Philosophical Ideas of John Stuart Mill - Essay Example

John Stuart Mill was educated by his father, James Mill, who was cold and rigid. From then Mill understood the undergrounds of liberty and saw the mistakes in his father’s rigid system of education: “Mill recognized, in later life, that his father’s system had the fault of appealing to the intellect only and that the culture of his practical and emotional life had been neglected” (John Stuart Mill, Life and writings). This period of his life, in which his opinions and feelings were omitted, has marked him. Mill suffered a mental crisis for this reason in his early life, but he succeeded to overlook it.

John Stuart Mill, in his essay On Liberty, mentioned liberty and the relationships between freedom and the state. The goal of the state is to build a social system that respects and defends human rights and liberties. The state can interfere with any individual if he harms the other one’s interests.

This is the only case when Mill accepts the intervention of the state. There are cases when the state rejects the individual’s opinion. But that does not mean the point of view is wrong or false. Neither the belief of the state nor the individual’s opinion is false, they might contain a certain truth, so they must not be rejected. If this happens, the decision of the state becomes preconception and affects the man’s liberty.

Mill saw human beings as an individual free to think, to speak, to feel. These rights are unquestionable on all subjects: “(…)his independence is, of right, absolute. Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign” (qt. John Stuart Mill’s Essay On Liberty, p.13).

In this relation, man-state, the latter can impose unlimited control, things that cannot be acceptable. For Mill,  education is primordial and it makes the differences between people, so the freedom of speech, of thinking, is the most important.

Mill speaks about the tyranny of the majority when the state wants to have unlimited control, to entice the majority:
     (…)There is a limit to the legitimate interference of collective opinion with
     individual independence, and to find that limit, and maintain it against
     encroachment is as indispensable to the good condition of human affairs as
     protection against political despotism (qt. John Stuart Mill’s Essay On Liberty).

The tyranny of the majority often appears in bureaucratic countries. In the case of democratic countries things go not so bad, because many individuals know and understand the importance of liberty in all its aspects. Also, in the case of democratic countries and of developed ones, educated people are more and cannot be ruled by a man or a group. So, the danger of the tyranny of the majority is less.

Liberty of speech, sustained by Mill, is indeed a very important right. In some periods the human being was restrained by people who wanted to have supreme control (a kind of tyranny of the society). For example, slavery, in the South of America, reserved man from various freedoms: the physical one, the conscience liberty, and maybe the most important one, the freedom of speech. The slaves were revolted mainly because they were treated like animals, they hadn’t the right to write, to read or to express their feelings and desires. We can extend here, seeing in these liberties the differences between man and animal. These are the rights that give confidence to an individual.

Nowadays the liberty of speech is more obvious and only in several countries people are banned from this right. Arabic countries may be relevant because in these countries it is the fear to talk and to think by yourself. But in other countries, the freedom of speech has enlarged so much that converted into something else. Now, anyone has the right to say all he thinks and many times this harms others. So, if in the past the tendency was to reject this liberty, now it is misunderstood.

John Stuart Mill discussed the liberty issue(mainly the speech and conscience ones) and related it to society or state because the society has to be free and open to human rights. Only in this way man could develop and understand well his status.