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Mill on Liberty: a Defence, Second Edition Mill on Liberty: A Defence Mill on Liberty: A Defence Second Edition John Gray London and New York First published 1983 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2003. Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 Second edition 1996 © 1983, 1996 John Gray All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book has been requested ISBN 0-203-43247-9 Master e-book ISBN ISBN 0-203-74071-8 (Adobe eReader Format) ISBN 0-415-12474-3 (Print Edition) CONTENTS Acknowledgements and Bibliographical Note vii Preface ix Preface to the second edition xi I Mill’s Problem in On Liberty 1 A Traditional Interpretation 1 2 A Revisionary View 9 3 The Argument of this Book 14 II Mill’s Utilitarianism 1 The Art of Life and Utility as an Axiological Principle 19 2 Acts, Rules and the Art of Life 28 3 Utility, Pleasure and Happiness 42 III The Principle of Liberty 1 The Self-Regarding Area, Harm to Others and the Theory of Vital Interests 48 2 The Principle of Liberty in the Doctrine of Liberty 57 3 Utility, Justice and the Terms of Social Co-operation in the Doctrine of Liberty 63 IV Mill’s Conception of Happiness and the Theory of Individuality 1 Individuality, Happiness and the Higher Pleasures 70 2 Autonomy, Authenticity and Choice-Making 73 3 Wants and Ideals in the Doctrine of Liberty 86 v Contents V Applications 1 Paternalism 90 2 Moralism 97 3 Freedom of Expression 103 VI Mill’s Doctrine of Liberty: A Reappraisal 1 The Doctrine of Liberty and Mill’s General Philosophy 111 2 The Doctrine of Liberty and the Science of Society 116 3 The Doctrine of Liberty and Mill’s Liberalism 119 4 The Utility of the Doctrine of Liberty 125 Postscript 130 Notes 159 Index 173 vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS AND BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE A good many people have helped me in writing this short book. It was conceived during the years in which my doctoral research on liberalism was supervised by the late John Plamenatz. Without the kindly interest John Plamenatz showed in my earliest work, and the encouragement and support I was given by my subsequent supervisors, Alan Ryan and Steven Lukes, it is doubtful that I could have ever brought the book to birth. Christopher Kirwan, my Tutor in Philosophy when I was an undergraduate at Exeter College, Oxford, has from an early stage and throughout the project’s development given me valuable comment and advice on a series of drafts. The late John Rees was generous in giving me his written and spoken comments on early drafts of the book. Graeme Duncan read an early draft and was very helpful in enabling me to express myself more clearly. Sir Isaiah Berlin, who gave me extraordinarily probing and very detailed comments on a late draft, and H.L.A.Hart, whose criticisms stirred my thoughts at several stages in the book’s composition, are to be thanked for their important contributions to the book’s development. I owe a special debt of gratitude to Ted Honderich, who has commented on several drafts and whose criticism and encouragement have been of great value to me throughout the book’s gestation. I wish to thank the Principal and Fellows of my College for granting me a period of sabbatical leave in which I was able to make considerable headway with the book. Several people have been kind enough to read and comment on the book in its later stages. Among them I would like to thank particularly Brian Barry, Fred Berger, J.P.Day, David Gordon, D.N. MacCormick, J.Raz, D.A.Rees, A.K.Sen, C.L.Ten and W.L. Weinstein. Since no one who has read the book agrees with all of it, and since I have sometimes vii Acknowledgements stuck to my views against the criticisms of those who have commented on it, it is important to underline the usual disclaimer that I alone bear responsibility for the arguments advanced here. An early version of my argument about J.S.Mill appeared as a paper entitled ‘J.S.Mill on liberty, utility and rights’. Portions of that paper are reprinted by permission of New York University Press from Human Rights (Nomos XXIII), edited by J.Roland Pennock and John W.Chapman. Copyright © 1981 by New York University. I am most grateful to Professor Roland Pennock and to the New York University Press for granting me permission to make use of my contribution to Nomos XXIII: Human Rights. J.N.Gray Jesus College, Oxford BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE The definitive edition of Mill’s writings is The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Toronto University Press, 1963. I have tried, however, always to cite the most easily available and widely used editions, e.g. the Everyman edition of Utilitarianism, On Liberty and Representative Government, London, Dent 1972, and in some cases, where there are very many editions of the work, I have given references to its chapter and section. A list of the sources for recent interpretations of J.S.Mill on liberty and utility is found in note 17 to chapter 1 of this book. viii PREFACE In this book a received view is contested as to the character of John Stuart Mill’s writings about liberty. It has become a commonplace of the intellectual history of nineteenth-century England that the younger Mill is at best a transitional thinker whose writings on social and political questions disclose no coherent doctrine or pattern of argument, but only the efforts at synthesis of an ultimately unsuccessful eclecticism. As for On Liberty, it has long been the conventional view that there Mill sets out to square the circle—to give a utilitarian defence of the priority of liberty over other values. What intellectual enterprise could be more misconceived, or more clearly doomed to failure? My aim in this study is to show by textual analysis and the reconstruction of Mill’s argument that On Liberty is not the folly that over a century of unsympathetic critics and interpreters have represented it as being, but rather the most important passage in a train of argument about liberty, utility and rights which Mill sustained over a number of his most weighty moral and political writings. Far from being the monument to Mill’s inconsistency that his critics have caricatured, On Liberty is consistent almost to a fault, both in its own terms and in terms of a patter of reasoning developed in Mill’s other writings in which a utilitarian theory of conduct is applied to many questions in moral and political life. On Liberty contains a fragment of what I call Mill’s Doctrine of Liberty, in which a defence is given in utilitarian terms of the institution of a system of moral rights within which the right to liberty is accorded priority. It is in his presentation of a utilitarian theory of justice and of moral rights, and his defence of the paramount importance of the right to liberty, that Mill’s greatest originality still lies. The conception of a utilitarian ix Preface theory of justice and moral rights remains a stumbling block to most contemporary moral philosophers, who are prone to consider its advocacy a symptom of confusion in thought even if it is not plainly a contradiction in terms. My submission is that this resistance to the idea of a utilitarian defence of justice and rights depends on a thin and narrow conception of Utilitarianism itself and neglects some of the most distinctive features of Mill’s contribution to the utilitarian tradition. We find in J.S.Mill, I shall argue, a distinctive and powerful species of indirect utilitarianism, which lacks most of the failings rightly attributed to other forms of utilitarian ism, and which is capable of generating a coherent and plausible theory of justice and of the moral right to liberty. In the context of his writings on liberty, Mill emerges as a formidable and systematic thinker, still very much a part of the British utilitarian tradition. His Doctrine of Liberty remains open to the criticism, just as it was when first he developed it. But the most salient criticisms are not those which take for granted the impossibility of a utilitarian theory of moral rights, nor which trade on the obsolescent image of Mill as a man of half-formed ideas, caught helpless between loyalty to the utilitarian tradition and his liberal commitments. Instead, the most pertinent criticisms of Mill’s defence of liberty focus on the claim that he underestimates the extent to which the various conditions and ingredients of human happiness may come into practical competition with each other, so that he fails to confront the true depth and difficulty of many real moral dilemmas. It is no part of my argument that Mill’s writings contain any satisfactory response to criticisms of this latter sort, but I aim to show that much of Mill’s doctrine of liberty retains force and importance even if the validity of such critcisms be conceded.
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