Is it morally justifiable for a university president to fire a philosophy professor for leading a discussion in his classroom about the morality of pedophilia? Is it morally wrong for a man to walk to take off his clothes and walk naked on the public sidewalk during a warm day?
At the beginning of his 1859 book On Liberty, John Stuart Mill makes an important distinction between two ways that society uses in exercising power over the individual. The first is civil power, defined as “physical force in the form of legal penalties” (fines, jail, execution). The second is social power, defined as “the moral coercion of public opinion” (shunning, name-calling, social media accusations of wrongdoing). The question Mill raises is about the moral justification for exercising either of these types of power.
Another distinction Mill makes is between morally legitimate and morally illegitimate ways that the majority of the people in a sovereign nation have of interfering with the liberty of individuals. This is where the famous phrase “tyranny of the majority” is first used by Mill. A majority in a democracy can tyrannize a minority by passing laws that suppress their liberty, as happened in the confederate states of America in the form of slavery and later in the form of Jim Crow laws after the Civil War. Again, Mill raises a question about moral justification. When is it morally justifiable (morally right) for the majority to suppress the liberty of the minority and when is it morally wrong? When does the majority tyrannize the minority and when does it not?
In this podcast, we will divide our discussion of Mill’s On Liberty into several parts. First, Mill’s description and defense of the harm-to-others principle as the only justification for civil and social suppression or interference with civil and social liberty.
Second, Mill’s application of the harm principle to thought and expression (freedom of speech). Third, the application of the harm principle to individuality (acting out one’s life as one wants to act). I think that listeners will be surprised to learn that almost all the restrictions of individual liberty that we see and read about today are not only not new to Mill but have been imagined, discussed by and evaluated by him as morally right or wrong. What is important is not whether Mill has made the same moral evaluations that we would make but that Mill gives us a defensible basic moral principle that can be used to make our moral decisions and choices about speech and action.
Let me remind you that I will be reading from my book Understanding John Stuart Mill: The Smart Stiudent's Guide to Mill's Utilitarianism and On Liberty. Most of my followers tell me that it is easier to follow me when they have my book in their hands. You can purchase the book (at low cost) from the Amazon book store. Use the search words "Houlgate" and "On Liberty".