The fundamental questions of On Liberty by John Stuart Mills Seminal - Essay Example

Prof’s Benefits for ‘Society’ and Fundamental Questions in John Stuart Mill’s Seminal “On Liberty” John Stuart Mill’s classic work, “On Liberty” is one of the foundational liberal documents, and as such is enshrined in the politics, laws, philosophy and policies of a wide variety of places. The capitalist practices that flow through the entire planet also largely stem from Mill’s ideas, and they are foundational to the ways that people in many areas envision their economic freedom from the government. Even the health care debate currently being debated in front of the United States Supreme court essentially stems from many of Mill’s ideas being enshrined in national law and understanding – that the government cannot force someone to buy a product, and that the individual must have as complete as possible economic freedom from the state. Many of the ideas in this text are highly admirable – the idea that the state or one’s society has no right to interfere with someone’s behavior if it causes no harm or only causes moral harm to one’s self, for instance, provides some fundamental protections that individuals need, as does the idea that tyranny of the majority can be just as harmful as tyranny of the government – that minority rights must be protected even when the majority finds them distasteful for some reason. With all this good, however, there are some fundamental issues with Mill’s conceptions of liberty, especially as they relate to the individual and the benefits of individual freedoms. While Mill seems to go to great lengths to protect individual rights, and in many ways does, the theoretical underpinning of his text could actually undermine individual freedoms. This is because Mill does not defend individual freedoms as inherent rights of the individual, but rather because he sees them as being beneficial to society – free speech, assembly, press and so forth are simply good practice for maintenance of a healthy society. This undermines many of the necessities of individual freedoms, as it puts a vaguely defined notion of ‘society’ at the heart of moral reasoning, rather than the individual. Superficially, Mill’s work On Liberty seems to do an excellent job enunciating the individual freedoms that a person must have to be free in their society. The most fundamental of those, Mill asserts, is the freedom to think the way one wants to think (30). From this point, many other freedoms naturally spring into prominence: the freedom to say what one thinks, for instance (28), or to publish what one thinks, or the freedom to assemble with others and not have one’s thoughts construed as another’s. Mill even demonstrates that there are many restrictions of freedom that can come from sources other than the government. The most prominent, he asserts, his the “tyranny of the majority” whereby the majority dictates its opinions and beliefs onto others. Mill demonstrates that this tyranny need not be overt, violent or anything else to still constitute a repressive, destructive force in society, through a discussion of a topic his readers would have been thoroughly familiar with: Christianity. Mill constructs a continuum of intolerance, with the Roman practice of “casting Christians to the lions” on an extreme end, but still placing his society in the middle of that continuum, saying that it operated a “merely social intolerance, [which] kills no one, roots out no opinions, but induces men to disguise them, or abstain in any effort to effect their diffusion (32). Mill recognizes that society can place many forms of control or oppression onto people within it, and that these forms are all negative. Mill’s solution to this problem is the “harm” principle: essentially that as long as a practice does not harm another, there should be no one, governmentally or otherwise, who represses it (52). This very construction, while seemingly beneficial for the world, and more or less in line with other excellent moral philosophizing like Kant’s categorical imperative (treat anything done as if it would become a universal maxim (Kant, 23)), it nonetheless actually creates opportunities for many forms of oppression. One of the biggest failings of this line of thought is that it encourages people to be isolated, and understands them in isolation. Mill states that “The liberty of the individual must be thus far limited; he must not make himself a nuisance to other people. But if he refrains from molesting others in what concerns them, and merely acts according to his own inclination and judgment in things which concern himself” then his liberty must be free – so essentially, a person is free so far as he can avoid contact with others. But as Aristotle astutely observed so long ago, “man is a political creature” (Aristotle, 73), that is, humans tend to congregate, and the most important actions we engage in tend to be with other people. Not only does this form and idea of liberty fail, on a fundamental level to properly understand the communal nature of human interaction, it can actually actively assert and continue the oppression of different groups within society. Defining exactly what the constitutes “harm” has been the fundamental challenge of liberal thinkers since Mill’s time (Ramsay 18), and the fact is there are interpretations of this concept that would lead to the oppression of a variety of groups. There is still, for instance, a widespread assertion from a variety of groups in the United States that the mere presence of gay people can be harmful – to children, for instance, who should, under this line of reasoning, be shielded from non-normative sexuality until an older age. With this understanding, one could argue that two gay men walking down the street holding hands represents “molesting” other people in the public space – thus the common complaint that gay people here that they should not “push” their views on others. Mill’s argument allows for this kind of oppression, under some interpretations, and makes fundamental freedoms only fundamental to people in essentially the private sphere, because once one moves beyond that sphere there could be an argument that their actions could harm other people, or harm the nebulously defined society. Furthermore Mill’s description of the harm principle, that people’s freedoms should be curtailed so long as they do not harm others, serves as a nearly total and incontrovertible defense of the status quo in society. The problem, however, is that nearly every society has pre-placed hierarchies that discriminate or oppress huge swathes of the population – by-and-large the history of humanity is the history of small select groups using much bigger and more populous groups to gain and wield power. This is perhaps best expressed in Marx’s Communist Manifesto , where he describes the shift of power to the nobles to the middle class (16), who then continued the cycle of oppression by using their complete control of the means of production to keep the proletariat in their chains (1). This inequity, an inequities like it that occur again and again throughout history, often require revolution to correct, or at very least a significant overhaul of systems of society and governance. But those overhauls, by definition, will cause harm to some – the people previously in control of society, for example. Under Mill’s understanding of freedom: so long as it bothers no one else, the freedom of a part of society to revolt against a controlling part of society would be drastically diminished, leading to a defense of an unequal, and often un-free status quo. Mill’s On Liberty is one of the most finely developed pieces of Western philosophy ever written, and sets out many highly respectable goals and seemingly positive notions on the nature of freedom. The problem, however, is that it comes from a nearly entirely individualistic, and entirely status-quo preserving perspective. It fails to properly grasp the idea that people’s public and political interactions may cause harm – and this must be allowed, as must revolution, a harmful and destructive, but often eventually fruitful practice. Works Cited Aristotle, and H. Rackham. Aristotle: Politics,. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1957. Print. Kant, Immanuel. Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, and What Is Enlightenment? New York: Liberal Arts, 1959. Print. Marx, Karl, Friedrich Engels, Friedrich Engels, and Ellen Meiksins. Wood. The Communist Manifesto. New York: Monthly Review, 1998. Print. Mathias, Michael B. John Stuart Mill: On Liberty. New York: Pearson Longman, 2007. Print. Ramsay, Maureen. Liberal Philosophy: A Critique of Key Concepts. Great Britain: Cassell & Co, UK, 1996. Print. Read More