Mill's On Liberty - critical evaluation - 1

Mill’s On Liberty ~ critical evaluation

Comments1. Locating Mill’s concept of liberty

• David Miller’s proposal: there are 3 traditions of liberty– (1) The republican– (2) The liberal– (3) The Idealist

• Where is Mill’s theory?

Mill's On Liberty - critical evaluation - 2

Mill’s On Liberty ~ critical evaluation

Comments2. On Liberty remains immensely

influential to this day. When the Wolfenden Committee in England recommended that laws against homosexual behavior be changed, they appealed to Mill’s argument: “There must remain a realm of private morality and immorality which . . . is not the law’s business.”

Mill's On Liberty - critical evaluation - 3

Mill’s On Liberty ~ critical evaluation

• Debates over legality & morality of pornography.

• Has almost become part of popular culture--if speech or action does not harm others, should not be legally proscribed and, many would say, should not be regarded as immoral.

Mill's On Liberty - critical evaluation - 4

Mill’s On Liberty ~ critical evaluation

3. Alan Ryan observes that the book is about more than a principle of liberty. It is about a certain way of life. • Mill is making a plea for a way of life

which gives full play to imagination, spontaneity (“experiments in living”), diversity, variety, individuality vs routine, security, & community.

Mill's On Liberty - critical evaluation - 5

Mill’s On Liberty ~ critical evaluation

Problems with Mill’s principle and justification of it1. The difficulty of making the

distinction between self-regarding and other-regarding• examples

Mill's On Liberty - critical evaluation - 6

Mill’s On Liberty ~ critical evaluation

• Lord Devlin in his famous The Enforcement of Morals argues that the distinction does not hold. All actions are in some way other-regarding.

2. Does freedom of expression always enhance truth?• A distinction is necessary.

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Mill’s On Liberty ~ critical evaluation

• Civil discourse which has as its goal truth vs polemical discourse which has as its goal winning the argument.

3. Does Mill emphasize individualism at the expense of the values of community?

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Mill’s On Liberty ~ critical evaluation

4. A case study: Dyzenhaus on Mill & pornography• Feminists argue that pornography

should be legally proscribed because it causes harm to women.

• Those opposed to legal restrictions on pornography appeal to Millian arguments.

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Mill’s On Liberty ~ critical evaluation

– Pornography does not cause physical harm to women.

– Pornography is purely self-regarding.

• Dyzenhaus’ thesis: Mill, on the basis of his own principle, would call for legal restrictions on pornography.

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Mill’s On Liberty ~ critical evaluation

– Mill in On the Subjection of Women call for perfect equality between men and women.

– For Mill, the inequality of women prevents women from achieving their autonomy, which in turn is a necessary condition of happiness

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Mill’s On Liberty ~ critical evaluation

– To those who object that men & women are naturally unequal, Mill would respond that what we take as natural is in fact the construct of a society of inequality (39).

– Is this consistent with On Liberty? Dyzenhaus: Yes.

Mill's On Liberty - critical evaluation - 12

Mill’s On Liberty ~ critical evaluation

In the opening lines of On Liberty, Mill talks about the limits of power exercised by society, not only the government, over the individual.

He is concerned not only with government tyranny but also with social tyranny.

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Mill’s On Liberty ~ critical evaluation

Indeed, he describes that latter as often “more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since . . . it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself” (Gray 8-9).

Mill's On Liberty - critical evaluation - 14

Mill’s On Liberty ~ critical evaluation

Mill is concerned with the coercive power of social classes and groups, not only the coercive power of the government (41).

This suggests that the power exercised by men over women through pornography is one of these kinds of social and moral coercion (42).

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Mill’s On Liberty ~ critical evaluation

– Cf. Dyzenhaus’ Millian defense of the legal restrictions on pornography with the conservative defense. Conservatives wish to censor

pornography because it offends against community norms of morality.

And conservatives usually want to preserve patriarchy.

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Mill’s On Liberty ~ critical evaluation

Mill would (acc. to Dyzenhaus) reject the conservative position because it retains patriarchy and thus does not allow women to achieve true autonomy.