On Liberty, John Stuart Mill
One of CC’s long-standing First-Year Program texts has been John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty (1859), and lively discussions arose recently in seminars concerning the tensions of respecting others’ individual liberty and personal freedom. Mill asserts, “the sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number is self-protection. . . . [T]he only purpose for which power can be rightly exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant.”
Here Mill articulates a basic commitment of liberal society. A competent adult’s individual freedom is justifiably overridden only in cases where one’s actions (for example, speech acts) harm others. Harms to one’s own person are not justifiably interfered with, according to Mill, but only harms to others. Here’s one of CC’s big questions: How does Mill’s way of coordinating not harming others, individual liberty, and beneficence map onto your own judgments? Consider, for example, mandates regarding masks, dining restrictions, or vaccinations.
