I'm going to start this afternoon's talk with John Stuart Mill, who was the most famous
classical liberal in England in the 19th century. He lived from 1806 to 1873. As most of you
You know Mill was a remarkable child prodigy.
His father, James Mill, was born in Scotland, was the leading disciple of Jeremy Bentham,
who was the founder of utilitarianism.
Remember, utilitarianism is the philosophy that said we ought to, in deciding what we
We ought to maximize happiness, where Bentham characterizes happiness as pleasure, taking that in a sense that anything that we liked, anything that was good, would count as pleasure.
So they're, in Bentham's view, there aren't types of good that are distinct from each other, they're all reducible to some common denominator, so they're, in Bentham's system, the question is, how do you maximize pleasure, and he said, pushpin is as good as poetry, pushpin is a child's game, like a spinning top, so he said, it doesn't, when you're thinking what to do,
What you want to do is just maximize pleasure. It's not that there are certain goods that
are higher and lower than others. It's just whatever turns out to maximize pleasure. He
suggests various ways of comparing pleasure. He doesn't have any fully worked out system,
it wasn't. He could claim some kind of mathematical calculus by which you could figure this out,
How to bring it about that there's a coincidence between each person acting to promote his
or her own pleasure and to get the result that society will maximize pleasure for everybody.
It doesn't follow right away. Suppose you have each person trying to maximize his or
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to Achieve Pleasure for Him or Herself.
The result will be the greatest satisfaction overall,
greatest happiness.
Sometimes people give the popular slogan,
the greatest happiness for the greatest number,
but this isn't really the best way
to characterize the utilitarian position
because that would be, you're trying to do
the mathematically impossible,
where you're trying to maximize two things at the same time
," you can't, it won't always work out that you can do that. So it's more, the utilitarian aim is to maximize for a society the amount of pleasure overall. Of course, big problem there is, what about the legislator himself, according to the hypothesis, he's trying to maximize his pleasure. So why would we expect it to turn out that his doing that
will why is it always in his interest to maximize his pleasure to work out this
balance between so that I've described where you try to get everybody else to
come up with the correct utilitarian solution that's a big problem for the
utilitarian system to what how do you count for the activity of the
legislator himself of course another problem for utilitarianism is when you
You say, you're maximizing utility and pleasure for the group. Which group are you talking about?
In the utilitarian principle, it doesn't tell you what group to pick, it just says,
you're maximizing utility for the society, but you don't know who's to be included in that.
So, that, as I said, utilitarianism was the one that Bentham adopted.
James Mill, who was John Stuart Mill's father, was his leading disciple.
James Mill wrote a number of books on government.
He worked for the British East India Company.
He was one of the highest officials in the East India Company.
Remember, at that time, the East India Company was running, was ruling India.
There was the British Empire, Britain had control of India as part of its empire, but the empire was run by a private company, not by the government.
This was the case really until the Charter of East India Company was revoked in the mutiny of 1857.
Up until then, this private company was sort of exercising the imperial rule.
This is kind of privatizing governmental functions in a non-libertarian way.
and private imperialism. So, James Mill was sort of, as I say, was a very active reformer both theoretically and on, in this practical basis, he figured in the East India Company, and he tried to apply his utilitarian principles to reform the laws and customs of India, various
Other people who were administrators in India were utilitarians and they thought that the people in India were in a primitive, barbarian state.
They needed civilizing reforms from England, which they thought they were in a position to provide.
One, the historian Thomas Macaulay, who wasn't entirely in sympathy with utilitarianism, in fact he wrote a critical essay about it, had a similar attitude and he said that something like one shelf of English books is better than all the sacred literature of India.
So it was a very much a not, would not be a very politically correct attitude the utilitarians have.
The reason I mention this is that you'll see it, this attitude, this view is important in understanding John Stuart,
a position John Stuart Mill took in, on liberty in 1859.
We'll see how the limit to his libertarian principles that we'll see later.
So, James Mill thought that he should educate his children himself on what he thought were
good utilitarian principles.
He thought that children were capable of learning much more than most people would think.
His prized pupil was his oldest son, John Stuart Mill.
He gave John Stuart Mill private lessons, homeschooling, and John Stuart Mill would
then have to instruct his brothers and sisters.
So the homeschooling was very effective.
John Stuart Mill could read classical Greek at age three, Latin at age eight.
By 15, he was an expert in political economy and he had tutoring from another friend of
his father, David Ricardo.
By his teen years, he was already one of the outstanding intellectuals of his time.
He had acquired so much knowledge.
He never attended university, but probably before he was 20 years old, he was one of
are the most learned people of his time.
He, as part of his education, he went on trips to Europe,
especially to France, and here he was very much influenced
by the sociology of Auguste Comte.
Comte had a theory of social evolution in which there was a gradual progress where people
would become more and more enlightened and he thought, here Comte was in line with the
in the San Simonian School, there was a constant alteration between what he called organic and critical periods.
There was an organic phase of society would be one where there was kind of a consensus on culture and morals, ways of doing things,
very much like the notion of customary morality or Zitlickite that I was talking about in the lecture on Hegel.
So an example would be in the Middle Ages, everyone, or practically everyone, agreed on God exists, what the true religion was, so there was a consensus, this is an organic period.
Then there were, people would start questioning this, this was a critical period, people would start questioning assumptions, there would be no general consensus on things,
and then this would be replaced by another organic period.
So you'd have an alternation between critical and organic periods.
I think this is something like actually the theory of science of Thomas Kuhn, the famous
one where you have a paradigm emerging and then you have normal science which takes place
in accord with that paradigm, then there are critical questions that develop when the paradigm
breaks down the questions that arise that it's unable to answer and this is eventually
replaced by a new paradigm where it isn't something that just evolves immediately out
of the old one but there's something new that comes on the scene. I think this is a very
Comptonian view of things and so Mill, this is what John Stuart Mill learned from Compton
and he adopted that view in his own work.
Now, after he got back from one of his trips to France in 1827, he had a mental crisis.
He had a nervous breakdown for six months.
This happened because he thought that he felt that he was emotionally starved.
His father had been very rigorous in his education. He never praised him. He had worked extremely
intensively on intellectual matters, but he never developed his emotions. Mill felt that
he wasn't happy. He asked him, supposing all the goals he wanted as a utilitarian were
We realized he asked himself, would this make him happy, and he had to answer, no, it wouldn't,
and he had it.
This made him despondently contemplated suicide, but he snapped out of it somehow, but he felt
afterwards that the utilitarian philosophy of Bentham and his father needed to be modified.
He was influenced by the German Romantics and also by the English poet Sandro Taylor Coleridge.
He thought that they had emphasized the need for cultivation of the emotions in a way that
the utilitarians hadn't.
He wrote essays on Bentham and Coleridge, but it was very critical somewhat of Bentham,
although he still said that he was a utilitarian, but he had criticism of Bentham.
He didn't publish this, though, until his father died.
He became, after he realized this need for more stress on the emotion, he became very
attached to a woman named Harriet Taylor.
He fell in love with her.
Now, there was a slight problem that Harriet Taylor was married to someone else, and in
In those days, it would not at all be acceptable, say, for someone to say if she had divorced
her husband and married him.
That sort of thing just wasn't done.
It wouldn't have even been...
Divorce would certainly not have been granted if, say, the husband and wife had voluntarily
to separate, that would be considered collusion and that would be itself grounds not to grant
the divorce in English law at the time.
So the husband though put up with their friendship, it's not clear that anything, anything actually
of a romantic nature actually took place between them, not even clear anything took place after
After they got married, but after the husband died, John Stuart Mill married Harriet Taylor.
He thought that she had exercised, he thought extremely highly of her talents.
He said that she had aided him particularly.
The main book by Mill that I'll be talking about on liberty, he thought that she had really
contributed so much to it that she was really, could be considered the co-author of the book.
Mill wrote, in his career he wrote works on an extraordinary range of topics, I wrote
on Logic, Theory of Knowledge and Metaphysics, he wrote on political economy, he was the
last of the great English classical economists, the last one in the school of David Ricardo,
and of course he wrote on ethics, political, he wrote on essays on history, literary criticism,
He was certainly a universal genius. He had an amazing range of knowledge and he was regarded
as one of the great public intellectuals of his time. His main contribution to the classical
and the liberal tradition is to be found in the essay on liberty which came out in 1859.
Here the topic was on what sorts of interferences, if any, are justified with individual conduct.
He wanted to defend a very simple principle that he said it was entitled to govern absolutely
the relations between, as far as compulsion is concerned, between individual and the state.
And this was that the state was justified to use compulsion on an individual only in
matters where there was harm to someone else.
The good of a person himself was not sufficient for any interference involving compulsion with an individual.
So if you were harming somebody else, it would be permissible by this principle to use coercion against you.
But if you were doing something that harmed only yourself, it wouldn't be permissible.
Now this doesn't mean that whenever, say you do something that harms somebody else, compulsion should be used.
This is just a necessary condition for compulsion.
Unless you're harming somebody else, compulsion can't be used against you.
It isn't a sufficient condition. It doesn't say, whenever there is a case of harm to others, then there should be compulsion.
It's just saying, you have to cross this bar before you can even think about using compulsion.
Now, before I go further in explaining what Mill's one very simple principle involves,
we have a problem is that, remember I've mentioned Mill is a utilitarian, he said he was still
a utilitarian.
He did modify the utilitarianism of Bentham in that he said, he said, well, it isn't right
as Bentham and his father thought that all types of utility, all types of pleasure are
really the same. Mill thought there were higher and lower pleasures that, say, the pleasures
that you could get from the best art and literature were higher than those, outranked those of,
I'd say that you could get just by stuffing yourself with food.
I guess he hadn't eaten enough, judging from his pictures at any rate.
So how could we find out what these higher pleasures are?
Well, he said just by consulting people who would experience both,
if, say, people with the relevant knowledge that this kind of pleasure from arts and sciences
is higher than just gustatory pleasure than we should think that it was.
So, he's modified his utilitarian system in this way, but we still have a problem in a utilitarian rule is you do whatever is necessary to maximize utility, however you calculate, even if you consider there are different kinds of pleasure, you still come up with some result, you're maximizing utility.
But is that compatible with saying there's one very simple rule to follow, namely that compulsion is only justified if someone is harming somebody else, not if it's just a question of the good of the person himself.
So, it would seem like, wouldn't a utilitarian have to say, you should just see what, even
if you have a case where an individual is harming himself, you should just see what
maximizing utility requires.
How do you know that maximizing utility will always get you the same results as this one
very simple rule?
Is Mill giving up utilitarianism?
And Mill certainly never said, okay, I realize because of this, after written on Liberty,
that I'm not a utilitarian anymore.
Quite the contrary, he always described himself as a utilitarian, because the essay, his book
on utilitarianism was republished in editions after, on Liberty, so he's certainly not giving
So one way, which I don't think is correct, that people have tried to say, they say, how did Mill get around this problem? They said, well, Mill wasn't an ordinary utilitarian, but called an at-utilitarian.
An act you chose here would say, for any situation you're considering, what action, what act
According to the rule utilitarian, you say, what rule that people could adopt would maximize utility?
You confine the list of options to rules and you say, what general policy would maximize utility?
So you say, would it maximize utility if you allow interference with somebody for his own good, so-called paternalist interference?
I'm stopping you from drinking because I think drinking isn't good for you.
So would you maximize utility if you allow that sort of interference or would you maximize utility if you follow Mill's principle?
principle.
So on this view, Mill gets out of the contradiction, apparent contradiction that he's favoring
a rule that could have non-utilitarian, could be, seems to go against what utilitarianism
would say by saying he's not trying to, he's not an actual utilitarian, he's a rule utilitarian
because it could turn out that his rule will be the rule that best maximizes utility even
if there are exceptions where you could have a paternalist act that would maximize utility.
Still the rule wouldn't be, his rule would win out and what you're doing is not trying
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The theory that following his rule just was the thing that would maximize utility.
If you say you're interested in maximizing utility, it doesn't follow that you always
have to try to calculate just by counting up what's going to maximize utility.
You can have a general theory which will tell you what to do, the analogy might be this.
Supposing, question coming up, how many molecules of hydrogen are there in the universe? Well,
supposing a scientist comes up with some theory that gives him an answer to that, it doesn't
He doesn't follow it because he's using the theory. He isn't really counting the number, he isn't really trying to determine the number of hydrogen molecules.
He doesn't have to count them individually to try to get a result, to get that result.
Similarly, in this case, the fact that Mill thinks of rule, he has an argument that a rule will maximize utility.
Utility doesn't mean he's not maximizing utility. So I think Mill, there at least, there isn't good reason to think Mill was a rural utilitarian.
Now, I want to now give, what are the arguments that Mill give, well before I give the arguments, let me just give one very important fact about his principle.
I made characteristically a mistake first that I corrected. I said, well, Mill is saying that the state can't interfere with someone just for that person's own good.
There has to be a situation that involves harm to others.
It isn't only by compulsion that Mill doesn't restrict himself to the state, he doesn't just mean cases where private people threaten to use force on others.
He also had in mind social pressure, say, supposing, say, someone is a public drunkard and other people don't like this, so they arrange a public boycott of this person.
I think Mill would consider that a case of social pressure and he thinks this wouldn't be
justifiable if the purpose of the pressure campaign is to get the person to stop drinking for his own
good. It's only if there's harm to others that you could have not that you're able to have compulsion
not we're not just talking about state compulsion but also compulsion by
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This is a limitation of his principle. He says that this principle, the liberty principle,
the one very simple principle that I've talked about, applies only to people who have reached
a certain stage of civilization. He thinks the European peoples have all reached that
stage. But when we're talking about barbarians, then he thinks you don't have to follow the
principle, he thinks if they find a despot who's very benevolent, he mentions the Indian
Emperor Akbar as an example, he said, then this is the best that can be hoped for. So
he's really, his position is by no means an entirely libertarian, a classical liberal
One, because he's restricting his principle to people he considers civilized.
It doesn't apply to, say, the Indian people.
He didn't really give any list of people it doesn't apply to.
But you can see he's not at all opposed to a paternalistic sort of imperialism,
Just as the British did, they claimed that their rule in India was for the benefit of the Indians.
He wasn't opposed, John Stuart Mill wasn't opposed to that.
In fact, he followed his father in working for the British East India Company,
and he became, before he retired from the company, I think the second highest official in the company.
So he was not only someone who allowed for imperial ruling practice, he was himself an administrator of the British Empire, again, for the private company, the British East India Company.
Now, he has, I think, some interesting arguments defending his principle of liberty.
He starts off from a principle that's very commonly accepted, or was commonly accepted
at the time, that people have the right to freedom of conscience.
People can believe whatever they like in religion or matters of ethics.
This isn't a question of how they act on the belief.
People shouldn't have a state church imposed on them.
They shouldn't be required to go to a church just because it's a state religion.
He takes that as common ground, and then he said, well, if you believe in freedom of conscious,
And you should also believe in free speech, because expressing your thoughts is very almost
as important as being able to think freely for yourself.
You should be able to express your thought.
So here he said you have an argument for free speech.
Now here, the limitations of the Liberty Principle don't fully apply. He believed in free speech even if, say, your speech is harmful to others, say, someone, this would be quite easy to do, gives a talk denouncing me or showing why I'm, I don't know what I'm talking about, even though this harms me,
Mill wouldn't, there can't be any interference with it on the grounds of the Liberty Prince
because freedom of speech is really absolute.
The only exceptions are, say, if there's some, someone is inciting people to direct action
with violent kind against somebody, like exposing people or rioting against, say, someone who's
collecting taxes, and then someone gives a speech saying, let's go out and kill this
person. That wouldn't be allowed, according to Mill. But you really have a right to say
whatever you want, expressing your own opinions, as long as you avoid that. Mill defends this
by saying the way we arrive at truth is by the clash of conflicting opinions. Suppose
somebody says, well, aren't that maybe the case? I mean, there are certainly areas where
we don't know the truth, but aren't there a lot of areas where we do? I mean, aren't
Are there, say, would it make sense for somebody to doubt the basic principles of mathematics, or should we take, are all questions, why should we say that all questions are open questions, aren't there some questions in which we do know things, things are definitely the case, this is the way it is, and we should, we need not listen to people on the other side, say, there are some
People who believe today that the earth is the center of the universe and everything revolves around the earth.
Do we have to listen to the arguments of those people? Can we just dismiss them? Why does the free speech principle extend this far?
So, Mill said, he had several replies to this, he said, first of all, in order to hold an opinion in a reasonable way, we have to be aware of the arguments for and against it.
If we just hold an opinion just because we learned it by rote,
we just, the teachers have told us this, we believe this,
then we really don't have a firm grasp of the view
and we could just hold the view without really understanding it.
Mill thought this is what had happened to Christianity.
He thought that Christians of his day in general
We don't understand the teachings of Jesus in the New Testament because these haven't been exposed to criticism.
These are not really held as live opinions, but they're just simply viewed dogmatically.
People just accept them. They don't understand what they are.
He thought also, if you say that a view is so absurd that we don't have to listen to the counter-argument,
then you're making an assumption that you're infallible.
You're saying that what the dissenters said couldn't possibly be of any interest, couldn't possibly be of any value,
and you have no right to assume infallibility.
It seems to me that Mill's argument here isn't right, I mean someone could say that he didn't think, he thought some question really didn't admit of dissent, but he wouldn't in saying that, I don't see, be claiming that that very view of his couldn't possibly be false, he just thinks that view is true, namely that dissent from the
The person he's talking about isn't worth anything.
The person wouldn't be claiming that his view is infallibly true, just that it is true.
So in that point I don't see really why Mill's argument works.
So this is, as you say, Mill has very absolute views on free speech.
But on other areas, he also has, where he applies the harm principle, his harm principle,
he arrives at quite libertarian conclusions.
For example, he opposes, lists various measures of his time that he thinks violate the principle.
He says, for example, that efforts to prohibit liquor that forbid people from drinking are
are violations of the principle because they're saying it isn't up to you to decide whether
to drink or not. The government is judging that these drinks are harmful to you, so therefore
you don't have the right to use these substances. You shouldn't do that. He mentions another
Another one, he said that there were efforts, at the time the Mormons were a very rising
group and there were all sorts of efforts in the U.S. to prohibit their multiple marriages.
There were attacks on polygamy and Mill thought as long as people were voluntarily entered
into these arrangements, there was no reason to interfere with them. People might think
Those aren't the right, that isn't the right way to live, but that would be a case of paternalist interference.
You would be holding that because, in your view, this type of marriage is, say, harmful to women, then people shouldn't be allowed to do it.
So this violates the principle according to him. Now Mill's principle, the harm principle, has gotten a lot of criticism from people.
The most important, the most frequent criticism is that Mill, according to the principle,
distinguishes between acts that harm others and acts that just harm yourself and the criticism
that Mill was well aware of is that there is no clear distinction between the two, that
anything really that someone does could have effects on other people. Supposing, say, someone
When someone gets drunk, well, this could set a bad example to other people in the neighborhood,
lead them to drink.
So how could you say that they're purely self-regarding acts?
Mill didn't really set out clear criteria that enable us to distinguish self-regarding
In the case I was giving, it isn't that the drunkard getting drunk causes somebody else
to get drunk, if there's some influence it would just be that would be this first person
getting drunk is having some effect on someone else through the other person's choice to
get drunk. So this wouldn't be the case according to Mill of permissible interference. So Mill
thought that for he did think that their principal has some bite to it. He wouldn't accept that
All acts really have some effects on other people, so really this principle doesn't say anything.
Now, I think from a libertarian standpoint, though, I think there is a problem with Mill's principle that,
I haven't mentioned, of course there's a problem I've mentioned already, that he limits its application to people he considers civilized.
If you don't make the grade according to him, then the liberty principle doesn't apply to you.
So that's a clear non-libertarian aspect of it all.
Mill. But there's another problem, and this has to do with this point I mentioned earlier,
that Mill is talking not just about state interference, but also about social control.
To elaborate on this point a bit, Mill said that in the development of political institutions in
in Europe. There had first been, when there was in the feudal period of absolute monarchies,
then people tried to limit the state power. But once we had the absolute governments were
overthrown, we had in the 19th century, after the French Revolution, we had parliamentary
Government in England and in France and other countries in Europe, at least for large periods
of time, then there was a feeling that we don't have to limit the government at all
because the government is really identical to the people.
So we don't have to be concerned with limits on government power anymore.
So Mill said, no, we do have to be considered with this.
In particular, we have to consider the tyranny of the majority.
Here he was very much influenced by Tocqueville, who had talked about that in his famous book
Democracy in America.
Mill wrote a long review of the book, and he knew Tocqueville, who visited England.
They were friends.
So, what Mill was concerned about is social pressure, that people are not only organized
boycotts, as I mentioned before, but people are confined by custom to doing things.
They say if somebody wanted to adopt an unconventional style of marriage, he might have great difficulty
in doing that just because of the pressure of public opinion against it.
So here's where I think the problem arises for the Liberty Principle is that if people
have free speech, then aren't they, on Mill's principle, free to react in a negative way
to what other people do.
So it's not clear to me how Mill could maintain his opposition to social pressure without
restricting people's liberty according to the liberty principle.
Now he does admit that some actions will have a negative effect on people and he thinks
that you're within your rights to react in a negative way if somebody does something
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You're responsible for the consequences of his action, according to Mill.
You're just, you have, you're within your rights in reacting to what he's doing.
It's just, this is, why can't, if you find something upsetting, why you certainly don't have to continue to associate with it, or why that, why not?
If Mill admits this, how can he then be opposed so much to social pressure?
He might be able to say, well, he personally doesn't like it.
He wishes people were more open to changes in social customs.
But it isn't clear he could do anything.
Now, he doesn't actually say what people could do to prevent social pressure, but he does
say his principle is intended to apply.
He says people are not justified in exerting social pressure against others to get them
to do, to act for their own good, but it's not clear how he can say this and still say
that people are free to react in accord with their own preferences to other people's behavior
seems, at least to me, to be caught in somewhat, if not a direct contradiction, at least some
tension there.
There's another key principle on liberty that is essential to grasping Mill's perspective.
Here he was influenced by the great German classical liberal, Wilhelm von Humboldt.
Humboldt had praised very much, and Mill quotes Humboldt in this quotation right at the beginning
on liberty, that he was very much in favor of more autonomy, people should not live just
according to prescribed customs, they should experiment and exercise their powers fully
as Human Being. Humboldt, in turn, had been influenced by the German playwright Friedrich
Schiller that people should exercise their powers to the fullest. We should develop autonomously.
So Mills spoke about experiments in living. It was desirable that individuals not just
accept matters passively and he thought Christians in particular tended to do this, but he favored
a more policy, what he called pagan self-assertion. He very much looked to the Greeks and he thought
that in Athens, especially during the period of Pericles, people would try, at least some
Some people tried to display their powers as human beings to the full, and he thought
this was very desirable.
People should have all sorts of experiments in living.
Interesting just as a sidelight, when he praised Pericles, one aspect of Pericles' life was
quite similar to Mill. Pericles had a romantic relationship that was considered irregular
by the standards of his time. He was involved with a woman called Aspasia who was like Harriet
Mill. Taylor was very educated and advised him. Pericles consulted with her on various
So, there's a parallel there between Mill's praise for Pericles and an aspect of Mill's own life.
So, to say this is just silent, the key point is, Mill thought that people should be very experimental,
Mill hoped, and here he was following Comte, that eventually, what he called it, the religion
of Humanity would replace ordinary Christianity and we would have then, after a new, this
critical period that we were now in in European society, sort of a new organic period would
replace the existing situation. So we would have a new organic period in which Christianity
would not be the central element as it was now.
This point, namely that Mill thought the intellectual should be very influential in these experiments
in living, plus that he hoped for the eventual overcoming of Christianity, has led some people
to argue that Mill really wasn't a classical liberal libertarian at all. That Mill had
a secret agenda. These people who argue this, although they say Mill had a secret agenda,
These are not, for one, Straussians. They're different people who say Mill had his own agenda.
In particular, there are three writers here who hold variations on this view.
One is Joseph Hamburger, who had a book called John Stuart Mill on liberty and control, and
And there's also Linda Rader, I'll just spell her name, that's a kind of unusual spelling.
And then there's the British Tory political theorist and historian Maurice Cowley.
So what they say is Mill wasn't really that interested in liberty, what he really wanted
was to dissolve people's beliefs, conventional beliefs, and then replace them by a dictatorship
of intellectuals, so it'd be really the intellectuals who would be guiding society.
Mill isn't really concerned with what he's talking about, liberty.
This is just during this critical period when you have to replace the existing beliefs,
the existing Christian order, but once that's done, once intellectuals are successful, then
he would have sort of an intellectual dictatorship.
Just like Auguste Comte favored Comte thought that favored rule by an elite group of intellectuals
and industrialist people, there would be a new religion of humanity, just the way Mill
talks about a religion of humanity.
I don't find this new interpretation convincing.
It very much overestimates the influence of Auguste Comte on Mill.
Mill always, throughout his life, respected Comte as a sociologist, but he thought that
Comte's programs were entirely hostile to liberty.
He described them as liberticide, killing of liberty, so he really can't be taken as
As an advocate of Comte, when he hoped that Christianity would be replaced, he isn't
at all saying that people should be prevented from being Christians or be forced not to
be.
He just thought and hoped that that would come about.
I mean, if it did, it would be through peaceful persuasion.
I think if in fact we look at Mill's essay Theism, which was published after his death
by his stepdaughter Helen Taylor, we'll see he really repudiates a key position in Comte.
Mill in this essay called Theism talks about, accepts a version of the design argument,
The argument that from the existence of order in the world, we can conclude that the world was designed by God.
He doesn't accept it in the sense that he thinks it's a conclusive proof, but he thinks that we do have grounds for thinking that, at least as a likely hypothesis, that the world was designed by a limited God.
Now, he also thinks that he's aware of the evolutionary view defended by Darwin, which, after all, the original species came out in 1859, well within Mill's lifetime.
But Mill says this is a hypothesis that might turn out to be true, but on the other hand, it might not. We have to wait and see what happens.
So here, the key point I want to emphasize is not whether Mill was right or wrong about the design argument.
His procedure here, his way of arguing, is very anti-comptian,
because one of the key points in Comte is that the theological stage,
where you explain things by saying a divine being had created them,
is a primitive stage, and this has been overcome by the metaphysical and the scientific stage,
But Mill is saying, no, no, it is a good explanation of things that it was created by a personal being.
This is a good principle of explanation, and it might very well turn out to be the true one.
So Mill, you see here, is very definitely not a comptee.
I think the reason I discuss this, I think Mill's essay on theism is very underrated.
People really should read this. It's important in understanding his thought.
That said, I don't think, as I said, I don't think these writers have made out a case,
at least their case, that Mill is not a classical liberal or libertarian, can't be sustained.
and Sustain. However, besides the point that I mentioned already, the limitation of liberty
principle to so-called civilized people, plus difficulties on what he meant by social control,
there are other anti-libertarian hearts to milk. Now, supposing we have cases that don't
fall under the harm principle, that are not prohibited by the one very simple principle,
I should say, ones that in his view do involve harm to others. Then, as I mentioned before,
one isn't required to interfere, but Mill did allow, in some cases, interference in
in a way I think most people consider very anti-classical, liberal, anti-libertarian.
I have in mind, especially, population control.
He thought that people could be forbidden to marry by the state unless they could show
evidence that they were able to support a family.
You don't have the freedom to get married.
You have to be able to show you could support yourself, because supposing you had children
and then they went on, they required welfare, they required charity from others, this would
be harming other people. So you see, you can't say the liberty principle rules it out, but
still, I think from a libertarian point of view, one would want to say, if you have such
a law, you're interfering with people's rights. And even if people were able to get
Married and Supported Family, Mill thought that if, say, there was a growth in population
and it was thought there were too many people, this would depress living standards generally,
the state could forbid women from having more children, say, by requiring them to use birth
and Health Control Devices. So here is one clear case where Mill can't be considered
libertarian. I should say he was criticized in a review of On Liberty by Frederick Harrison
just on this point. It was way odd that Harrison, of all people, should criticize Mill for being
not sufficiently libertarian, because Harrison was the leading English disciple, or a leading English disciple of Auguste Comte.
So here we have a case of a Comtist who's criticizing Mill for not being libertarian enough.
Well, I now want to turn from Mill to the next person I want to talk about, Herbert Spencer, who lived from 1820 to 1903.
It's almost the exact years of Queen Victoria. I think she was 1818, 1901 or something like that, but it's very similar.
He lasted pretty much the entire Victorian era. Now, in the lectures I've given so far, the people I've talked about from Plato to Mill
are pretty much the standard ones you would get, say, if you were taking an ordinary course in history and political theory.
These are really the ones you would get. You might get a few others or different ones, but this would be a very standard list.
But in, say, standard courses, Herbert Spencer isn't a figure who would get much studied.
Studied, sociologist Talcott Parsons once started one of his books,
Who Now Reads Herbert Spencer?
This is, in my view, a very unfortunate fact.
Spencer is, for those of you who read him will know, an extremely good thinker, in my
in my view, substantially more worth studying in political and social philosophy than John Stuart Mill,
even though that's very much the reverse of the situation now.
And at the time Spencer wrote, he was regarded as major philosophy, one of the great philosophers of his time.
Both John Stuart Mill and Charles Darwin, for example, viewed him with great respect.
Darwin said in his correspondence he was very pleased that Spencer had supported evolutionary views in his own work before Darwin did.
He was happy that one person he considered one of the greatest intellects of his time was a supporter of views very similar to his own.
Spencer was the son of an English clergyman, and he, like Mill, his father helped educate him,
although he was certainly not force-fed the way John Stuart Mill was.
And like Mill, he didn't go to university, he was trained as a civil engineer, and also like Mill, he had an amazing variety of knowledge.
He wasn't learning languages in the way Mill was, but he wrote works on giving theories in physics, biology.
He was one of the founders of sociology. He had an enormous range of knowledge on all sorts of things.
In the work I recommended, I want to talk a bit about the principles of ethics,
these main ethical theories on social philosophy in the second volume, but the first volume,
called The Data of Ethics shows how much he knew, how thoroughly he was familiar with contemporary
anthropological accounts of ethics. He read very widely in the literature,
and he knew what he had a very wide historical knowledge also. Now,
Now, I mentioned that John Stuart Mill was a utilitarian, although he modified utilitarianism
in certain ways, like talk about higher and lower pleasures, and that he also had a, in
this area of interference with others, he had a principle, one very simple principle,
and what he thought you should use to determine what would be the maximized utility in these cases.
Spencer, like Mill, was a utilitarian, but he had his own very distinctive kind of utilitarianism
that was in which a particular hypothesis about what would maximize happiness,
will produce the best happiness, applied not only, as with Mill, to one particular sphere, but to everything.
Spencer is a utilitarian only with this extra hypothesis.
The extra hypothesis is he thought that if you want to maximize happiness,
Then, what you need to do is to do the most you can so that the human species should survive.
If you accept that life is worth living in the sense that living will, on the whole,
to produce more happiness than not living, then you have reason to think that by promoting
human survival, you'll be promoting happiness.
So Spencer said, well, it's very hard to calculate trying to figure out individual instances.
We can't really say what will maximize happiness.
This is kind of a standard criticism of utilitarianism, how are you supposed to know what will maximize
is happiness. This is one that has been developed especially since the development of Austrian
economics. As you know, Austrian economists will point out, you can't compare people's
utility inter-personally. I can't say, my getting $10, your losing $5 will be maximized
And Spencer said, you do that by you have a system where, since each person will be most interested in his own life, you want a system where each person bears the consequences of his or her own actions.
So, this gives Spencer, is the key principle that he uses in this volume Principles of
Ethics in arriving at the policies of what to do, and he thinks that what we will get
If we allow each individual to bear the consequences of his or her own actions, we'll get what
he calls the law of equal freedom.
Each individual should be free to do what he wants, so long as he doesn't interfere
with the equal freedom of others.
After Spencer developed this law, it was expressed in his early work, Social Statics, that came
out in 1850.
Here, he didn't use this kind of evolutionary argument, he was saying, we're in having
What Will Best Promote Human Survival, as he does in Principles of Ethics, where in social
statics he had a kind of theological grounding for the same principle, but it was pointed
out to him that Kant had a similar principle, and he has an appendix to, in an appendix
to Principles of Ethics, he says Kant did have a similar principle, although he thinks
there's some difference and I think he was rather surprised to find this out
because Kant's method of philosophy is quite different from his but there is a
similarity between his law of equal freedom and what Kant said. Spencer
Peter placed a special importance in applying the law of equal freedom to having peaceful
relations.
He thought that if, say, we had a situation in which the society was under threat, then
It would be, of course, justified to resist the force, but doing so could involve restrictions
on people's liberty.
He distinguished between what he called industrial societies, which is one where the market develops
and people live peacefully through market exchanges, and what he called militant societies
where you're using society, you're sort of at war with each other and you're fighting
each other. Now he thought if you had a war, then as I say, it's justified to have interference
with people's liberties because you might need this to protect the society. And he didn't
think that that was wrong. He thought that in that kind of case you could interfere with
but he thought that's a good reason to try to avoid war and he was a big opponent of the wars that England engaged in going down to the war near the end of his life, the Boer War against the settlers in South Africa.
He was very much opposed to that. He was always opposed to British imperial ventures.
He was unlike Mill, he was a very consistent anti-imperialist.
So Spencer then works out in detail how his principle of equal liberty applies.
I think it's important to mention a very common misunderstanding of Spencer.
Spencer isn't read much nowadays, but if you mention to any fairly well-informed college student named Herbert Spencer,
I'm sure what the person will say, oh, social Darwinist.
In fact, you can imagine a dictionary where somebody looks up Herbert Spencer and just
says, social Darwinist.
According to this view, social Darwinism, you have kind of a violent, society develops,
human beings develop some kind of violent struggle.
You imagine this Tennyson's line, nature, red tooth and claw.
And so the survivors are the ones who are tougher than others.
They kill the weaker people, and so they are surviving, and then they're able to reproduce
and pass on their good traits to the next generation.
So on this view of Social Darwinism, then you shouldn't help poor and weak people because
if you do so, they'll reproduce.
We don't want the weak to reproduce, they should really be wiped out.
This isn't at all what Spencer believed.
When he talked about evolution, he had his own views on how evolution would take place.
It would be more that, say, people would develop, say, peaceful habits of cooperation, and these
These would be taught to their children and passed on.
He was also something of a Lamarckian, he believed, in inheritance of acquired characteristics,
so this could possibly be passed on through heredity as well as education.
And he didn't say that you shouldn't help the weak or the people who are sick.
On the contrary, he thought people naturally have feelings of affection and beneficence
toward others, and this is very desirable that people have these feelings because this
is a way to aid human survival.
So it's very desirable.
Now, he did think in deciding how much to help those who are sick or poor, you should
You should take account of possible negative effects, say, if somebody was idle and a loafer,
you should take account that if you give that person money, that could encourage bad habits.
So doing that wouldn't advance the human welfare very much, it might hurt it.
He thought if you refrain from giving money to someone like that, that would be a case
what he calls negative beneficence. You're helping general welfare by refraining from
doing something in this case. You're refraining here by not giving, you're helping people
in general. But he certainly didn't exclude helping people. He did think that, of course,
the government shouldn't do this. This would violate the law of equal freedom. He was also,
He thought very poorly of organized charities. He thought these were somewhat rackets. They
weren't really helping other people. They had their own agendas. But he did favor helping
people on a personal basis. If you help on a personal basis, you could evaluate the case,
to see whether an act of beneficence was justified.
So as you see, I think, oh, one final point on Spencer that I think is interesting, Henry
Sidgwick, who was one of the great academic utilitarians who followed John Stuart Mill,
Sidwick's Methods of Ethics is one of the most important works on ethical theory written in the 19th century.
He wrote a review of Spencer, in which he raised an objection.
He said, well, Spencer argues that we promote happiness by doing what we can to promote human survival.
And he does so on this optimistic hypothesis that life on the whole is worth living, life generates more happiness than unhappiness.
But he doesn't prove the optimistic hypothesis, he doesn't show that people think that life isn't worth living, that people are generally unhappy or wrong.
and Spencer in reply to that he said Cedric is perfectly right he said I
haven't proved this this is just the hypothesis view I'm assuming and it's
only on if you assume that that his system goes through and the little time
remaining I left a little time just for by Sanders Spooner and the reason I
I left such a little time, other than the fact that I tend to go on too long, is I have only
one real point I want to make about Spooner. Spooner was, of course, a, lived from the
1808 to 1887. He was one of the great American abolitionists and anarchists. The key contribution,
I think he made to political theory is found in a number of his works, especially in the
series of works with the same title and different numbers called No Treason, The Constitution
of No Authority.
And what Spooner does is really to demolish totally consent theories of political obligation.
I remember when I mentioned Hobbes and Locke, I was talking about various kinds of consent,
how Hobbesian social contract differs from Lockean contracts.
We're dealing with hypothetical consent, various other matters.
Spooner, in the No Treason, really raises devastating objections, considering especially the United States Constitution.
He says, well, supposing, I'll just give a few arguments he gives, he says, supposing you say the Constitution rests on popular consent,
Well, who was actually consented to the Constitution?
Let's have a list of the people who actually said, I accept the Constitution.
Even if you could come up with people who had said that, why would that bind anyone
else?
Say, we're living in a time later than the Constitution, so why should it matter to us
If, say, some people at one time in the past accepted the Constitution. Furthermore, even
those people say, it says in the Constitution, we the people of the United States of America
do ordain and establish this Constitution. Even if there were people who said that, they
didn't say for what period of time they were doing this, so why should we assume they're
You're doing this perpetually.
Also, he thinks, if you're consenting to something, if you're saying other people, a certain body
is authorized to represent you, because you have to do this in public, you have to say,
this person is my representative, I authorize this person to be my representative, but he
He said, well, voting is done in secret, so all we know is that some people, if we have
a constitution that has been adopted, have voted in favor of it, but no one has been
willing to stand out and publicly say that he supports the constitution.
So it doesn't really have any force.
He said, well, you know, if you talk about consent, you really have to take consent quite
literally wants there to be actual evidence by particular people saying that they consent.
And even if you could find that, why would this have any binding force on other people
who didn't consent?
Why are they supposed to be bound by the consent of the majority?
If you said, well, even the minority, say, by voting have consented, he said, no, no,
that isn't right because people could be voting, say, just because they think they're in a
bad situation, they think they have to try to do the best they can, or they could think,
given the situation, they have a chance to get people they want in power so they can
exploit others.
But the mere fact that someone is voting doesn't show that he's consented to the system in
any way.
Some of the arguments Spooner gives are limited in application to the U.S. Constitution, but
I think he gives arguments that apply more generally, and I think he gives one of the
most devastating criticisms ever made of consent theories of political obligation.
And he, like Spencer, is another person who isn't really studied in usual courses on history, political thought, but should be.
So, I think I have a little bit of time for questions. Matthew?
and then you also said that there were certain authoritarian and guardian aspects to his vision of liberty.
And I think it's important to bring those two together. There's a current book called Civilizing Subjects by Catherine Hall, a British scholar.
And one of the things she does is she looks at a debate in 1865 between Thomas Carlyle and Mill,
Because, as you said, Mill was involved in colonialism. Mill actually became the colonial governor of Jamaica after a very famous rebellion against the former colonial governor in Jamaica named Edward Iyer, E-Y-R-E, who was considered authoritarian as colonial governor as well.
and the debate between Carlisle and Mill was that Carlisle actually used civilizational rhetoric and said we, the British, must always master them, the Jamaicans, because they can never be fit for self-government.
And Mill's mixed attitude toward liberty actually made him a good colonial governor for that moment because Mill said, no, wait a minute, they're not a lower culture.
They have the capacity to be self-governing some day, you see, and why that's important to recognize for contemporary consideration of anti-war, anti-colonialism is because right now, obviously, our government would like to tutor Iraq up to the capacity for self-governing, right?
And that, it's not just a matter of racially excluding people and say, oh they can never be, they're barbarians. It's the suggestion, the guardian suggestion that people can be tutored up to the capacity.
That made Mill an excellent colonial governor in time of crisis in response to this rebellion in 1865.
And so, with Neal saying, well, you have certain freedoms and rights, but you don't have the right to revolution, but I recognize that in humanity you might be self-governing someday, it's kind of like Jimmy Carter imperialism, you know what I mean?
I'm not sure I can summarize all of that. The gist of it is that it was suggested that I should
You'd combine two points made in the lecture. One is Mill's very negative view of so-called
barbarian people and also his view, some sort of authoritarian guidance, and this was applied
to a controversy between Mill and Thomas Carlisle over the governor of Jamaica, Governor Airy.
Civilizing Subjects by Kaplan Hall, H.A.L.L.
Not the colonial, never the colonial governor of Jamaica or anything else.
The controversy over Governor Erie was that there had been a revolt in Jamaica that Governor
Erie put down in a very cruel way and including, there was a member of parliament who he had
was really judicially murdered, and there were many Jamaicans who were executed or flogged very cruelly.
So, Mill was the head of a committee that thought the governor should be prosecuted for murder, and he made efforts to do that.
There were other famous people on his side, such as Charles Darwin, and then Carlisle
was head of a committee, the other defending the governor. There were people on his side
who included Charles Dickens, I think John Ruskin, who was a very ardent imperialist
on this side, but I'm fairly sure Mill himself wasn't the colonial administrator. I could
check that for you, but I'm fairly sure that... Any other questions? Dan?
The question is that when Mill says it's just viable to restrict free speech if someone is directly inciting to violence, isn't this inconsistent with what he says elsewhere in that if people were incited to violence as a result of this speech,
speech, then their acting violently is going through their judgment. It isn't something
happening automatically. Well, I think Mill would challenge that part of it. He would
say, you could have cases where, say, there's a mob that's really so emotionally aroused
that this speech is really setting them off. He thinks that you really wouldn't want to
Well, I think we're out of time now, so thanks very much.