particular technologies or their applications, will depend upon the position taken by the reference normative code. In liberal communities, respect for negative liberty will be one of the relevant considerations in conducting the prudential and moral assessment of a new technology.
