I have heard and read about John Stuart Mill many times before but have never read him. Known as the most influential English-speaking philosopher of the nineteenth century, he still has many followers and admirers in the new millennium, even in some intellectual circles in mainland China. For example, Xiang Luo (罗翔) – the famed Chinese law professor who had gained an incredibly strong following on Internet because of his lucid and witty analysis of contemporary legal matters – is evidently a Mill’s fan. I was reluctant to read Mill, or for that matter any philosophers who lived two centuries ago, as I wasn’t sure I could understand, much less enjoy, their writings. However, after reading a blog by Luo that passionately praises On Liberty, I decided to at least give it a try. I’m glad I did.
One of the most important works on political philosophy, On Liberty explains what constitutes liberty, why society must guarantee it, and how to resolve the conflict between liberty and order. Mill’s central argument is that a civilized community should not exercise power over its members against their will except for the purpose of preventing harm to others. In his own words,
“The only freedom which deserves the name, is that of pursuing our own good in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs, or impede their efforts to obtain it”.
This doctrine, known as the harm principle, bestows each person a virtual sphere, whose boundary may be described by the adage, “my right to swing my fist ends where your nose begins”. The individual is sovereign over themselves within this sphere, which Mill divides into three compartments: (i) the liberty of conscience, including thought, feeling, opinion and sentiment on all subjects, (ii) the liberty of planning one’s own life according to one’s tastes and character; and (iii) the liberty of uniting with other consenting individuals.
Per the harm principle, the US government seems to overstep its authority by outlawing prostitution, gambling, and drug use. The government may consider these activities immoral and dangerous, even decidedly harmful to a person who engages in them, but still the person should only be warned of the danger, not forbidden from exposing themselves to it. In fact, Mill thinks even commercializing such activities – say working as a pimp or selling drugs for a profit – may fall into the realm of individual liberty, so long as those activities themselves are admissible (under the harm principle, they surely are).
It should be noted that harm is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for interference. Any competition for a scarce resource – admission to Ivy League colleges, election to political offices, tickets to Taylor Swift’s concert, to name a few – necessarily produces winners reaping benefits at the expense of losers. Do the winners thus harm losers, materially and/or psychologically? Mill asserts such a claim would be valid only if the winner has employed “fraud or treachery, and force”. Nor harm to others must be caused by actions. A person can be held accountable for the harm attributed to their inaction, too, though compulsion against such offense must be more carefully exercised. A somewhat surprising example given by Mill is parents failing to provide their children with the “ordinary chance of a desirable existence”. That is, the failure at parenting is not just a family tragedy, but a crime against the children and society. In fact, Mill has gone so far as suggesting couples who cannot show they have the means of raising children properly should be denied the right to marriage, effectively denying them the liberty to unite with others.
Mill would probably be called a free speech absolutist if he lived today. Expression of any opinion by any fringe group, in his mind, must be tolerated and protected, no questions asked. To drive home this point, he writes,
“If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind.”
Mill does not believe being offended by another person’s conduct or speech is an injury that warrants redress. To him, the feeling of a person for their own opinion carries much more weight than the feeling of another who finds their holding it hurtful or offensive. If hate speech was a thing back then, Mill would be inclined to protect it too. He would be dumbfounded upon learning that Larry Summers, the former president of Harvard University, was forced to resign simply because he offered a seemingly innocent explanation of women’s underrepresentation in science and engineering. The only qualification to the freedom of speech Mill would agree is that it must not incite violence. For example, “an opinion that corn-dealers are starvers of the poor… may justly incur punishment when delivered orally to an excited mob assembled before the house of a corn-dealer”. This example seems to fit well with the speech that Donald Trump gave to the mob that gathered in front of White House on January 6th, 2021 –– whether Trump was intended to stop a proceeding of US congress by force or not, the mere presence of a mob that could heed his words means the speech has violated the harm principle.
Mill had more than a healthy dose of skepticism about democracy. He appears to suggest self-government is an illusion because there is no such a thing as “the government of each by himself”, but only the government “of each by all the rest”. The will of the people spoken of, similarly, is the will of the majority, not the will of everyone. Mill is wary of society hindering the development of individuality by compelling its members to adopt its own ideas and practices as the rule of conduct. This tyranny of the majority, he contends, can be more oppressive than an actual tyrant, because “it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself.”
At times Mill sounds like a staunch elitist. Deriding the mass as “collective mediocrity”, he warns us the danger of allowing the mass to take their opinions from “men much like themselves, addressing them or speaking in their name, on the spur of the moment, through the newspapers”. Instead, to rise above mediocrity, the mass must be “guided by the counsels and influence of a more highly gifted and instructed One or Few”. Exactly who these geniuses are Mill did not specify. I don’t think he meant elected officials, since no elected official in a democracy, including the president of the US, could ever hope to achieve this level of potency.
Liberty is not a natural right, according to Mill. He made it clear the people who are incapable “free and equal discussions” have no use for it. These “barbarians”, as Mill calls them, should consider themselves lucky if they can find a competent despot – “an Akbar or a Charlemagne” – to be their ruler. Instead, Mill justifies liberty by its utility. Freedom of speech is indispensable because it guarantees “the opportunity of exchanging error for truth”. Even if an opinion is wrong, we would gain, by giving it a fair hearing, a better understanding of truth “produced by its collision with error”. As Mill puts it eloquently,
“he who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that.”
Moreover, liberty fosters individuality, which is instrumental to human progress. A civilization becomes stationary, Mill asserts, the moment it ceases to possess individuality. He argues the emphasis on conformity at the expense of individuality is the main reason why China fell so behind the West at the time of his writing (twenty years after the first Opium War). China enjoyed “a particularly good set of customs” from early on, thanks to the talent and wisdom of a few “sages and philosophers”. Yet, her attempt to “impress the best wisdom upon every mind in the community” backfired because it ended up imposing the same maxims and rules on everyone’s thoughts and conduct, thereby eradicating individuality. Remarkably, Mill’s analysis still rings true in today’s China. Growing up in 1970s and 1980s, I remember being taught that the best I can do for the nation is to become a “revolutionary screw” (革命的螺丝钉). The word “revolutionary” might have been slowly phased out since then, but the metaphor has not. China still sees her citizens as standard parts on a well-oiled machine: indistinguishable and insignificant as individuals, but harmonious and powerful put together – or so she hopes. In the past two centuries, China had tried to reinvent herself but insisted to do it her own way for so many times that Albert Einstein might think she was insane, as in “doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results”. Will she succeed this time around? I don’t know, but I will leave you with one of my favorite quotes from On Liberty (the emphasis is mine):
“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 accomplished”.