Structural anthropology says that we humans like to sort things into dualities, into matched pairs of opposites. Cooked and raw. Civilized and barbaric. Domesticated and wild. Earthly and uncanny.
That last pair - earthly and uncanny - has always fascinated me. Commonly that pair forms a basis for the legal code in many different human societies, explaining why punishments or obligations are due in various cases.
Within the uncanny, there is a second duality, that between the divine and the demonic. Each of course has its own particular rules; interactions with the demonic are generally shunned, while interactions with the divine must take place on the terms that the divine agents themselves purportedly set.
One way to think about the transition to liberalism is that it seeks to remove these elements from the legal system and to replace them with something like the harm principle, which can be found long before J. S. Mill. Harmful and harmless as a revised duality, if you will.
This transition does not come naturally, though; if the structural anthropologists are correct, we are perhaps not well disposed to thinking that way. We would prefer to use the categories of the earthly and the uncanny. They are forever trying to sneak back in.