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Discussing John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty (1859). For Wes Alwan’s summary of this book, go here).
If we disapprove of certain behaviors, when is it okay to prohibit them legally? What about just shaming people for engaging in them? How much shaming is too much? Mill’s famous “harm principle” says that we should permit anything unless it harms other people. But what constitutes “harm”? If I call you by a racial slur, have I harmed you? If I teach your children ideas or behaviors you don’t approve of, without your permission, have I harmed you? Or them?
Mill was not just concerned with paternalistic laws, but with other kinds of social pressures. We should not let the tyranny of custom make us all into meek conformists. We need to promote individuality, diversity, eccentricity. This is the only way to allow genius to flourish. Individuals’ “experiments in living,” even though most of these may just be foolish, ultimately serve to help us progress.
And of course, central to this freedom of living is freedom of thought, and what’s very closely related, freedom of speech. Even if nearly all of us find some ideas objectionable, we need to let them be stated, not just out of principle, but because we want bad ideas to be engaged, to be actively refuted. If we all agree on something, we take it for granted and forget why we believe it; having to defend it makes us understand it better. Ideas need to compete in daylight if we expect truth to prevail over time.
Mark, Wes, and Dylan bring this debate to current issues and explore some of the less expected aspects of Mill’s view, such as his views on public education (he’s for universal education, but against government providing it), imperialism (maybe it’s OK to be paternalistic when dealing with illiberal cultures), and economics (because economic activity by definition involves others, it does potentially fall under the harm principle; Mill’s “libertarianism” doesn’t leave companies to deal with employees and customers however they see fit).
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To hear the other famous part of Mill’s thought, check out our ep. 9 on utilitarianism.
Mill image by Charles Valsechi.
Continues with Part Two. Get the unbroken, ad-free Citizen Edition. Please support PEL!
Hey Peter, we dwell further on specific textual points in part 2, so come back!
Wes was trying to argue based on the text, I think, though I think Mill gives us openings in talking about decency and the context of specific speech acts to allow things like campus speech codes and censorship of hate speech on Twitter and other places.
I loved the passage Wes read about free speech and the importance of being able to challenge conventional wisdom. One line I’m going to bring out when I’m accused of debating too aggressively or “mansplaining” is about how people tend to get offended precisely “whenever the attack is telling and powerful, and that every opponent who pushes them hard, and whom they find it difficult to answer”.
Another piece of wisdom that really jumped out at me: “[E]ven if the received opinion be not only true, but the whole truth; unless it is suffered to be, and actually is, vigorously and earnestly contested, it will, by most of those who receive it, be held in the manner of a prejudice, with little comprehension or feeling of its rational grounds.” I felt a spark of recognition here regarding the subject of Citizens United. I am generally liberal, certainly not a Republican; but while I constantly see other Democrats sloganeering against Citizens United, I have my doubts about how practical it would be to overturn the decision and still preserve First Amendment rights. But whenever I bring up these doubts to other liberals, it becomes clear that they have not thought it through past “get money out of politics”. So even if I’m wrong to doubt the wisdom of overturning this decision, this Mill quote makes me feel like I am doing others a favor in questioning this proposition, to hopefully make them take it beyond the sloganeering and really build a logical/factual argument.
Ok, I’ll bite. What is your argument? To me it seems pretty straight forward – allowing corporations the first amendment rights is likely a misuse of the intent of the constitution since corporations were not what they are now. Corporations, though legally “a person” are not the same as a person and limiting the free speech of a corporation would not limit the free speech of any single person. Allowing these government created entities which have tremendous financial power the same rights as people seems problematic. I don’t think it’s the only reason that there is a huge disparity between the rich and poor, but it certainly seems like part of the reason.
In reality, I am really more curious about this fear of ever amending the constitution. It seems like any change to the constitution is met with such resistance that we end up having a monolith of a system of government.
So share your logical factual argument! I’d love to hear something beyond the tired trope of a slippery slope about free speech limitations.
Listening through this episode, maybe this will come up later. But I’m wondering what people think about Holocaust deniers as a test case/line drawing problem. Holocaust denying is illegal in most of Europe, but obviously not illegal in the United States. It seems like Mill would come down against shaming Holocaust deniers, but I’m not totally positive. And it seems to me that rejecting shaming those people intuitively goes against what history bares out about these debates. And a key reason seems to be, here, if race is the current most controversial issue whereas religion was in Mills’s time, then it’s that the truth-value seems so clearly settled on top of the other factors. (The legality question imo is thornier, but I’m open to different perspectives and arguments there.) What are other people’s thoughts?
We actually discussed that at some length in our follow-up ep on free speech, which will be coming out this Monday. We seemed to agree that it’s an empirical question: Does trying to tamp down on this kind of thing actually work or not? Wes thought not; if you outlaw it, it just festers and grows, becoming all the more alluring from its being outlawed. I’m more interested in what sorts of activities one can engage in to encourage/discourage certain messages short of the brute force of actually outlawing speech, which seems draconian. But we also agree that no particular publication has an obligation to give this kind of shit a platform. However, it seems like Mill would say we should actually seek out platforms for such objectionable ideas so that they can be exposed. Stanley Fish (who we read for the free speech ep) thinks that it just doesn’t work that way: The fact that it has a forum at all will do much more to vault the ideas into public discourse than the refutation will contribute to its disappearance from public life.