On this side of the Atlantic a number of incidents have occurred recently that have focused attention on the rights to freedom of speech and action that we take for granted in the West. I am thinking particularly of:
- The Danish cartoons
- The conviction of David Irving in Austria for 'Holocaust denial'
- British parliamentary bills creating the following new offences :
- Incitement to religious hatred
- Glorification of terrorism
- Smoking in public places
In all of these cases freedoms of speech and action have been assumed as rights, but in various ways commentators and legislators have suggested that there must naturally be restrictions on these freedoms where they come into conflict with other rights, such as:
- The right not to be offended (Danish cartoons, incitement to religious hatred, holocaust denial)
- The right to security (glorification of terrorism)
- The right not to be harmed by the actions of others (prohibition of smoking in public places)
By coincidence, while all this was going on, I just happened to be reading John Stuart Mill's 1859 essay,
On Liberty, which is generally considered to be the classic statement of the liberal position on the freedom of the individual. Mill's essay isn't simply a rhetorical manifesto for liberalism, but is a closely argued justification for his views, and, as such, I thought it might be useful to review his arguments in the light of these recent controversies.
In the first chapter he states his aim as follows:
The aim of this Essay is to assert one very simple principle ... that the sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number, is self-protection. That the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant.
And again:
The only part of the conduct of any one, for which he is amenable to society, is that which concerns others. In the part which merely concerns himself, his independence is, of right, absolute. Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.
After an introductory chapter Mill goes on to cover his subject under four headings:
- Freedom of opinion and expression
- Freedom of action, and individuality
- Limits to the authority of society over the individual
- Application of his principle to borderline cases
1. Freedom of opinion and expression
The core of his argument here is that
absolute freedom of opinion and expression is essential for the well-being of individuals and of society. The only exception he is willing to allow to this rule is where the expression of opinion is likely to incite immediate harm to others.
His summary of the grounds for this argument is more succinct than anything I'm likely to produce, so I'll quote it here in full:
We have now recognised the necessity ... of freedom of opinion, and freedom of the expression of opinion on four distinct grounds; which we will now briefly recapitulate:
First, if any opinion is compelled to silence, that opinion may, for aught we know, be true. To deny this is to assume our own infallibility.
Secondly, though the silenced truth be an error, it may, and very commonly does, contain a portion of truth; and since the general or prevailing opinion on any subject is rarely or never the whole truth, it is only by the collision of adverse opinions that the remainder of the truth has any chance of being supplied.
Thirdly, even if the received opinion be not only true, but the whole truth, unless it is suffered to be, and actually is, vigorously and earnestly contested, it will by most of those who receive it, be held in the manner of a prejudice, with little comprehension or feeling of its rational ground. And not only this but, fourthly, the meaning of the doctrine itself will be in danger of being lost, or enfeebled, and deprived of its vital effect on the character and conduct: the dogma becoming a mere formal profession, inefficacious for good, and preventing the growth of any real and heartfelt conviction, from reason or personal experience.
(The final two grounds here are a useful reminder to those of us with liberal social values to guard against the kind of political correctness that would like to silence the opposition).
2. Freedom of action, and individuality
His argument for freedom of action is based on the same four grounds as quoted above. The bulk of this part of the essay is used to argue for
individuality (i.e. for the cultivation of individual tastes, feelings and judgement, and the expression of individual desires and impulses) and against the twin evils of
Custom and
Calvinism
The Case Against Custom
Though ... customs be both good as customs, and suitable to [the individual], yet to conform to custom, merely as custom, does not educate or develop in him any of the qualities which are the distinctive endowment of a human being. The human faculties of perception, judgement, discriminative feeling, mental activity and even moral preference, are exercised only in making a choice. He who does anything because it is the custom makes no choice. He gains no practice either in discerning or in desiring what is best. The mental and moral, like the muscular powers, are improved only by being used. These faculties are called into no exercise by doing a thing merely because others do it, no more than by believing a thing because others believe it.
The Case Against Calvinism
According to [the Calvinistic theory] the one great offence of man is self-will. All the good of which humanity is capable is comprised in obedience. You have no choice; thus you must do, and no otherwise: "whatever is not a duty, is a sin." Human nature being radically corrupt, there is no redemption for anyone until human nature is killed within him. To one holding this theory of life, crushing out any of the human faculties, capacities and susceptibilities is no evil: man needs no capacity, but that of surrendering himself to the will of God: and if he uses any of his faculties for any other purpose but to do that supposed will more effectually, he is better without them ...
... Many persons, no doubt, sincerely think that human beings thus cramped and dwarfed are as their Maker designed them to be; just as many have thought that trees are a much finer thing when clipped into pollards, or cut out into figures of animals, than as nature made them. But if it be any part of religion to believe that man was made by a good Being, it is more consistent with that faith to believe that this Being gave all human faculties that they might be cultivated and unfolded, not rooted out and consumed, and that he takes delight in every nearer approach made by his creatures to the ideal conception embodied in them, every increase in any of their capabilities of comprehension, of action, or of enjoyment.
And after these stinging criticisms of Custom and Calvinism he goes on to describe his own ideal:
The Individual
It is not by wearing down into uniformity all that is individual in themselves, but by cultivating it, and calling it forth, within the limits imposed by the rights and interests of others, that human beings become a noble and beautiful object of contemplation; and as the works partake the character of those who do them, by the same process human life also becomes rich, diversified, and animating, furnishing more abundant aliment to high thoughts and elevating feelings, and strengthening the tie that binds every individual to the race, by making the race infinitely better worth belonging to.
3. Society and the Individual
According to Mill, Society has the right to expect certain things from the individual, namely:
- That he or she does not injure the interest of others;
- That he or she bears their fair share of 'the labours and sacrifices incurred for defending the society or its members from injury and molestation'.
In general:
As soon as any part of a person's conduct affects prejudically the interests of others, society has jurisdiction over it, and the question whether the general welfare will or will not be promoted by interfering with it becomes open to discussion. But there is no room for entertaining any such question when a person's conduct affects the interests of no persons besides himself, or needs not affect them unless they like ... In all such cases there should be perfect freedom, legal and social, to do the action and stand the consequences.
Mill's main argument for this principle of minimal interference is stated simply:
... the strongest of all arguments against the interference of the public with purely personal conduct is that, when it does interfere, the odds are that it interferes wrongly, and in the wrong place ... for in these cases public opinion means, at best, some people's opinion of what is good or bad for other people; while very often it does not even mean that ... There are many who consider as an injury to themselves any conduct which they have a distaste for, and resent it as an outrage to their feelings; as a religious bigot, when charged with disregarding the religious feelings of others, has been known to retort that they disregard his feelings, by persisting in their abominable worship or creed.
The rest of this chapter consists of examples of majority tastes being used as justification for interference in individual liberty. These examples include:
- Prohibition against eating pork in Muslim countries;
- Prohibition of non-Catholic worship in Spain;
- Socialistic disapproval of ostentatious shows of wealth in the US (!);
- Prohibition of music, dancing, theatre, etc. in England during the Commonwealth;
- Prohibition of the sale of alcohol in some US states, and the attempts by British temperance movements to impose similar laws at home
- Persecution of Mormons (a new sect at the time Mill was writing) because of their practise of polygamy;
- Sabbatarian laws, i.e. laws banning work and leisure activities on the Sabbath.
Of the latter he writes:
It remains to be proved that society or any of its officers holds a commission from on high to avenge any supposed offence to Omnipotence, which is not also a wrong to our fellow creatures. The notion that it is one man's duty that another should be religious, was the foundation of all the religious persecutions ever perpetrated and, if admitted, would fully justify them.
4. Applications
In the final chapter of his essay, Mill explores his principle by examining some questionable or borderline cases such as brothel-keeping, running gambling dens, prohibition of marriage, taxation, universal education and bureaucracy. His arguments in these cases are quite thought-provoking, but particularly interesting is his case for universal education (a case now pretty much won in the West) in which he argues that the important freedom is not the freedom of the father to do with the child as he sees fit (which is actually power over another's liberty) but the freedom of the child to receive an education 'fitting him to perform his part well in life towards others and towards himself'.
Mill's final paragraph - written in the context of a discussion about bureaucracy - is a fitting peroration for the essay as a whole:
The worth of a State, in the long run, is the worth of the individuals comprising it ... [and] a State which dwarfs its men, in order that they may be more docile instruments in its hands, even for beneficial purposes ... will find that with small men no great thing can really be acccomplished, and that the perfection of machinery to which it has sacrificed everything will in the end avail it nothing, for want of the vital power which, in order that the machinery might work more smoothly, it has preferred to banish.
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