Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-dh8gc Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-14T22:04:38.050Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Rights, Consequences, and Mill on Liberty1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 January 2010

D. A. Lloyd Thomas
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Mill says that the object of his essay On Liberty is to defend a certain principle, which I will call the ‘liberty principle’, and will take to say the following: ‘It is permissible, in principle, for the state (through law) or society (through social pressure) to control the actions of individuals “only in respect to those actions of each, which concern the interest of other people”’. The liberty principle is a prescription of intermediate generality. Mill intends it to support more specific political prescriptions, such as liberty of conscience, of expressing and publishing opinions, of framing a plan of life to suit our own character, and of combination for any purpose not involving harm to others (p. 75). The liberty principle is more general than these prescriptions but less general than its possible moral foundations, such as utilitarianism. My concern will be with attempts to defend the liberty principle by showing it to be supported by an acceptable moral position.

Type
Papers
Information
Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 15: Of Liberty , March 1983 , pp. 167 - 180
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 1983

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

1

This is a revised version of a lecture given in the Royal Institute of Philosophy series, Feburary 1981, and at the Political Thought Conference, New College, Oxford, January 1981, under the title ‘Mill's Kantian Liberalism’. My thanks are due to those present on both occasions, and to Jerry Cohen, John Gray, John Halliday, John Kelly and Anne Lloyd Thomas for their helpful and encouraging comments.

References

2 Mill, J. S., On LibertyGoogle Scholar (Everyman Edition), Utilitarianism, Liberty and Representative Government, 74Google Scholar. All page references in the text are to this edition of On Liberty. For a similar reading of Mill's principle, see Rees, J., ‘A Re-reading of Mill on Liberty’, in Limits of Liberty, Radcliff, Peter (ed.) (California: Wadsworth, 1966), 100.Google Scholar

3 p. 73, emphasis added. Other passages favouring an interpretation in terms of rights-based interests are to be found on pp. 120, 121, 132, 136 and 137.

4 On the other hand Mill says at p. 132 that the conduct each is bound to observe includes ‘bearing his share (to be fixed on some equitable principle) of the labours and sacrifices incurred for defending the society or its members from injury and molestation’. This suggests that there is a choice of acceptable ‘equitable principles’. So perhaps Mill's view is that some of the interests he refers to in his formulations of the liberty principle are constant for any of its applications, while others are partly a matter of which of a permissible set of options a particular society chooses to take up.

5 The argument to follow would not be affected if we adopted the more plausible position that ‘satisfied desire’ covers a set of distinguishable psychological states. ‘Desire-satisfaction utilitarianism’ also could be adopted as a label for the different view that what is intrinsically good is the world coming to conform to how we desire it to be, whether or not this gives us ‘satisfaction’.

6 Mackie, J. L., Ethics—Inventing Right and Wrong (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1977), 142.Google Scholar