Since its publication in 1859, the central claims and assumptions of On Liberty have been the focus of clarification, debate and no little disagreement – which is, of course, exactly what Mill would have wanted. Most of these issues have been addressed previously, but there are three topics that deserve a little more attention: namely the relation between harm and offence; the ultimate value of negative freedom; and Mill’s perfectionist ideas about humanity.
A frequent point of discussion among commentators has been Mill’s precise definition of harm. One difficulty is tied to the notion of purely self-regarding actions: Mill himself acknowledges that every act, at least indirectly, may affect others. But the meaning of ‘affect’ here is uncertain. Just because my voice is grating, or my choice to wear white socks with black shoes causes upset, that should not be enough to prohibit me from talking and dressing as I wish. Harm needs a more precise definition.
Mill himself seems to understand harm in terms of a person’s interests:
This conduct consists... in not injuring the interests of one another; or rather certain interests which, either by express legal provision or by tacit understanding, ought to be considered as rights. 4.3
J C Rees in 1960 made use of the same term to clarify the meaning of ‘affect’. According to Rees, Mill intended a clear distinction between ‘actions affecting others’ and ‘actions affecting the interests of others’:
... one might say that interests – and I do not wish to imply that they are necessarily legal – depend for their existence on social recognition and are closely connected with prevailing standards about the sort of behaviour a man can legitimately expect from others. A claim that something should be recognized as an interest is one we should be required to support by reasons and one capable of being made the subject of discussion. On the other hand I could be very seriously affected by the action of another person merely because I had an extraordinarily sensitive nature and no claim to have others respect these tender spots would be recognized as amounting to an interest.
For the Harm Principle to apply, Rees argues, mere offence is not sufficient: an individual’s interests must be affected. This is consistent with Mill’s own position and Rees’ definition of interests is plausible on the surface: they must be reasonable and open to discussion, both requirements that receive some support from the text. But there is a deeper problem here. Rees also understands a person’s interests as dependent upon ‘social recognition’ and connected to ‘prevailing standards’ of behaviour. This seems to give too much normative power to social morality – the ‘tyranny of the majority’ – and goes against Mill’s broader argument by placing self-regarding conduct at the mercy of social expectations.
It seems that interests are no easier to define than harm itself. But Rees recognises an important point of contention. Mill excludes personal sensibilities as a normative factor and is clear that offence does not count as harm:
... there is no parity between the feeling of a person for his own opinion, and the feeling of another who is offended at his holding it; no more than between the desire of a thief to take a purse, and the desire of the right owner to keep it. 4.12
This has seemed problematic to some thinkers. Offence can run deep, much deeper than other less controversial forms of harm. In our day, the issue has become urgent in matters of religion: a recent example is the 2005 publication of cartoons depicting Muhammad in a Danish newspaper, which led to a series of violent attacks and public flag burnings. There is no doubt that such feelings of hurt or outrage are genuine, but whether they count – or should count – as harm in the relevant sense is uncertain.
Jeremy Waldron has argued that ‘moral distress’ does not constitute harm because it contributes to the greater good. Waldron notes that for Mill the presence of harm is a necessary but not sufficient condition for the state to place limits upon individual liberty. For the state actually to interfere, there must be more than merely harm: namely, the benefits of interference must outweigh the costs. Moral distress cannot be a reason for censorship because it is a positive, not a negative, consequence of free expression.
Waldron’s point here is that such clashes of ethical views are to be welcomed. As he points out, Mill advocates vigorous, even abusive debate as necessary for progress; offensive opinions must be aired and alternative lifestyles flaunted for people to properly engage with ideas. Moral distress is a symptom of this engagement, and an antidote to the anaesthesia of ‘dead dogma’. Mill sees truth emerging from:
... the rough process of a struggle between combatants fighting under hostile banners. 2.36
The struggle may be distressing but the benefits outweigh the costs. Moral offence is, in this case, instrumentally valuable. In Chapter Two of On Liberty Mill argues that open discussion achieves two things: it brings the truth to light, and it reinforces and deepens our beliefs. Moral distress is a manifestation of that process. Of course in the short term, as the Danish Cartoons showed, there can be great pain on both sides of a disagreement. But Mill is not thinking in terms of a Benthamite calculation of local pleasure and suffering: as always, he considers certain values in the long term interests of humankind. The ultimate justification for Mill’s claims is, albeit indirectly, utilitarian.
Mill’s indirect utilitarianism is based on the belief that freedom – and through the exercise of that freedom, truth – will provide the optimal conditions for ‘the permanent interests of man as a progressive being’ (1.11). But this is an empirical claim that can be contested. Some thinkers have maintained that optimal conditions will not be created through Mill’s negative liberty, but require a more positive understanding of freedom including active guidance and intervention from the state.
For Mill – and most liberals – freedom is understood to exist primarily at the level of the individual, and therefore the individual must be protected from the authority of the state. On this view, the authentic individual will often come into conflict with the traditions and values of society – what Mill calls ‘the despotism of custom’. Liberty consists in the exercise of individual preferences independently of social pressure to conform.
But philosophers of a more communitarian cast disagree with this account of freedom. They insist that liberalism leads to alienation and, ultimately, the fragmentation of society. Rather than setting up the individual against social norms, they insist that people are thoroughly social beings: who we are emerges from, and is inseparable from, the community in which we live. If we lived in a different community, we would be different people. The interests of the individual coincide with the interests of society, and therefore leaving individuals alone – negative liberty – is a failure of social responsibility. The only way to achieve the utilitarian goal of maximal happiness is through a form of positive liberty. Individuals should be encouraged to identify their well-being with the well-being of society as a whole and that encouragement will sometimes take the form of paternalistic intervention.
Mill claims that negative liberty is necessary for happiness. Some empirical evidence suggesting that this is wrong comes from the work of the French sociologist, Emile Durkheim. Durkheim’s investigations into suicide revealed that a lack of social constraints on behaviour commonly led to ‘anomie’: a loss of traditional values and structure and an associated feeling of alienation and purposelessness. If Durkheim is correct to link individual freedom to nihilism and ultimately suicide, then clearly a utilitarian must oppose such freedom for the greater good.
Around 40 years before the publication of On Liberty, the German philosopher Hegel argued that the concept of negative freedom was fundamentally flawed:
If we hear it said that the definition of freedom is ability to do what we please, such an idea can only be taken to reveal an utter immaturity of thought, for it contains not even an inkling of the absolutely free will, of right, ethical life and so forth. in Singer p34
Hegel insists that it is important to understand why people have the preferences they do. Negative liberty contents itself with removing obstacles to personal choice so that individuals can exercise their preferences, and is not concerned with how and why these choices are made. But for Hegel, that is not enough. These preferences are wholly arbitrary and may well be the product of manipulation by others. Certainly people’s perceived needs are often manufactured by advertising or the media, and in such cases the exercise of choice is hardly free in any meaningful sense. Mill has little to say about this: he warns against the individual grounding their choices in the tastes of the majority, but does not offer an alternative. For Hegel, individual preferences – to be properly free – must be actively directed to meet human needs and maximise welfare.
On Liberty offers a defence of free expression on the grounds that it will allow the truth to emerge. Mill assumes that the truth has utility, that knowledge is better than ignorance. But this is not necessarily the case. Rousseau, at least, took the opposite view:
... give us back ignorance, innocence and poverty, which alone can make us happy... Discourse Second Part
Rousseau is being rhetorical here but his point is worth exploring. In purely utilitarian terms, the truth does not always bring the best consequences. Knowing that your partner has had an affair, or discovering what your colleagues really think of you, will hardly increase your happiness; a government may suppress news of a disaster or threat in order to avoid panic; scientific knowledge, such as the development of nuclear weapons, may come at a heavy cost; and so on. These examples suggest that under certain circumstances, ignorance may indeed be bliss.
Although Mill was pessimistic about the momentum of his own society, he was optimistic about the possibilities for humanity. His perfectionist vision of individuals attaining truth and wisdom through debate and experimentation is certainly inspiring, but it is also based on assumptions about human nature that some thinkers have questioned.
Gertrude Himmelfarb felt that the inspirational effect of On Liberty was in part due to a serious flaw in the essay:
... its over-simplicity, its reductivism, its attempt to subsume a large and complicated set of problems under ‘one very simple principle’. p46
Others have agreed that Mill fails to properly acknowledge the ‘mundane and ignoble circumstances governing our lives’. Adam Gopnik, for instance, saw a deep connection between Mill’s rather unusual life and his naive vision of human capacities:
Mill’s work, intellectually so thick, is psychologically thin. There is too little room for Rhinos in it – too little room for the irrational drives that he recognized in his own life but could not entirely blend into his philosophy. It is rich in arguments for freedom, but poor in insights into why so few people want freedom when they can have it.
Gopnik’s point is a compelling one: in practice, people do not seem to value and utilise liberty to the degree that Mill expects. James Fitzjames Stephen made a similar point in his critique of Mill’s thought:
Where, in the very most advanced and civilised communities, will you find any class of persons whose views or whose conduct on subjects on which they are interested are regulated even in the main by the results of free discussion? What proportion of human misconduct in any department in life is due to ignorance, and what to wickedness or weakness? ch 1
If Stephen is right, of course, then liberty will not lead to the optimal conditions for human development. These very different assumptions about human nature lead to very different conclusions about freedom and government. Mill’s portrait of humanity is certainly flattering, but for many thinkers it is hardly realistic.
In the end, these criticisms do little to lessen the power of On Liberty as a hymn to individual freedom. As Isaiah Berlin recognised, Mill’s argument rests on a single ‘passionate belief’:
At the centre of Mill’s thought and feeling lies, not his utilitarianism, nor the concern about enlightenment, nor about dividing the private from the public domain... but his passionate belief that men are made human by their capacity for choice – choice of evil and good equally. Fallibility, the right to err, as a corollary of the capacity for self-improvement; distrust of symmetry and finality as enemies of freedom – these are the principles which Mill never abandons. p.192