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Mill′s Principle of Liberty
Introduction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 January 2009
Extract
Although J. S. Mill′s essay On Liberty was intended by its author to be read as a self-contained work,1 and even though a careful reading would justify seeing it in this way, it has far too often been denied this right even by its defenders. There is a crucial distinction to be made between eliciting some point of substance from a particular work by an author and then turning to the rest of his work to throw further light on it, and employing other texts from the corpus of his writings to put the construction on certain things said in it which the work by itself cannot sustain, thus treating the former as essentially a fragment, albeit a most important fragment, of a whole.2 I would suggest that recourse to the latter course is justified only when the possibilities of treating it autarchically have already been explored. In this paper I propose to treat a celebrated text in the former way only because I believe that the results will show such an approach to be uniquely worthwhile, or at least fruitful enough to justify a paper conceived in this way. And, with a view to putting what I want to say about it in maximum focus I shall with one or two exceptions eschew giving supporting evidence from Mill′s other writings, even when this is permitted by the distinction I have made in this opening paragraph.
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- Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1994
References
1 In the Autobiography he wrote: ‘None of my writings have been either so carefully composed, or so sedulously corrected as this’ (p. 256, edition of 1873). It was ‘a kind of philosophic text-book of a single truth’ (p. 253), whose importance it was its principle purpose to argue. This for Mill was his belief in the importance to man and society, of a large variety in character; the Principle of Liberty enunciated at the beginning of the Essay is an essential basis of his argument.Google Scholar
2 The Essay is described as a ‘fragment’ by John Gray in Mill on Liberty: A Defence (London: Routledge & Keegan Paul, 1983), pp. 127–28.Google Scholar
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11 I shall deal later with the distinction between causing harm to another and being responsible for someone′s suffering harm.
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15 If the casino operator in this example is prevented from plying his trade when such an activity is quite legal then the law ought presumably to come to his help. But this raises questions that are not pertinent to my concerns in this paper.
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28 No doubt there are problems in this distinction but I believe they can be surmounted. Take the obvious counter example of a parent′s failure to provide sufficient nourishment to his child; ordinary usage allows us to say that the parent is the cause of the child′s starvation. But in this case there is not merely a failure which is an omission but one that is to be described as neglect, and neglect is a kind of doing.
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30 James Fitzjames Stephen, Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, extracts from which are included in Radcliff; the present quotation is from p. 47 of this volume.Google Scholar
31 Robert Paul, Wolff, The Poverty of Liberalism (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968)24–25.Google Scholar
32 In the concluding chapter on ‘Applications’ he recognizes the importance of ‘expectations and calculations’ formed in response to someone′s actions (158–159) but we can have expectations of others which are not merely what they themselves originate in us.Google Scholar