Transcription
[Music] English philosopher John Stewart Mill's essay On Liberty is one of the classic texts of modern liberalism. It's been hugely influential in politics, even more so than you might realize, as we'll be seeing shortly. The question he's grappling with is: when can the government legitimately restrict your freedoms by imposing and enforcing laws? Always? Never? Ever only sometimes? The technical way of phrasing this question is: what is the proper scope of criminal law?
Mill offers a famous and pretty simple answer: the harm principle. If your action harms somebody else, then the government can legitimately step in and try and stop you from doing it, or punish you if you do. But only if it harms someone else. If the only person you're harming is yourself, then the law should have nothing to say. The classic example is drinking. If you want to drink yourself to death, fine, that's your call. But the moment you get behind the wheel of a car, that's when the law kicks in, because you've started endangering somebody else. As the old saying goes, your freedom to swing your fist ends where my nose begins.
Note that Mill is saying the government can legitimately interfere if you're harming others, not necessarily that it should. In any competitive act, the winner, the person who gets the job or the contract or whatever, gains benefits from the same process that harms, in the form of disappointment or denial of goods, to the loser. But Mill thinks that some competitive acts are good for society, and therefore we might argue that we should keep them. Harm to others is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for curbing liberties.
The harm principle is about the motivation behind the law, so there are ways of being sneaky about it. The example that was taught to me was: imagine a law that requires every citizen to jog for 30 minutes a day. If you're passing that law because it will improve people's health, well then the harm principle says that you shouldn't do that, because people's cardio fitness is their own business, and if they don't want to exercise, that's their call. But if you pass that law to reduce the cost of public healthcare and so have more money to spend on good things for other people, then the harm principle says it's okay. So there are ways of getting around it.
Take, for instance, soft paternalism. It might be inconsistent with the harm principle for the government to ban you from smoking, but it would be fine for them to put warning labels on cigarette packets, tax smoking so you can only do it in certain areas, and generally try to discourage you from doing it. It would also be consistent with the harm principle for them to say it's legal for you to smoke cigarettes, but make it illegal for anybody to sell them, therefore effectively depriving you of smoking, just via a more roundabout route.
So now that we know Mill's harm principle and what it entails, we can start looking at it a little bit more closely. And as usual in philosophy, the devil is in the details. How do you define harm? That's a whole philosophical debate in itself, and it's actually surprisingly difficult to do. But it's obviously going to have a huge impact on what your liberties are. If my freedom to swing my fist ends where your nose begins, well then the next logical question is: how long is your nose, mate?
One popular definition of harm is making somebody worse off than they would otherwise have been, and that looks pretty intuitive. But we get into some interesting cases involving overdetermination. Suppose John is going to murder Susan on Friday, and we find out, so we lock John up for attempted murder. But Susan gets hit by a bus on Friday and dies anyway. So she's not any worse off than if we had just let John kill her. So how do we justify locking him up? Now, that might not be a very realistic case. But what about doctors who murder terminally ill patients? That is a real phenomenon, and we do punish them, even though, at least the doctors would say, they aren't really harming anybody in the sense of making them worse off. So how do we justify that on Mill's account, or argue against it? Now, those are issues that we could get into, but I'm going to leave you to puzzle over those, because there are roads less traveled, I think, we could go down.
Mill doesn't think that the harm principle applies to everybody. He makes some exceptions, and they're particularly important exceptions, given the period of history he was living in and the impact his ideas have had on liberalism today. Remember, Mill is talking about when the government can legitimately step in and restrict your freedoms, and thinks that so long as you're only harming yourself, the law should stay out of it. So listen to this paragraph: "It is perhaps hardly necessary to say that this doctrine is meant to apply only to human beings in the maturity of their faculties. We are not speaking of children, or of young persons below the age which the law may fix as that of manhood or womanhood. Those who are still in a state to require being taken care of by others, must be protected against their own actions as well as against external injury. For the same reason, we may leave out of consideration those backward states of society in which the race itself may be considered as in its knowledge. Despotism is a legitimate mode of government in dealing with barbarians, provided the end be their improvement, and the means justified by actually affecting that end. Liberty, as a principle, has no application to any state of things anterior to the time when mankind have become capable of being improved by free and equal discussion. Until then, there is nothing for them but implicit obedience to an Akbar or a Charlemagne, provided they are so fortunate as to find one."
In other words, personal liberty applies to adults, but not all adults, only civilized adults. By which he means mainly white Europeans, not barbarian races. Well, so what? Mill had some Victorian ideas about society. He was a Victorian, after all. He lived through the high day of British colonialism in India and in the West Indies. In fact, he worked for the East India Company, administering the bureaucracy that ran between the British government and its invading and occupying forces in India.
But can't we just take the good stuff from him and then forget about all that other stuff, especially if the good stuff is logically distinct from it? Well, it is tempting to do that. And when Mill is taught in schools and universities, we often do skip over those more nasty parts. But remember my video on Foucault and her discussion of the way power makes exceptions for people it doesn't like. She focused on liberalism's tendency to do this, and by looking at Mill, we can see that liberalism's ability to make exceptions along racial grounds, that's no accident. We know by looking at Mill that it was designed to do that from the very beginning, to give you the context of this discussion. There's a whole practice of taking Enlightenment texts and saying, "Okay, we're not going to throw these out, but some bits are very good, and some bits are not so good." And the reason this is historically important is because it's by making those exceptions that Mill's liberalism justifies colonialism and imperialism. And in case you think this is all a big exaggeration, Mill literally explicitly defends conquering barbarous nations elsewhere. It's tempting to focus just on the harm principle, but that's not everything he left behind. And just as no extended discussion of Nietzsche's concept of the Übermensch would be complete without noting the ways that the Nazis took it and used it, I think so too, no discussion of Mill's liberalism would be complete without noting the ways that governments in his time and now have interpreted it.
But, hang on, hang on a minute. Mill says that conquering other nations against their will is okay, so long as you are trying to improve the lives of the people who live there, and they have no capacity for self-improvement. He sees imperialism as a tool to help native peoples build the kinds of societies that they couldn't build on their own. Mark tunic says that Mill advocated tolerant imperialism. So, for instance, he didn't think that Indians should be allowed to run India, but he did think that they might do it one day when Britain had sufficiently improved their country. Now, tolerant imperialism might be a long way from what the British Empire actually did in India and everywhere, but that doesn't mean that Mill necessarily wanted it that way. But it's what counts as improvement, and who decides when a nation has been improved enough to run itself? That's the rub. Mill thought that industriousness is a mark of improvement, as are the kinds of conditions that foster laissez-faire capitalism. And it's for the colonial powers to decide when a nation can run itself, not the actual people in it. In other words, his imperialism was explicitly capitalistic. A nation is improved and made more civilized by allowing colonial powers to create new markets through which to exploit it for profit. When it came to India, Mill thought that the administrators should be Indian in blood, but English in spirit. In other words, that local people should be taught to go along with colonialism and helped to shape their country according to the wishes of the colonizers, not helped to build their own country from their own vision at all.
David Goldberg says that Mill failed to recognize that whilst colonialism is great at creating new markets, that is after all what it's for, it's not so great at setting anybody free or laying the groundwork for them to peacefully assume that freedom. He writes, "Mill's arguments for benevolent despotism failed to appreciate that neither colonialism nor despotism is ever benevolent. Benevolence here is the commitment to seek the happiness of others, but the mission of colonialism is exploitation and domination of the colonized generally, and Europeanization, at least of those among the colonized whose class position makes it possible economically and educationally. And the mandate of despotism is to assume absolute power to achieve the ruler's self-interested ends. Thus, Colonial despotism could achieve happiness of colonized others only by imposing the measure of Europeanized marks of happiness upon the other, which is to say, to force the other to be less so." Mill's argument necessarily assumed superiority of the despotic, benevolent or not. It presupposed that the mark of progress is to be defined by those taking themselves to be superior, and it presumes that the ruled will want to be like the rulers, even as the former lack the cultural capital ever quite to rise to the task.
Was Mill just of his time? Well, we've got to be careful saying that, because in one sense, it's true that a lot of people thought like that back then. But in another sense, it kind of assumes, albeit indirectly, that that time isn't now, that colonialism and imperialism have had their day and are no longer around, which a lot of people, both in and outside of academia, would say is not entirely true. It's important to realize that the question here isn't, was John Stewart Mill personally a racist? A lot has been written on that, and Mark tunic quite rightly points out that he was more progressive, certainly, than some of his contemporaries. But we're not worried about whether we'd be comfortable having him around to dinner, right? He's dead. We're worried about the extent to which his legacy, liberalism, can be used for imperialism and colonialism, and what we can therefore do to improve it.
So that's Mill's harm principle, its meaning, and its legacy. We've done a lot of political philosophy lately, so next time we could either do "Can Art Be Defined?" or we could do "The Ethics of Collateral Damage." So leave me a comment telling me which one you'd rather see. And for more philosophical videos from me every Friday, please subscribe. I have a Patreon page if you could spare a few dollars to support the show. This month's top patrons were Jesse Austin, DJ McIsaac, Lydia and Nate Thorne, Jeffrey Glenn Murphy, Emiliano Haynes, and Horatio Corduro. Everyone else who donated, your names are in the description. So big thank you to all of you, and to everyone who chose to donate anonymously.
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