Episode 183: Mill on Liberty (Part Two)

0:07 Mark: You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, a podcast by some guys who at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 183 is something like, what is freedom? Or maybe if we disapprove of certain behaviors, to what extent should that result in legislation or social pressure censuring those behaviors? And we read John Stuart Mill's On Liberty from 1859. For more information and link to the text, Please check out partiallyexaminedlife.com this is Mark Linsenmayer with enough spontaneity to help develop the excellence of the race in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:38 Wes: Seized on the Nietzsche here. This is Wes Alwan in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

0:41 Dylan: This is Dylan Casey in Middleton, Wisconsin.

0:44 Mark: All right, we are down a Seth today, but we will do our best to express the liberty and diversity that he would bring to the show. Does that work?

0:53 Wes: Yeah.

0:54 Mark: This is a text we could have done a long time ago, and we should have because it's awesome and people should memorize it from beginning to end.

1:03 Wes: I agree. I hope there's not going to be too much agreement on this podcast, because as we all know, we need opinions to be adversarial in order to maintain a high degree of comprehension and force.

1:18 Dylan: You're wrong, Mark. No one should read this.

1:20 Wes: This book sucks. But I'm only saying that in order to highlight its greatness.

1:28 Dylan: That's the esoteric teaching.

1:31 Wes: That's right. Right.

1:33 Mark: So I thought that this was probably, you know, when I thought about this in passing as an episode idea before, that this would be kind of redundant of things that we'd already done, and I was going to say, like Thomas Paine's Common Sense, but I haven't read that either. So I don't know if that's actually a good example of the kind of thing that you don't need to read because it's so familiar and just chock full of cliches or whatever. But this is longer than I expected, and it really makes a great argument for Mill being a much better thinker than I thought he was based on just the Utilitarianism short book.

We did that in a very early episode. And it's not even the thing that invented utilitarianism. It's just a particularly cogent expression of it, and it makes it a little more reasonable by introducing things like the distinction between higher and lower pleasures. So it can't just be that the action that brings the greatest animal pleasure to the greatest number is always the one that people should engage in and Also introduce the idea of that there might be certain rights that we want to establish, certain general rules that we want to obey. In other words, rule utilitarianism as opposed to act utilitarianism, which is obviously wrong because it just leads to these.

Well, what if in this particular case, if I shoot somebody that'll help a bunch of other people? Well, I should definitely do that. Well, no, in general we should have a rule that we don't shoot people. And I just feel like everybody who reads utilitarianism should be forced to read On Liberty at the same time to get a more complete picture because the two seem to be things that would conflict. Right. If utilitarianism, the idea society should do whatever's going to bring the most good to the most people. And that doesn't seem like it leaves a lot of room for individual liberty.

People making mistakes, like when you want to correct people's mistakes so that then you'd have the most happiness for the most people. In fact, if you're going to do something that's destructive to yourself, shouldn't we step in and prevent that from happening so that we have the most happiness for the most people? And. But on liberty, without actually contradicting utilitarianism gives a great framework and some very solid guidelines for why you would in general not want to interfere with people's liberty.

3:42 Wes: Yes. Who would have thought one of the world's foremost proponents of utilitarianism would be also one of the foremost proponents of individual rights? Not something I think we commonly hear about, Mill, at least in popular discussions.

3:56 Dylan: There are some interesting qualifications. I think it's one of the ways in which the book, as Mark said, ends up being intellectually very interesting is it's not black and white in all these cases. And certainly the case he's making a strong argument for a lot of individual latitude. But it's also true that there are obligations of the individual not just to not harm other people, but there are reasons to expect people to, to make contributions to society. It's not a simple minded screed for individualism either.

4:30 Mark: There are two maxims he's really arguing for and I'll just read a quote. It's actually from the last chapter from chapter five Applications, but I just like the way he formulates them here. The first one is the individual is not accountable to society for his actions insofar as these concern the interests of no person but himself. Advice, instruction, persuasion and avoidance by other people, if thought necessary by them for their own good, are the only measures by which society can justifiably express its dislike or disapprobation of his conduct.

And second, for such actions as are prejudicial to the interests of others, the individual is accountable and may be subjected either to social or to legal punishments if society is of no opinion that the one or the other is requisite for its protection. So that's a kind of legalistic way of expressing it, that is summing up a lot of the individual points he's elaborated in the first four chapter before we get to this last chapter, which is called Applications.

5:19 Wes: Well, he does give the harm principle like on the 10th page, which is his fundamental principle.

5:25 Mark: Well, do you want to read the earlier formulation of it?

5:27 Wes: Sure. The object of this essay is to assert one very simple principle as entitled to govern absolutely the dealings of society with the individual in the way of compulsion and control, whether the means used be physical force in the form of legal penalties or the moral coercion of public opinion. That principle is that 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. That the only purpose for which power can be rightfully 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. He cannot rightfully be compelled to do or forbear because it will be better for him to do so, because it will make him happier, because in the opinion of others, to do so would be wise or even right. We've returned to a kind of conflict that we've discussed many times on this podcast, which is between the right and the good, or a deontological sort of ethics that emphasizes the importance of people's rights. And then maybe a utilitarian or virtue based ethics which seems to put the good of the many above individual rights.

Of course, it's not that we have to simply choose one or the other, it's that they're in conflict. And we have to draw some lines with respect to not just government compulsion, but even social compulsion about where those sorts of things are applicable and where they aren't. When does the collective good actually warrant compulsion, whether social or legal?

7:05 Dylan: And it tempers a little bit the quote I think that Mark gave at the end, which talks about the way in which we can use persuasion and public approbation to voice displeasure or tell people what we think of them. We don't have the right to compel them. Just before this section here, he spends a fair bit of time talking about the force of social mores that aren't legal. It's not a question of laws, but a question of social pressure. And that as being as much of a problem often as legal pressure. I think that comes out to be kind of a complicated topic for Mill because he goes back and forth on it throughout the whole thing, where talking about there being principles involved is.

It's a messy business. Even in this 130 page book, you don't get clear lines, but you get principles about where to draw the line. And I think in the end it ends up being fuzzy in many of the most interesting cases.

8:02 Wes: So you mentioned his talk of social tyranny earlier on, and that's on page six of my edition. Just to read a brief quote on that, because I think it's important in the sense that the way free speech is often discussed, the way the objections are often phrased, is that, well, social coercion and shaming is actually a tool for the good. Yes, the opponents of free speech, or what they call free speech absolutism, admit we can't pass laws against free speech, but socially shaming is an appropriate way to do that. And I feel almost a little ashamed of myself that it's been so long since I read Mill that I didn't think back to this text as addressing the question of social tyranny and shaming just as much as legalistic or governmental oppression of speech.

But anyway, just to read the social tyranny part, Society can and does execute its own mandates. And if it issues wrong mandates instead of right or any mandates at all in things which it ought not to meddle, it practices a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life and enslaving the soul itself. Protection, therefore, against the tyranny of the magistrate is not enough.

There needs protection also against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling against the tendency of society to impose, by other means than civil penalties, its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent from them. There is a limit to the legitimate interference of collective opinion with individual independence.

9:42 Mark: He ends up wanting to draw the line. Like maybe his prime example is drunkenness. He doesn't think that the state should be paternal in outlawing liquor, in preventing you from getting liquor or being drunk. Yeah, being drunk insofar as you are drunk on the job. That's an obvious separate issue. Insofar as you can drunk and drive, those are clearly places where you're gonna affect or potentially affect other people. But just drunkenness in itself. Yeah, Maybe we don't approve as a society of people who just are drunk all the time, and there are going to be natural consequences.

Natural social consequences. He used that word, natural. That will come out of that, that you will be shunned. You will not be invited to parties. If you're going to be drunk all the time, you're not going to get good jobs. It's its own punishment. That's why it's bad. But to then go beyond that. So I guess this shaming in particular, like, I don't know if he uses that term, but if it has overarching effects, like we go out of our way to punish the person beyond the punishment that just being a drunkard would bring you, then that's when we've crossed the line.

That's when there's a social tyranny at work. And that's not to say that we can't morally be against being drunk all the time, but just because we are morally against something doesn't mean just that we can't outlaw it, but that we shouldn't make the lives of the people who we morally disapprove of worse than they would otherwise be.

11:06 Dylan: So, for instance, if there's someone who's drunk all the time and you can not want to associate with them, but what you can't do is you can't go and get people to stop providing them cable service or say, well, you know, you got to stop selling them food or something like that.

11:24 Wes: Yeah. So this gets at the tension.

11:27 Dylan: It makes boycotts an interesting problem.

11:29 Unknown speaker: Yeah.

11:30 Wes: Earlier on, he sort of rails against the possible effects of social tyranny, but in the case of drunk drunkenness, it simply is the case that such people are going to be shunned and I think even shamed by society. And that Mill is okay with that particular case. And it's harmful not just because it's. The social punishment is inherent. Of course it's harmful because something Mill talks about a lot because of the way it damages human potentialities and turns us into lesser human beings and destroys our lives.

12:03 Dylan: So I think there are two points to emphasize here. One part of it is you can rightfully be punished for either committing acts or failing to do the things that need to be done under your obligations as a result of your drunkenness. So it's not that your drunkenness would be the thing that you're being punished for. But if you are being a public nuisance as a result of your drunkenness,

12:24 Wes: where he says a policeman should be punished for being drunk on duty, is one of his examples.

12:29 Dylan: Yeah, those are all things like your job, you know, driving while drunk. So what you would be guilty of and what would be illegal is to drive while drunk, not to be drunk.

12:38 Wes: So the social effects of your drunkenness.

12:40 Dylan: Yes, and so that gets to the next point, which is that you, for instance, if you do not fulfill your obligations as a parent, you can be held accountable for that as a result of your drunken behavior. If you aren't taking care of your children, and it may be because of your drunkenness, but you would be failing in that obligation in this case to society and to people who you have tied yourself to for failing to do the requisite activity to take care of them. But you're not being held account for your drunkenness itself, even if you were to the sort of social punishment of not wanting to be around people who are drunk.

So you get shunned for being drunk. I take Mill to make a distinction between not being around somebody because they're drunk and not being around because someone you've labeled as a drunk drunkard. And this seems to be like where the line of potentiality that you're talking about, they're not being shamed for an act of being drunken, but they're being shamed for being a drunkard.

13:45 Wes: So again, the critical distinction between here is the effect on oneself and the effect on others. And the effect on others is rightly, we can compel people, if they're really damaging, harming others, to do certain things, but we can compel them to do things if they're just harming themselves.

14:02 Dylan: We can't compel them for their own good.

14:03 Wes: But I do think he's saying we do rightly have a low opinion of other people because they harm themselves.

14:09 Mark: Yes.

14:10 Wes: And we do rightly regulate their conduct in some sense. You know, part of our conduct, really, it's predicated on not or a lot of our conduct on not people not having a low opinion of us. And it's not a bad thing if we say drunkenness is bad or even if we shun people because of it. So he says, for instance, on page 69 of my edition, we have a right also in various ways to act upon our unfavorable opinion of anyone, not to the oppression of his individuality, but in the exercise of ours. We are not bound, for example, to seek his society. We have a right to avoid it.

We have a right to choose society most acceptable to us. We have a right, and it may be our duty to caution others against him. In these various modes, a person may suffer severe, very severe penalties at the hands of others for faults which directly concern himself, but he suffers these penalties only insofar as they are natural and, as it were, the spontaneous consequences of the faults themselves. So in this sense, shame the very thing that we can't regulate at a legislative level, we can regulate socially. He actually is saying that despite the fact that there are enormous potential problems that what he calls social tyranny.

So, Dylan, as you mentioned much earlier, that's a really interesting tension in this book that's not easily resolved. Of the many lines that Mill acknowledges, I think this one is the hardest. When is shaming the right way to go and when isn't it so? For instance, you know, the whole Nazi debate that was going on about the normalization of Nazism by doing a profile in the New York Times, a family man who also happens to be a Nazi, or more relevant here, is if someone says something that we think is racist on Twitter or sexist or something like that, do we gather our group of followers together and try to shame them and make it unacceptable that way, or do we develop a persuasive argument and treat what they've done as a mode of discourse?

Is what they've done more like speech, or is it more like being drunk? And if it's more like speech and something that we're obligated to confront unless we suffer for it in the many ways that Mill says we would and we shame them, then we've engaged in social tyranny. But if it's more like drunkenness, then it's just natural consequences, you know, and something I've been thinking about a lot because it's not an easy question.

16:35 Dylan: Yeah, I think you put it well, Wes. There's a lot of latitude in Mill for, let's call them intellectual liberty and liberty of speech, that he wants to have it be really, really wide. And the amount of time he spends, particularly on things like religious free or religious disagreements or puritanism and stuff like that, and his love affair with diversity of both opinion and voiced opinion makes him, you know, a very, very strong free speech advocate. On the other hand, this line between sort of socially acceptable behavior and he isn't quite the same as that. So he wants to allow for maybe more licentiousness and poor behavior than would typically be thought of, but not with the same kind of latitude as there is for speaking particularly on political and social issues as opposed to activities.

17:35 Wes: So he does give one sort of bit of guidance on this. And it's actually something that's built into our legal system already, and that is to worry not about the content of the speech exactly, but to think about the speech as a speech act. What is it doing exactly? So, for instance, you know, it's the whole yelling, fire in a crowded theater principle. So he says on page 50 of my edition, even opinions lose their immunity when the circumstances in which they are expressed are such as to constitute their expression a positive instigation to some mischievous act.

An opinion that corn dealers are starvers of the poor or that private property is robbery ought to be unmolested when simply circulated through the press, but may justly incur punishment when delivered orally to an excited mob assembled before the house of a corn dealer or when handed about among the same mob in the form of a placard. So the same sort of speech. We wouldn't ask ourselves whether Nazi speech is allowed or allowable. We would ask, does it come in the form of an argument that's published for readers or something like that? Or does it come in the form of someone who's trying to insult someone, Someone who's trying to arouse a mob or intimidate people or things like those are the sorts of questions we have to ask in any case of speech.

So here it's a guideline for the legal question, does it help us as a guideline for the social shaming, social coercion question? And I think it's difficult because this guideline focuses specifically on the effects done to others. So a drunkard, again, it's because they harm themselves that those natural consequences follow. But someone being a racist on Twitter, arguably they are maybe engaging in a different sort of speech act if they say they're harassing someone than someone who publishes their Nazi argument in a newsletter. So in one case, it may be shaming, may be the approach, and in the other, the approach may be to actually have an argument with the Nazi and not simply let that sort of opinion fester in the dark.

19:38 Mark: Yeah, that seemed to be the comparable case, this corn dealer one, to a lot of what we might have in mind now. And I guess there's a question that he doesn't really consider, maybe because of the different environment in which arguments could be traded, that with the Internet, it could just be ubiquitous. I think he would be sympathetic to the idea that it's fine to put forth any kind of argument, no matter how heinous other people finds it. But if the world becomes full of such things, then that could be sort of like pollution. There could be a group benefit to, you know, especially if it's coming in the form of technologically aided the troll farming kind of, you know, it's not even a real person arguing for a point there.

I think there's this model of people putting themselves behind arguments. This is not something that Mill spells out, but I could definitely see the idea if something is anonymous and done in mass, then it's not a good faith effort to actually convince other people. Then it's an effort to incite them to potentially to some mischief. And in particular, since you know the history of these kind of things, you can argue different models of, you know, that race is a real thing or race is not a real thing. But given the history where this kind of thing is argued right before a lynching occurs, then one could make a pretty good argument that it's okay to take measures to say we're just going to do something to say on Facebook, cut down the amount of, you know, we're just not going to allow, we're going to censor out the N word or something like that.

Like what do you think about that? Practically comes to measures that particular communities might take. Of course they have the right to take it. It's, you know, Facebook owns Facebook, we own our site and we tend to have no problem. It seems like it just depends on the size and the place in society. Like, are there other places that people could go to make this argument? Whether it's okay for me to police my own little backyard in that way. If I disallow something on my particular Facebook group, there are plenty of other places that somebody could go and voice that same thing.

So like there's really no harm done by my cleaning up my yard. But like Facebook at large, which controls such a big portion or just, you know, Google putting sort of rules. I don't know, what do you think about that?

21:56 Wes: These are complicated examples because they might things like Facebook and Google might rise to the level of being public utilities implicitly or trusts. And then it's a much more complicated issue. If you're running your own small newspaper, of course you can have an editorial guideline which prohibits the N word. And naturally I think we would agree that the government can prohibit the N word in some publications. In this case we're private company which may also turn out to be a public utility in some sense makes these prohibitions I think becomes very complicated.

So obviously Right now, Twitter can ban whoever it wants to and even shadow ban conservatives, which is what conservatives think it's doing. If we were to decide Twitter were so important a mechanism of disseminating opinion that banning people from it were like banning people from using printing presses or something like that, then we'd have to have another discussion.

22:50 Mark: Well, maybe the key to unlock what Mill would say about this is his very short comment about decency. This is right after the drunkenness part in the last chapter. Again, there are many acts which, being directly injurious only to the agents themselves, ought not to be legally interdicted, but which, if done publicly, are a violation of good manners. And coming thus within the category of offences against others, may rightfully be prohibited of this kind are offenses against decency on which is unnecessary to dwell. So that's a little disappointing.

This is kind of one of the main things Dylan had characterized him as tolerating more potential licentiousness. Well, decency, okay. So clearly what he has in mind is sex is okay. Sex in the street may be not okay. There are a violation of good manners. And coming thus within the category of offences against others we're getting into, usually the harm principle is held to be distinct from the offense principle. And Mill is very clear that it might just be offensive to me that you are an atheist. That's the example he gives. And that's not okay for me to come down on you in any way, you know, apart from the ways that we've talked about.

I could shun you. I don't like atheists, but I can't say atheists can't get a job. I can't say atheists can't give testimony in court. These are actual things, you know, that were going on in jurisdictions that he was connected with.

24:09 Wes: Yep. This is another outright conflict. In the text here, he talks about offenses against others. Elsewhere, he thinks that the offense principle is liable to be badly, badly abused.

24:21 Dylan: As a sort of illustration of this kind of example, there's a TV series on Amazon called The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, which is a fictional story of a woman in the 50s who becomes a standup comic. And Lenny Bruce is a character in the story, but she's playing these clubs and her. Early on in the series, she gets arrested by the police for public indecency because of her cursing and stuff like that. And that seems to be exactly the kind of thing that Mill is adamantly against.

24:54 Mark: Adamantly against her being cracked down for it or adamantly against her doing it?

24:57 Dylan: No, adamantly against her Being cracked down for it.

25:00 Mark: Yeah.

25:00 Dylan: So I take him to be having this tension about where the line of public decency is. Right. And so there would be a difference for Mill between, as you said, Mark, sex in the street versus sex behind closed doors or certain kinds of language and expression in a club versus standing out in front of an elementary school. There are differences there between those things. So a broad brushed argument against decency and saying, wow, you know, you're cursing in this club and so we're going to arrest you because you're offending public decency, that seems to me, is something that Mill would be stoutly against. But if there were laws against that kind of language, you know, in the middle of the park, that might not be wrong from Mill's perspective.

25:52 Wes: So here's what he says on page 46 of my edition.

25:55 Dylan: Okay.

25:56 Wes: It is fit to take notice of those who say that the free expression of all opinions should be permitted on condition that the manner be temperate and do not pass the bounds of fair discussion. Much might be said on the impossibility of fixing where these supposed bounds are to be placed. For if the test be offense to those whose opinion is attacked, I think experience testifies that this offense is given whenever the attack is telling and powerful, and that every opponent who pushes hard and whom they find it difficult to answer appears to them, if he shows any strong feeling on the subject, an intemperate opponent.

I just think it's really important because, you know, a lot of people will say today that, well, speech can be violence or that speech has harmed me by offending my dignity, and therefore there have to be limits on that. I think that's with a certain segment of the left, especially at universities. I think that idea is quite popular and of course, ridiculed by conservatives and libertarians.

26:56 Dylan: Mill comes on very strong that diversity of opinion and diversity of expression of opinion is a fundamental good. So there are a couple of different themes. The harm principle is one of them. Another is the idea that just having lots of different vigorous opinion in the world and in our communities is only for our good because we are progressive entities and that we are striving to become better and more than who we are. And having a soup of that diversity of opinion and diversity of expressed opinion only contributes positively to that progression.

He says in the introduction, the only freedom which deserves the name is that of pursuing our own good in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others or impede their efforts to obtain it. Each is the proper guardian of his own health, whether bodily or mental or spiritual. Mankind are greater gainers by suffering each other to live as seems good to themselves. Than by compelling each to live as seems good to the rest. And then later on, he's praising eccentricity. And against the tyranny of opinion. Eccentricity has always abounded when and where strength of character has abounded.

And the amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional. To the amount of genius, mental vigor and moral courage which it contained. So he wants to see lots of different opinions. He wants to see lots of eccentrics. And that's a sign of his mental intellectual vigor within a community.

28:31 Wes: And he wants to give voice to people who are wrong. It's not even that they may be right. So it's sort of worth going over at some of the arguments in the first chapter and the structure of that. But the sort of overview of the chapter is that free speech is important really. Mainly because freedom of conscience requires it. So the overall just three basic reasons. The arguments for free speech is that the first one is that we may sort of shut out the truth. And in doing so, in silencing the opinions of others who we think are wrong or immoral, we assume our own infallibility.

And we ought not to assume that. We ought to assume that we could be wrong. And that we could benefit from being corrected by others. The second reason is that even opinions that are false may contain a portion of the truth. And that we need this sort of collision between. Even if the prevailing opinion is kind of extreme on the one end. And the opposing opinion is extreme on the other. We sort of need the collision to balance each other out. And to sort of supply each partial truth. To supply to the other what it needs. And then the third thing is just that.

That even if received opinion, Even if what society thinks and what's prevailing opinion is the whole truth. That we can't properly keep that truth alive in the real sense unless it's contested. And that means that we can't really know something. Unless we subjected it to scrutiny. Unless we can think of all the objections to it. And reply to those objections. And then also that it can't really have any influence on our conduct and character. If it just takes the form of a catechism. Or it just takes the form of something that we repeat to ourselves in this uncomprehending way.

So we need untruth in society. Not only do we need untruth, we need immorality. We need people out there advocating immoral things.

30:32 Mark: But again, we get to the idea of sort of how much is too much, that it would be completely sufficient. You know, so drunkenness is again one of the examples that he. That's not an experiment for life. We want diversity. So we have all these different experiments for life. And that's what pushes society forward, is people try different things, they have different ideas, they live different ideas, and they present examples to the rest of us that maybe then give us, you know, the mass of people who just go with tradition. Eventually that might be shifted by these things. Drunkenness is not an experiment. It's not a cutting edge experiment. Lots of people have tried being drunk all the time and that's sort of been shown to be a dead end.

31:14 Wes: Well, ask Charles Bukowski.

31:18 Mark: As far as Mill is concerned. As far as Mill is concerned, at

31:21 Wes: least there are exceptions. My exception doesn't prove anything.

31:24 Mark: That's one of the responses that he gives. He might say, we've tried this kind of thing, it doesn't work well. Are you sure that it never works like that is, you know, we have to be fallible about all of these things that it could be that no matter how much we think that, how much social agreement we have that some particular kind of behavior doesn't work well, if there are a lot of people doing it, then clearly there actually isn't that much agreement. And that might give some idea that the prohibitive claim is not the whole truth, that there's something that the inveterate drunken poets or something, there might be a way of doing this that actually does constitute a significant experiment for living.

But if you accept that, that it really is, yeah, that's a dead end, that just like, let's try suicide. Like, no, we don't want that to spread. And so can there be if something like that basically becomes an epidemic. And again, comparing this to like, if racist speech becomes an epidemic, is it okay for us to legally or socially take action to staunch that?

32:30 Wes: Well, I think, I mean, he clearly says no. I mean this is the argument from the utility of. So he addresses this argument of suppressing speech for the sake of utility of that to society. That's on page 20 of my edition. And let's look at what he says. Strange it is that men should admit the validity of arguments for free discussion but object to their being pushed to an extreme, not seeing that unless the reasons are good for an extreme case, they're good for any case. And then so there are, it is alleged, certain beliefs so useful, not to say indispensable to well being, that it Is much the duty of governments to uphold those beliefs as to protect any other of the interests of society in a case of such necessity, and so directly in the line of their duty, something less than infallibility, may it be, it is maintained, warrant and even bind governments to act on their own opinion, confirmed by the general opinion of mankind.

It is also often argued, and still oftener thought, that none but bad men would desire to weaken these salutary beliefs. And there can be nothing wrong, it is thought, in restraining bad men and prohibiting what only such men would wish to practice. This mode of thinking makes the justification of restraints on discussion not a question of the truth of the doctrines, but of their usefulness. So this is what I take the place that you're going and you can correct me if I'm wrong, Mark, but with the idea that there could be an epidemic of racism and the interests of society, it's not a matter of a discussion of truth or falsity anymore.

The interests of society require us to do something about it. And Mill comes to reject that because on the next page he says the usefulness of an opinion is itself a matter of opinion. You just push this sense of infallibility about moral matters back one step. So to require that we restrict people's racist speech on the idea that there's an epidemic and society can't tolerate it is already to assume our infallibility about the argument in question. So I think again the distinction would have to be drawn along the lines not of content, not of whether speech is specifically racist, but the nature of the Speech Act.

Obviously we can prohibit racist speech if it's an incitement to kill someone, for instance, or to oppress them in some immediate circumstance. But we could do that with non racist speech as well. We could do that with speech which is normally under other circumstances, completely innocuous, like telling people when there's a fire or something like that there is a fire and you yell fire in a crowded theater, then yeah, you've done a public good. So it's not the content that's at issue in those cases, it's the Speech Act. And so the example that Mill uses throughout this book is religion.

But because religion is not so live an issue for us, he's just choosing the livest, most controversial issue he can put his finger on. But for us it's race. And I think people feel so strongly about that that if you were to write this in this time and place, that if you write this book in America today, that's the example you would have to use because the question is whether you can get people to agree that however horrible you think it is to hold certain opinions, that those other people who hold them be allowed to hold them legally and express them.

And not just that, that we even benefit by their expression. So I think Mill would say, and maybe you guys can correct me if you think I'm wrong about this, but, but I think Mill would say that we do benefit from people out there making claims that we think are racist. We benefit because we get to rebut those claims. We make sure that they don't simply lie in darkness, that they get expressed, and so they just don't sort of malignantly grow within cancer like a society, that they get to be disposed of and processed in some sense. And also that we get to strengthen our own opinions and even maybe our anti racism is so extreme that we can help give some nuance to it by having to argue with the racists.

So that's what I think he would say, that we would only hurt ourselves by simply through legal enforcement or even through shaming. Get rid of the racists altogether now, Prevent them from intimidating, threatening, messing up people's lives, even humiliating others in some contexts. I think there's a lot of argument for that. But to prevent them from publishing their newsletters or their opinions online or whatever, he would think there's harm to that and even to refrain from engaging them in an intelligent way, I think he would say that engaging those opinions in a sober, intelligent way could actually be beneficial and not just saying, fuck you, racist.

37:27 Mark: Yeah. So clearly he does, as you mentioned, have in mind atheism as just the belief that even to Spinoza, who's arguing for free speech across denominational lines, he seems to think that if you cross the line into just not upholding these things of what he calls the universal religion. And so Mill points this out, that a lot of people, if they, if they go in for tolerance, it starts with religion and it can vary. It's usually to. Just to other religions, but then to get all the way to atheists is just, that's, that's too much that there's.

38:02 Dylan: Or Mormons.

38:04 Wes: So I would say Spinoza's universal religion is something like the harm principle. But that's another discussion. Go ahead.

38:10 Mark: Right, right. And so being an atheist, even though you might think that, oh, if you're an atheist, then you don't have any foundation for your ethics and you're going to harm other people and like that was part of the basis for their being offended by someone being an atheist is the kind of person this is supposed to result in. And whether that is the case or not, like, is a claim that should be argued about. And so that works very well. Yeah, you should let people be atheists, even if you just want to argue against them and show them that atheism leads to all this bad stuff. So there's no problem with that.

38:44 Dylan: Well, I mean, it's just like drunkenness, right? Is that you can hold people accountable for their actions, not their thoughts and expressed opinions. So if it's the case that you're an atheist and you go out and rob a store and kill people and any other kinds of things, you should be held accountable for breaking those laws, not for being an atheist.

39:10 Mark: Maybe driving while atheist.

39:12 Dylan: Driving while atheist. Yeah, sure.

39:13 Mark: Anyway, you could see him right along those lines. I know that driving while atheist is a joke, but, like being a preschool teacher while atheists or something like, maybe somebody could make exactly that. That could be a topic of discussion in Mill's time. And these things are gonna change depending on what the public mores are.

39:29 Dylan: Well, it's like allowing gay men to be part of the Boy Scouts. Right.

39:35 Wes: So I think, though he talks later on about allowing prostitution versus allowing you to be a pimp, there's a difference

39:42 Dylan: between being a dealer and being a user.

39:45 Wes: Yeah. So if someone who proselytizes atheism is, in fact, there's some sense in which they are morally damaging society, or one is afraid that they might morally damage society, I think in that case, that's not an argument for prohibiting it. And again, we should move back and forth between the shame prohibition, the social regulation of it versus the legal regulation. Because I don't think Mill even wants to see a shaming of atheism out of existence to make it so socially consequential to be a heretic that everyone keeps quiet about their heretical beliefs is something he explicitly says is an evil.

40:29 Dylan: Well, even in the case of prostitution and, say, drug dealing or he spends more time on alcohol being a publican, he seems to be more concerned with the individual corruption that could go along with it. Not if you're the pimp or the madam and the publican, but of the people that they're making money off of. So, for instance, if you're a publican and you cultivate drunkenness amongst your patrons in order to make money, or the canonical example of the drug dealer who gets people hooked on purpose so that they can continue to get money from them, that's both a social Bad and also a harm to the person that you are corrupting, essentially.

And the same thing would be true for prostitution. It would be a difference for Mill if somebody is engaging in selling sex of their own free will versus being coerced. And that's sort of the nub of the argument often regarding things like prostitution and drugs is to what extent are you exercising your liberty in that activity versus are you being not just corrupted, but essentially being. You're being enslaved by that activity.

41:44 Mark: So I want to contrast, though, how being an atheist might be different than being a racist. I think so it seems like it comes down to the nature of the individual speech acts, the racist speech acts. Actually, I think racism is pretty comparable to those. If you have a religious belief that anybody that does not believe in God is going to go to hell, let's just say atheists are going to go to hell. And so if you just hold that and you argue it, that's fine. You could hold that and argue. But it is offensive. Like when you run into someone who is born again or whatever and just thinks, yeah, I just. I'm sorry, I think you're going to.

42:20 Wes: It doesn't even have to be that extreme. It could just be like you're morally inferior because you don't share my religion. Like in the same way that you're morally inferior because you don't share my race. It's a pretty analogous example.

42:32 Mark: Yes. So, but. Right. Mill is going to want to shame the act of shaming itself. Right. That is essential to his liberal project, is that we don't have a tyranny of shaming. And again, you can do some shaming. We've talked a little about what sort of legitimate shaming amounts to the sort of things that naturally come out of. And you know, you can express your disapproval, but if it becomes, again, I like the notion of pollution, if it becomes a matter of you just can't walk around without people littering, shame on you everywhere you go. Like, that is how in our white privilege episode.

Yeah. How blacks feel or felt or how many of them in many different environments feel on a daily basis. So in that sense, the racism itself, in the ways it is expressed is a form of shaming. And you could definitely even see that, you know, very much comparable to the thing that Mill is afraid that the way atheists are being treated in his society, like, it's okay if you religious people are not atheists and you think atheism is morally bad and you have other objections to atheism, but you can't let this show up in your behavior, such as to make it a hell on earth for the people that hold that view.

And so it would be the same. So just expressing racist opinions is helping to create that environment that makes it horrible for these people to live in. In that sense, I could see there'd be a lot of room on Mill's grounds to restrict the kinds you know, again, maybe not legally, but like to have very strong moral pressures against certain times and places and whatever to express these kind of things.

44:13 Wes: Yeah, I think there's a distinction to be made here. So if you're a drunkard, you might get shamed and shunned in your personal life. Right. In your personal relations.

44:23 Mark: But in your professional life as a pilot, you're fine.

44:27 Wes: Yeah. And your professional. I mean, to include that. So in your individual relations, let's say. And then the same thing goes for being a racist. You would be absolutely ostracized from certain communities, although you could find communities that agree with you and be part of those communities. But then there's the question of shaming within the higher public discourse. So in other words, at the level of our writing about things and thinking about things, do we simply adhere to that sort of shaming? In other words, the racist comes and writes their screed about the inferiority of a particular race.

Do we simply not engage? Is that just simply not a discussion? And we say, yes, this opinion is so obviously wrong that we don't even need to rebut it. We just don't talk about it. I think Mill would think that's the wrong way to go. So I think he could agree both Mark, with the idea that on a personal level, shame could have this positive regulative function when it comes to racism in daily social relations. But at the level of discourse, especially the more abstract you get, then engagement is called for and not just saying, oh, your opinion is obviously wrong.

And so we don't engage in which

45:49 Mark: it's difficult to, of course, have the stomach for that when the same things keep coming up. And maybe that's a reason for having. Just like the various Catholic institutions as he describes would create kind of manuals for rebutting the opposition. So you could just more or less point to that so you don't have to actually spend your time necessarily. It would be better if you learned the manuals and you can use those things to smack these things down. But really there should be a. So I'm just. I'm just thinking like, you know, whenever we bring up anything like white Privilege or whatever, people pull out this whole bell curve.

Oh, it's just objectively, the average IQ of blacks is lower than of whites. So therefore, all these pushes for. If there's an education gap, then we should expect that. Blah, blah, blah. So, like, that should just be the kind of thing that. Yeah, I don't respond to that. I erase that because it's just so tedious. We hear the same thing. But it would be better to have a stock response to that, to just smack it down and cut and paste it in every time.

46:53 Wes: Well, okay, according to Mill, no, it's better to actually have to argue those points and not simply in order to sharpen one's own opinions and to doing it repeatedly I don't think is a bad thing. But leaving that aside, you presented that argument in a pretty tendentious way, because I think there is. So it wasn't actually that long ago that it was a legitimate conversation to have about whether what primarily ails African Americans in society is socioeconomic problems, which by themselves are actually pretty trenchant and tend to perpetuate themselves no matter what racial group you belong to, or if they're a result of racism, where racism now can mean a lot of different things.

It can mean simple inequality of disparities, or it can mean actual discrimination, or it can mean subtle biases or something that's systemic or institutional. The word racism means lots of things. And so part of what I'm pointing to here is that I do actually think it's a legitimate conversation if the conservatives, by the way, do make these rebuttals all the time. And I don't think they're inherently. It's not inherently racist to say, well, actually, some of the problems are just trenchant socioeconomic problems, which don't have anything to do with racism traditionally conceived, until you redefine racism to include them.

And maybe it's not helpful to simply lump them together like that. It's helpful to know from a perspective of policy whether you're trying to ferret out racists, for instance, within an organization, or implicitly racist procedures within an organization, whether you're trying to address socioeconomic problems by having the state intervene in helpful ways for people who are disadvantaged. Those are two different things. So that's one rebuttal I would give to that. And so you can see how, even though a racist might use that to their benefit.

48:46 Dylan: Right.

48:46 Wes: Not just bell curve stuff, but the socioeconomic stuff that I've just mentioned, racists might jump on that and want to use that to their Benefit. But that still doesn't mean we can't ignore the possibility of some grain of truth in what they're saying, which is precisely Mill's point. We could actually benefit. Our position could become more nuanced if we acknowledge that. And I will say, by the way, like the white privilege opinion. I mean, the whole concept of white privilege, I think, is tremendously harmful and really misguided. But I think it can be helpful to have to talk about that and rebut that in a reasonable way, to really analyze it.

And I tried to do that during that episode, to paint that position in its strongest form in the way Mill says we ought to do, to try and see its merits. And there are actually interesting merits to the idea around something you mentioned before, Mark, this concept of humiliation. So I don't know is that convincing at all.

49:49 Dylan: I didn't know that you exactly were making an argument. I thought you were illustrating the.

49:54 Wes: Yeah, I'm arguing against Mark's idea that we should simply reject out of hand certain arguments as racist.

50:03 Dylan: Well, I didn't think Mark was saying that as much as that. There gets to be a point where it becomes tiresome. And I think there's something like that in Mill. And these kinds of controversies have a certain kind of bubbling point. You know, there'll always be ones that come to the fore because they're part of the current conversation or part of real discrimination or social upheaval going on. And other times when there's a sense in which it's basically been decided and that might be a social tyranny, or it might be just that. Well, you know, it's basically been decided, you know.

50:40 Wes: Well, he's against the whole idea of it's just been decided. So, I mean, the whole end of the first chapter is him saying, even if we have the whole truth, it must remain contested to remain alive. We might possess the truth in a really stupid way, in a really stupid, unhelpful way. And the only way we can prevent falling into that trap is. Is to have it continually contested, to remain engaged with the opposition always.

51:07 Dylan: I agree with that in principle, Wes, but let me give you an example. Like, it seems to me that it's going to be pretty far in between where we're going to say it's a legitimate discussion to have about the sexual slavery of children. And I am certain that there are people in places and times that they would say, well, you know what? It is right for certain classes that we should be able to have sex with children and use them in that manner. And I think that there's a very strong argument against that. Right. But it may not be the case that I have to make that argument over and over and over again all the time.

51:44 Unknown speaker: Right.

51:44 Mark: And if it became in particular, every conversation like this happens in a particular venue, and if a particular venue is getting overloaded with posts or whatever of people arguing in favor of the sexual slavery of children, then it seems like at some point you run into what Mill would consider an offense against decency. That it's not that you should never, never respond to that kind of thing at all, but that it should be okay to, you know, it shouldn't be necessary to continually respond to that. Or maybe it should just be easy. That, like, yes, you should always be ready with the counter argument for that. But it's just. It's very simple to explain for so many reasons why sexual slavery of children is wrong. So it's not like that occupies too

52:26 Wes: much of your intellectual life, you guys, about the sexual slavery of children.

52:30 Dylan: Well, before you jump into that, can I just want to. The point that Mark was making, I thought was also tied to our kind of media right now, where you would have the ability to subvert conversation itself by having there being an appearance of a predominance of an opinion that is actually engineered by a small number of people, and that's a kind of corruption of conversation, a corruption of the public exchange of ideas, that maybe we should talk about what we think Mill would think about that. I would expect that he thinks that that would be a perversion of the actual marketplace of ideas.

53:08 Wes: I think Mill would absolutely disagree with what you guys are advocating right now. I mean, you guys have done what he warned against, which is you've fixed on the most obvious abhorrent opinions. This is precisely the trap that people fall into. They say, but wait, there are these really obviously abhorrent opinions. We don't need to discuss those. There may not even need to be freedom of speech with regard to those. It's the worst opinions that require the most protection.

53:36 Dylan: Wes, you're mischaracterizing what I'm saying altogether. So it's not that. In fact, I explicitly said that. It's not that you shouldn't be able to express that opinion. It's just that there is some kind of frequency that goes on with it. Right? There's some kind of. It's not that I'm going to say, oh, you don't. We're going to make a law that you can't express it. That's not what I'm advocating. I'm saying that it gets tiresome to have to. I should be able to, as the editor of some magazine, say, look, you know, I'm just not going to give you time for that.

54:05 Wes: Well, that's fine if you're editor of the magazine, but I'm talking about this extensive argument that Mill makes that we remain engaged even if we have the whole truth with even the most stupid false opinions. Because unless we do that, we can't retain in any intelligent way our own true opinions. We can't know them as fully as we might know them otherwise. They can't be as embedded in our character, in our heart and mind. They won't influence our conduct as much unless they are fully active. And the only way they can be fully active is to be in this adversarial relationship.

So, yes, obviously child sexual slavery is wrong. Obviously, almost no one is going to disagree with that. And obviously there are certain contexts in which it's. I don't know if there could be situations of incitement or whatever, but if something constituted the speech act, which was actually a matter of harm, you would prohibit it. But I don't think there's a good reason not to engage. I mean, the good reason would be that the argument for it is so flimsy and shallow that one's rebuttal need not be very detailed. But I'm sure child sexual slavery has been some sort of case example in many sophisticated philosophical arguments.

In other words, people have learned by having to rebut that even something so obvious you could learn a lot by having to systematically spell out one's beliefs in that. So, for instance, to someone who rejected the very notion of moral truths, and there are philosophers out there who hold that opinion, then the rejection of anything on moral grounds is simply meaningless. And that goes for child sexual slavery as well. So that intuition becomes an important bone of contention. That intuition in that kind of debate, that's the best example I can think of.

56:06 Mark: Now, I think maybe we should set aside for a little bit here some of these very practical, interesting issues just to make sure that we get at some of the very rich and involved topics brought up by the text.

56:19 Wes: Maybe we can talk a little bit more about the whole question of partial truths and how they're important to the argument for Mill.

56:28 Mark: So what's a central quote about that that we want to start off with there?

56:33 Wes: I think, and it's about page 40 where he gets into that. So he says, we have hitherto considered only two possibilities that the received opinion may be false and some other opinion consequently true. Really, though he says that often it's the case that instead of one being true and the other false, they share the truth between them. And the non conforming opinion is needed to supply the remainder of the truth of which the received doctrine embodies only a part. Popular opinions on subjects not palpable to sense are often true, but seldom or never the whole truth.

Exaggerated, distorted, disjoined from the truths by which they ought to be accompanied and limited. I think that's a really important point. And then that last point, I just think, to elaborate, I think what people often don't understand is that it's not just a particular truth that's important, it's whether it has the right relations to the rest of our beliefs, whether it's functioning properly within our network of beliefs.

57:31 Mark: So I was trying to think whether his way of talking about this, about partial truths, is better or worse than talking about things in terms of dialectical responses, which anything that sounds Hegelian sounds like it could only obscure things could only make it worse. But I like the idea, which I think is very much captured by the way that Mill expresses this, that certain ideas become ascendant and that causes the neglect of something else that is sort of equally needs to be addressed in some way. And so if you're really thinking about this explicitly in terms of dialectic, you might say that then socially it's almost like the second idea takes revenge on the first one.

But even just talking about periods of ascendancy and descendancy. So. Right. You might have, I think, to bring up the race issue that we are already talking about. The difference between justice requires race blindness. Right. You should just. Everybody should get a job based on their merits. Everybody should, in any sort of contest, you should just completely disregard notions of race. And that sounds like a great. Yeah, if we had been doing that all along, then we wouldn't have had racism in the first place. We wouldn't have any of these problems.

But then someone could respond sort of, it seems pretty true. But the partial truth that is neglecting is, well, the history of racism, which means that maybe something like affirmative action is necessary. Okay, so maybe that becomes ascendant and becomes socially dominating and then it, the original fairness thing gets kind of neglected and say, hey, is it really fair that you're letting more people in this school with lower test scores or whatever, blah, blah, blah, and that I am personally, as the white person who is on the border, am not able to get in Here because of this policy, like, well, there's something to that too.

59:23 Wes: And it's not surprising because it fits that general form, right, of the tension between the just and the good and rights and, and maximizing social well being. And that's just a perennial conversation that we're always going to have to have in order to draw very tricky lines. Right?

59:42 Dylan: One thing that he says earlier, which I think bears on this question of truth, is that he has this love of the marketplace of ideas and neglected truths and partial truths. And you can see how intellectual he was himself. And he was a super, super smart, like a prodigy on his own. And his love of intellectual combat is very high. Yet earlier he says that, look, truth doesn't out itself on its own. He says the dictum that truth always triumphs over persecution is one of those pleasant falsehoods which men repeat after one another till they pass into commonplaces, but into which experience refutes it is a piece of idle sentimentality that truth merely as truth has any inherent power denied to error of prevailing against the dungeon and the stake.

And so in that context he's talking about the fact that persecution of people for their ideas, regardless of whether they're true or not. So let's take the case in which they are true, but they're being persecuted against falsely. Just because those ideas are true doesn't mean that they're going to triumph over that persecution. He admits that in the long run, particularly because of this ethic of a marketplace of ideas and pushing towards that, that eventually the truth will out, but that it's not a simplistic manner in which it does, that it can easily be subverted by social and political and legal pressures.

1:01:15 Mark: Don't people usually have in mind when they say the truth will eventually out, that it's like verifiable factual truth, Right. That you could prosecute Galileo for his various claims about astronomy, but then just anybody else goes and reproduces the experiment and they'll find the same thing. So in that sense, yeah, you could repress it for a long time, but truth is eventually out. Whereas the example that he gives is about how many times did the Protestant Reformation almost happen? And it just get put down, put down, put down. And then eventually it. But clearly, like the Protestantism versus Catholicism is not a matter of recognizing the truth in an obvious way that looking through a telescope would be.

1:01:58 Dylan: Well, I think you make a good point. I always took the truth will out as even if you're right, Mark, that it refers to fact more than other kinds of Arguments. I always took it to be a calling card for that. Also kind of social injustice.

1:02:18 Mark: What do you mean?

1:02:19 Dylan: Against oppression. Right. So that the part of the activity of tyranny, regardless of what it is, is to basically quell opinion and public discussion of, I guess, of facts and also ways of life. I take your point, Mark. I think that you're right that in general that the phrase would refer to attempts to deny facts that are sort of facts on the ground.

1:02:43 Mark: Well, maybe it was just a slip when you were describing. You said, maybe it's a true belief that's being persecuted and then a false persecution, which sounds like it's just a mistake. But the way that you were just saying that the idea of truth will out is connected to oppression is the idea that there's a connection between truth and freedom.

1:03:06 Unknown speaker: Right.

1:03:07 Mark: Freedom will eventually conquer dialectically. Again, maybe you could only make this kind of equivalence if you're thinking in a weird Hegelian sort of way, but that if you're saying sort of the manifest destiny, the progress of humanity is towards freedom, towards individuality, then saying that that will eventually happen is a form of truth will out. There's at least a family resemblance between those claims.

1:03:32 Dylan: I guess that's what I was thinking. I was taking him as being arguing against that.

1:03:36 Wes: Well, it seems like for him, the truth will out in the long term, but not in the short enough term to justify saying that it's persecution is okay.

1:03:46 Dylan: Well, he believes in general progression of humanity, right. And so in that respect, he would be in that sort of Hegelian camp of we're progressing towards freedom and truth and stuff like that. Even if there are downturns in the market, so to speak, there's an entropic pressure in that direction.

1:04:04 Mark: He makes this comparison to what I thought of as a pragmatic character of belief, right. That when we read William James on Belief, that he says, look, you can't know for certain these various religious propositions, but you have to have enough certainty that you can just act, you know, act even if you're not certain. And that seems to be the kind of thing that would justify, you know, we're not completely sure that racist speech is always harmful, but we're sure enough about it. We've had enough recent experience about it that aren't we justified in putting that down?

And he wants to say, no, those two things are not comparable. The individual, in making a decision like that, that I need to proceed based on my best judgment of things. Yeah, there is something comparable in the way a Society has to decide, say what tax law to adopt and is gonna have some economic conclusions that given that economics is not a very certain science they can't be sure about, but they have to make some decision in policy, but that should not extend to persecution.

1:05:06 Wes: Yeah, this is about page 17 to 18 that he's making this argument. So as the objection frames it, we have to live without absolute certainty all the time. And there's a certain kind of. He had been arguing before about don't assume infallibility. But the one making the objection says, well, if you're allowing the propagation of error, you're assuming a kind of infallibility anyway and we all must proceed without absolute certainty. And Mill's ultimate point is that yes, for the purposes of action, you're allowed in sort of tacitly assuming a kind of infallibility, but that doesn't mean that you're allowed to assume that for the purposes of suppressing other people's speech.

1:05:49 Mark: Those are two different cases imposing a social finding that you think is well established on the opinions of everyone.

1:05:57 Wes: Yeah. So the state. Let the state make all kinds of anti racist policies except to the extent that they involve prohibition of speech. Right. So the state could have an entirely dogmatic anti racist position and make as many policies as it wants predicated on that. Mill's not objecting to that. And so for those purposes it assumes a kind of infallibility as it acts. But it's a whole different thing to prohibit speech and to assume infallibility, such infallibility that it can say, okay, no one ever has anything intelligent or useful to say that isn't completely in line with our point of view.

1:06:38 Mark: So the fact in question might be that all people are morally equal, something like that. That's what policy is based on.

1:06:45 Dylan: I mean, I think Mill would support that principle. But I think to Wes point is that the distinction is very strong between acts and speech, even on the part of a government. You know, it's one thing that a government has some set of laws or even a society has one set of customs that govern acts, but that the restrictions on speech and thought ought to be orders of magnitude less.

1:07:14 Wes: Yeah. So in the case of affirmative action, we said, yes, that debate kind of rages on, but if a government pursues that policy anyway, yes, it has to sort of say, okay, yeah, this is our conclusion about this debate and we're going to act on that and that's fine. But it goes too far. If you say we're not going to talk about it anymore, saying You've drawn some conclusion about it. So we're going to act. And saying we're never going to talk about it again are two different things.

1:07:42 Dylan: Let me give an example that's less morally fraught. There is nothing to prevent anybody from trying to build a perpetual motion machine and talking about how they have built one. But the government, through the patent office, will not engage in giving you a patent for one. They won't even read your patent application for a perpetual motion machine. But the government won't prevent you from talking about such a thing. That, to me, is an example of the decision has been made that perpetual motion machines are so unlikely. And so the decision has been made about them, even if not everybody agrees and even if people vociferously want to pursue it and you want to build one, but you can't get a patent on it. Maybe I don't think that's as good of an example as I do.

1:08:29 Wes: But you don't need a patent. You can just sell them on Etsy for a fortune. That'll prove your case.

1:08:39 Dylan: My dad, when he worked as a district manager for a congressman in Michigan several times he had to go out and go talk to some guy about his perpetual motion machine because he was just causing such a ruckus at the congressional office that he had this perpetual motion machine and no one was giving him the time of day. And so to appease him, my dad went out to talk to him and see a demonstration of his perpetual motion machine, which inevitably involved him, like charging up some battery and then seeing, oh, it works without it being connected to something else.

1:09:13 Mark: So that was a. The discussion of partial truths is a Chapter 2 thing in the introduction is the first thing that makes it look like some of the things that Nietzsche says that are attractive, like this whole building of individuals as being kind of the point of social action, are right in here. So this is 1859, and it was like 1888 was the book we just read. So this is quite a bit early. He mentions, for instance, just in talking about something that sounds like the master slave morality dynamic. This is in the introduction. Wherever there's an ascendant class, a large portion of the morality of the country emanates from its class interests and its feelings of class superiority.

The morality between Spartans and helots, between planters and Negroes, between princes and subjects, between. Between men and women, has been for the most part creation of these class interests. And feelings and sentiments thus generated react and turn upon the moral feelings of the members of the ascendant class in their relations among themselves. Where, on the other hand, a class formerly ascendant has lost its ascendancy, or where its ascendancy is unpopular, that the prevailing moral sentiments frequently bear the impress of an impatient dislike of superiority.

So even though that's not the historical story of slave morality conquering, this is

1:10:20 Wes: all in the context of an argument, though, about how people's moral opinions are affected by these many different pernicious influences. So that the sentence preceding all that sometimes they're reason, at other times they're prejudice or superstitions, often their social affections, not seldom they're antisocial ones, their envy or jealousy and so on, desires or fear for themselves. These are all the things which form people's opinions and cause them to be not so reliable. And that class is a big part of that. I think the connection to Nietzsche here is that at the pathos of distance that the upper class holds right, the sense of their superiority, and then the ressentiment that the lower class feels, those two things are both compromising when it comes to the quality of people's opinions.

1:11:10 Mark: And another place where I'd written Nietzsche on is he's got these quotes from Wilhelm von Humboldt, who is also 1854. The end of man, or that which is prescribed by the eternal or immutable dictates of reason, and not suggested by the vague and transient desires, is the highest and most harmonious development of the powers. Be complete and consistent whole, the object towards which every human being must ceaselessly direct his efforts, and on which especially those who design to influence their fellow men must ever keep their eyes, is the individuality of power and development.

For this there are two requisites, freedom in a variety of situations, and that from the union of these arise individual vigor and the manifold diversity which combine themselves in originality. So that's a really nice. And he kind of goes on to elaborate this of Nietzsche's doctrine of becoming yourself or live your life as an art or something like this.

1:12:00 Wes: Yeah. So Nietzsche has lots of overtly inhospitable things to say about Mill and Utilitarians, but we know he read him. And you read this and you're like, he's definitely been influenced by it and borrowed a lot. Or he's, you know, he's built on this in some sense, like, it's amazing. You would think he would acknowledge some sort of indebtedness to a predecessor like Mill instead of just saying how wrong he is. Yeah.

1:12:28 Mark: How English and small and boring. And that's not here at all. This is a vigorous writing style and it's in praise of exactly the same thing. But Mill emphasizes the Christian virtues. He might say the Christian virtues are not the whole story. The Christian virtues will make you small and meek and a bunch of sheep. And you actually use terms like sheep and cattle in here. But still, don't be obnoxious like. So that whole discussion we had to have about Nietzsche is like, is he really obnoxious? Like Mill is very upfront in trying to. He's more of a people pleaser. Let's just say Mill is.

1:13:03 Wes: He's temperately English in his.

1:13:08 Dylan: Yeah, but he's furious on the inside.

1:13:12 Wes: What do you mean?

1:13:13 Dylan: Mill feels like he's more or less quiet and reserved, like if you met him on the outside, but that he is overflowing on the inside. Whereas I feel like Nietzsche, he would be more explicitly overflowing in interacting with him. Maybe I'm wrong about that.

1:13:31 Mark: But they definitely both have certain social things going on that would push us toward a herd mentality that they want to condemn in very strong terms. And one of the things Nietzsche's critique of kind of niceness is similar to. Mill talks about philanthropic people who want to engage in moral and prudential improvement of our fellow creatures. These tendencies at the times cause the public to be more disposed than at most former periods to prescribe general rules of conduct and endeavors to make everyone conform to the approved standard. And that standard, express or tacit, is to desire nothing strongly.

Its ideal of characters to be without any marked character to maim by compression like a Chinese lady's foot, every part of human nature which stands out prominently and tends to make the person markedly dissimilar in outline to commonplace humanity. That sounds like a very Nietzschean kind of line.

1:14:23 Wes: This whole chapter, by the way, we should just say, because I don't think we gave the title of the chapter is on Individuality is one of the elements of well being. There's a whole chapter devoted to the celebration of individuality. Not in the kind of caricature of Kantian individuality that's criticized by people like Sandel. This sort of Cartesian ego devoid of anything but choice, but a real fleshed out character who may deviate from societal norms and the ways in which that's a good thing.

1:15:00 Dylan: Yeah. He says among the works of man which human life is rightly employed in perfecting and beautifying, the first in importance surely is man himself. But goes on. Human nature is not a machine to be built after a model and set to do exactly the work prescribed for it. But a tree which requires to grow and develop itself on all sides according to the tendency of its inward forces which make it a living thing. And one whose desires and impulses are not his own has no character, no more than a steam engine has a character, if, in addition to being his own, his impulses are strong, and under the government of a strong will, he has an energetic character.

Whoever thinks that individuality, desires and impulses should not be encouraged to unfold itself must maintain that society has no need of strong natures and that a general average of energy is. Is not desirable. He wants to have a whole society full of people with very strong personalities and characters.

1:15:52 Wes: Yeah, he says, yet desires and impulses are as much a part of a perfect human being as beliefs and restraints. So he's talking in terms of. Instead of the sort of traditional Christian repression of desires and impulses, you still have a strong conscience. You keep them in check in some sense. And Nietzsche, even in our last reading, talks in this way too, about the importance of both of impulse, but also of a conscience that does something constructive with those impulses. But instead of thinking about them merely in terms of suppression or repression, you think about them in terms of harmonizing them.

And I'm going to use the word exploit, but I don't think that's a very good word. Cultivating, yeah, but maybe sublimate, as you guys know, is my favorite word. Sublimation is the way to think about it. You don't get rid of the impulses, but you. You do something constructive with them. You don't make them weak and inactive, but you make them productive.

1:16:47 Dylan: Yeah, in part they're having a similar reaction, I think, which is that human life is not one of self loathing and of repressing ourselves because we're sinful. It's that we should be cultivating the things that are great about us. In fact, Mill explicitly goes into this characterization when he's discussing a paganism in this chapter. Right. In my book. It's on page 71 where he's gotten into this discussion of Calvinistic theory and goes after it and gives praise of pagan self assertion versus Christian self denial. And he says it may be better to be John Knox than Alcibiades, but it is better to be Pericles than either. So John Knox is a Calvinist founder, and Alcibiades, for anybody who's listened to the podcast for a while, was a slut, a lush, a slush, a lush and a slut. So. And a General in what? 500 B.C.

1:17:51 Wes: a tyrant.

1:17:52 Dylan: Yes, and. And a lover of Socrates.

1:17:55 Mark: Here's another quote from the same chapter. Human beings are not like sheep, and even sheep are not indistinguishably alike. A man cannot get a coat or pair of boots to fit him unless they are either made to his measure, where he has a whole warehouse full to choose from. And is it easier to fit him with a life than a coat? Or are human beings more like one another in their whole physical and spiritual conformation than in the shape of their feet? So different persons require different conditions for their spiritual development and can no more exist healthily in the same moral than in all the variety of plants can in the same physical atmosphere and climate. The things which are helps to one person toward the cultivation of his higher nature are hindrances to. To another.

1:18:31 Wes: Yes. So reminiscent of a sort of individualized virtue ethics, right? Where one's virtues are relative to one's own character and not just generic Aristotelian traits. So it might be for me to fulfill my potentiality might be becoming a doctor, for instance, even just being a certain type of person who doesn't necessarily meet some sort of societal standard. But in doing that I actualize myself not qua rational human being in the Aristotelian sense, but qua Wes.

1:19:06 Dylan: Yeah, but there's definitely an ethic of. I wanted to say self improvement, but I think that word actualization is probably better. But either one would be a working of one's character and a development of that. In some ways the greatest ethical lapse would be of not doing anything, of not having an active character. That's probably true for Nietzsche as well.

1:19:32 Mark: Right. So he uses kind of virtue ethics language but puts forth the ideal. It's not like a typical moral reformer would say let's all imitate Christ or something, but the ideal is to be more fully an individual, or let's all

1:19:46 Wes: maximize utility so we can be optimally happy in some kind of dumbed down sense of having the most creature comforts and the least pain. The sorts of things that Nietzsche sort of implicitly rejects and Mill and people like him are. He's saying precisely the opposite here, instead putting forth this very Nietzsche thesis that in a way the end of society for him actually seems to be making it hospitable to geniuses and to their positive effects they have on society and preventing as much as possible conformity. I think even the freedom of speech arguments ultimately in the beginning kind of link up to that ultimate end or ideal for Mill.

1:20:31 Dylan: That sounds right I mean, effectively the patron saint for him is Socrates and the example of something he wants to avoid is Socrates. Execution. Right. Socrates would be an example of someone that there ought to be room for as a genius in the society, even though he's a gadfly and even though he may be corrupting the youth.

1:20:52 Mark: So I'm wondering if there's a little bit of a tension in here between talking about the individual as the endpoint of virtue ethics and this admission that, well, really like Nietzsche, he's concerned with genius. Right. Geniuses are the ones whose experiments in living actually then might catch on and improve things. They're more individual than other people, less capable consequently of fitting themselves without hurtful compression into any of the small number of molds which society provides in order to save its members the trouble of forming their own character.

So definitely it's not just any individual maybe can become the virtuous ideal. It's really the geniuses are the ones he has in mind here. But then he admits that, look, most people, when they try these experiments and live off the grid and are original, they're actually going to be failed experiments. And it's just a matter of society is overall better if we permit that sort of freedom. So that Even if only 1 out of 50 non conformists ends up being a genius, it's worth it. Otherwise we'll have a very stagnant society. But that doesn't mean that the other 49 are actually attaining a moral ideal.

Even if they are the most individually themselves they could be.

1:22:10 Wes: Say that last part again.

1:22:11 Mark: They've attained their own individuality, they have become themselves. But maybe they're still jokers. They're still not actually going to provide in their experiments of living any way that we would want to imitate. They're useful only insofar as they're examples of non conformity and we need more of that. At least now. You know, in his time he's thinking, I think this is a lesson that we, our society really, at least looking at our media, has gotten right in our David Brin interview. Like that's typical of pretty much every piece of fiction now they read is they're all wacky non conformists, like that's a trope.

Now maybe that hasn't actually dripped into the way we treat each other. Maybe we're just as intolerant as Mill thinks that people in his time were. But at least we give quite a bit more lip service to non confidence conformity. Even if we're not saying these people are all geniuses I mean, the power

1:23:01 Wes: of conformism is still, I think, very strong.

1:23:03 Mark: Yeah. Maybe that's a reason that the trope keeps getting put out there, because it's such a necessary lesson. And we could do, you know, a media analysis course of what's actually going on there. Is it really helping kids to be less conformist to see people in Stranger Things or whatever being non conformist? Being geeks? Does that actually make more people okay with being geeks? I think it does. I think it helps the culture. But maybe there's something. Adorno might have different ideas that in fact, this is putting us to sleep.

1:23:34 Wes: Well, the geeks are never truly geeks. They're always good looking enough at least, and often very good looking, even when the wearing of glasses is supposed to be a signifier for not being of the most beautiful class of people. Yeah, and the same thing with their uncoolness. Their uncoolness is cool. I don't want to lead us off a track, but you can see how you would analyze those signifiers to see the way in which they sort of do homage to the idea that we would tolerate true geekiness or true eccentricity while making the person acceptable enough, in popular terms to idolize or to sympathize with. What if the character were truly disagreeable? I mean, there are of course, some shows and movies like that, but they're of a whole different sort.

1:24:21 Mark: Right.

1:24:21 Wes: Have someone who's truly disagreeable in some sense to make them the anyway.

1:24:27 Mark: Well, yeah, or even disagreeable in a racist sense. I'm thinking. I watched the Clint Eastwood movie the Gran Torino. So he kind of plays this old crotchety veteran who is quirky, but in a very challenging. Those are.

1:24:42 Wes: Those are the flaws to be reflected. Formed from by their narrative arc. Right. Those are. They're not just something they can't do anything about or are more ingrained. Take someone who's truly so socially inept that even the audience recoils. Right. You can't enjoy watching them. That sort of character doesn't become the protagonist of the film. And it's not a problem that could be solved within a narrative arc in a genuine way.

1:25:06 Mark: But anyway, Honey Boo Boo, we're going to.

1:25:09 Wes: I feel like we're off.

1:25:10 Mark: I don't think this is off topic at all because I think that one of the. The harm principle, of course, is central in what we've inherited from here. And it still needs to be said. This message about not using social pressure to squash people is a thing that desperately is a message we still Need. But I think it's a good question, you know, to what extent did we get the memo on eccentricity is good. And the fact that it's so prominent in our media, I think is interesting. But yet, as you said, still in high school, isn't it still just as horrible as it always was?

1:25:47 Wes: Of course it is.

1:25:49 Mark: Talking to my kids, I feel like, at least in their school, maybe not as much, but, you know, certainly it's not like peer pressure has gone away.

1:25:55 Wes: That's Wisconsin. It's Madison, where people are about 10 times nicer than elsewhere.

1:26:01 Dylan: No, no, it's true. When we moved here, my son had grown up in Maryland, both of them, a large part, but one had been only to school in Maryland. And completely unbidden by me, he went to school his first day and he came back and he said, dad, everyone is so much nicer here than they are back where we used to live. Exactly. The prejudice you would have that people from the Midwest are just nicer than the people people.

1:26:26 Wes: But do they have strong spirits?

1:26:29 Mark: Well, should we talk about the limits of tolerance in dealing with barbarians? This word barbarian comes up twice, one we kind of mentioned in passing in talking about Mormonism. So, you know, you might be very offended by polygamy. And he even says, you know, I don't like polygamy either. But still, the fact that these people have gone off in their own, you know, a different part of the world.

1:26:52 Wes: And he says he doesn't like polygamy, by the way, because it's oppressive to women.

1:26:56 Mark: Yeah, but he says, right, no one has a deeper disapprobation than I have of this Mormon institution. But for other reasons. It's because far from being in any way countenanced by the principle of liberty is a direct infraction of that principle. Mere riveting of the chains of one half of the community and emancipation of the other from the reciprocity of obligation towards them. Still, it must be remembered that this relation is as much voluntary on the part of the women concerned in it and who may be deemed the sufferers by it, as is the case with any other form of marriage institution.

And however surprising this fact may appear, it has this explanation of the common ideas and customs of the world which teaching women to think marriage the one thing needful, make it intelligible that many women should prefer being one of several wives to not being a wife at all. I just wanted to read the quote that you were saying. But the ultimate conclusion of this is that since they've gone off to their own community to do this. She I'm not aware of any community that has a right to force another to be civilized. Like, we could go send people to try to convince them that polygamy is bad, but we can't go conquer them to make this right.

I think he used the word barbaric in that context. So in that case, you can't force another community to be civilized. But if I'm looking at secondary literature about this, he was actually well known for thinking, say, the American Indians or some other like. He also uses the term of barbarians. Despotism is a legitimate mode of government in dealing with barbarians, provided that the end be to their improvement and the means justified by actually effecting 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.

1:28:30 Wes: So he puts them in the same category as children also, who are also not free and susceptible to our despotism.

1:28:38 Mark: Although I like the criterion that he gives that people should be capable of being improved by free and equal discussion. So I think you could agree to that in abstract and just say that if you're actually condemning and he doesn't, you know, pick out the American Indians or anybody else, but a lot of philosophers from England at this time that was, as we read in Rousseau and several other philosophers, it was a popular topic there. He's in Imperial Britain. So this is not an uncommon thing for them to think about. So you could say, oh, we tried going and having a discussion with them, but we failed.

So they must be barbarians. When clearly the thing that went wrong is not that they're incapable of talking. Right. If they really were incapable of talking, then they really would be barbarians in the sense perhaps, you know, to be domesticated. But it's just that the communication did not work. The colonials were not in good faith trying to evaluate their own communicative norms. And it's just, you know, are they being convinced by us or do we have to conquer them?

1:29:44 Dylan: Yeah, but I think he would be squarely in the camp that there's an evolution of culture that makes something like democratic conversation available to them. I think your analysis of exactly the kind of thing that would have happened with that certain forms of social culture are not available to become democratic. They just don't. And he would be, I think, on the side of the argument that there's a kind of social progress there. So you're never going to get democratic elections in Afghanistan, effectively because of tribalism. That's the argument.

1:30:21 Mark: So it's not barbarianism in terms of. I'm thinking of this. This was the criteria, I think, in Ender's game in the Orson Scott card, where pretty much if you can't communicate with the other species, they might as well not have minds. If they're just. There's no way to get through, then we have to deal with them in some other way. But if communication is possible, then that's like all that's required for civilization. Well, that's a pretty low bar. Like any human being, any human culture is going to pass that bar. But you seem to be saying that what would make you barbarian is not even just not being able to communicate, but having illiberal practices.

1:30:55 Dylan: Yeah, I mean, that's where barbarian comes from. Right. It's from the Greeks, that people who didn't speak Greek, they just said bar, bar, bar, bar. And that's the word barbarian came from literally, what you're saying, that they can't communicate with you, period.

1:31:09 Wes: But I think his idea, though, is just that they are primitive or their social institutions. He uses the word backward elsewhere.

1:31:19 Dylan: Yep.

1:31:20 Wes: So he does put this caveat in. Provided the end be their improvement and the means justified by actually affecting that end. So it's not an outright defense of colonialism, because we know colonialism was in many cases it was just naked greed. And that wasn't even. It was about finding gold or getting land or.

1:31:42 Mark: Or.

1:31:43 Wes: I'd be surprised if Mill really thought that people were simply going over with altruistic ends.

1:31:50 Mark: I found it interesting that, like the one little bit of secondary literature I was looking at characterized him as being very dismissive of colonized peoples, as not being sufficiently civilized, but sort of putting aside what his literal beliefs. And that's not something we'd be following him on anyway. Does it follow that if, like, you know, in Afghanistan, obviously a civilized country, but if it's a place that is not because of their tribalism or because of their despotism, that we can. We don't accept them as an experiment in living.

1:32:25 Wes: Well, just let's take a more obvious example. Take a place where women are terribly tyrannized and where there's female genital mutilation and the sorts of things that often conservatives are bringing up to criticize certain societies. Take all of those customs which we find abhorrent and then ask the question, are we entitled to become despots over them in order to reform them?

1:32:55 Unknown speaker: Yeah.

1:32:55 Mark: And there's no big discussion of international relations here, so we can't really Figure out what he thinks about that.

1:33:02 Wes: There are a thought experiment in which one simply walked in with a pamphlet and could persuade everyone. You might think, okay, well, there's nothing wrong with that. But the use of force opens up, of course, all kinds of problems, right? You have to kill a lot of people, you have to do a lot of things which are ultimately then deprive them of their freedom, deprive them of their sovereignty and commit a lot of crimes. Basically. The ends almost never justify the means because of the contingencies of doing this. But then to ask whether the general principle is any good, you have to imagine that highly nonviolent case in which there are no complications about means and which there are no complications about the ends of the people going in to do the reforming.

1:33:50 Mark: I think he's sensitive to different conditions in different places. He even says in the beginnings of society the state had more of an interest in controlling every aspect of the citizens because the society was so fragile that if there was any non conformity, if there were people voicing things against the government, then it would just collapse. But we are now in a developed enough society that we're not under that sort of danger, so we can take the chains off. So sort of extracting from that to how we're going to judge other places in the world. It could be that he would say that, yeah, okay, some of these. If the people are not sufficiently capable of democratic institutions, then I guess over there having despotism is okay. But we certainly should be trying to help them progress along the road to being able to handle the same freedoms that we have. Something like that.

1:34:55 Dylan: It does feel in tension with some of the other stuff that he says. It amounts to a kind of force to be free and compelling people for their own good kind of thing. And given how much he rails against compelling people to do things for their own good, this crack in the door regarding compelling societies who aren't sufficiently developed to be despots on them for their own good seems to be at least full of lots of tension.

1:35:27 Mark: Send them pamphlets, missionaries. That's what we should do. Convince.

1:35:32 Wes: Well, even then I think that some would argue that it would be possible to destroy a culture through such means to corrupt, certainly.

1:35:42 Dylan: And some people might also argue that depending upon that culture that might be okay.

1:35:47 Mark: So I guess we haven't talked about his views on education and we don't really have time to get into those too much. But so in general it might sound like he would be very libertarian about economic issues, for instance, but because economic issues Issues of trade are issues where you're dealing with other people. So there's actually a lot of room in his viewpoint for economic interference. But he's, you know, he's read the wealth of nations, so he knows that in general, like, unless there's really a reason for having a restriction on anything, then let it go free.

But he has no problem with all sorts of laws about how you treat your workers or stuff like that, because that's interpersonal stuff that is not really relevant to liberty as he sees it, because that's again, the division between things that affect only you and things that affect others. Like, any economic stuff obviously affects others. And then as far as the education thing goes, like, even having a kid, people would think it's obviously, you can't control my body, you can't control our sex lives. Like that seems like it would fall under here.

But the fact of you having a kid that maybe you don't have the money to pay for to support society could. Doesn't have to intervene there, you know, maybe even making you undergo forced labor, like, it's the same thing. If you're too drunk to take care of your kids, then they might be able to step in to force support. So likewise, it is the duty of parents to provide education to their kids. Like, and he really wants to make this idea of universal education, which was not the norm at his time, to make that recognize that every kid has a right to.

To an education. And maybe again, this would be the kind of thing that sort of depends on how advanced your society is, whether you can insist that this is a right or not. But given that it is possible and if parents can't pay for it, then like, the. The government should pay for it. However, he does not think that the government should actually educate kids, that public schools would be bad because those would make everybody the same.

1:37:55 Dylan: He's writing at a time that there's a very live conversation about public education. And he's, as you point out, he's adamantly against it because he thinks that it's basically a wing of the government to indoctrinate you.

1:38:09 Mark: So what that would lead to, I would think would be different societies within your society and that you should be able to kind of choose which you're gonna go into.

1:38:19 Wes: And by the way, he's still advocating that the pub. That the government pay for all the

1:38:23 Mark: education and that there be basic standards he wants, like public testing, so that whatever education you choose, it has to make you literate. That's like, at least I think that's about the only thing.

1:38:32 Wes: No, no, he has other, lots of other standards.

1:38:35 Dylan: But all that testing has to be factual.

1:38:37 Wes: Literacy is just the first test for children and then it gets more and more sophisticated as time goes on.

1:38:42 Mark: But would, would they have to. It seemed like those more specialized tests, he wants them to be standard so that you know when you're going to hire a plumber if somebody is certified, but that nobody has to go beyond literacy. I don't know, that's not totally clear. But.

1:38:57 Wes: Well, no, he says that higher degrees like PhDs and things should not be a barrier to, they should not be requirements for jobs or barriers to employment. If you don't have one, it would

1:39:10 Mark: just be a stamp of approval. So like it would improve your reputation and people could know that you've met this requirement. You know, we have such more detailed educational standard, educational requirements, I think, than just literacy. And I'm not totally sure what Mill thinks about that. He, he seems to think like, yeah, you know, we can't force you to be religious, but we could. Maybe this is just a thing for discussion. Say you have to have some basic knowledge about what people's religious beliefs are because that's a necessary thing to get along in the world. And so you might have to be tested about this kind of thing in general. Obviously not thinking that everybody needs a, you know, a full on Catholic education or something like that.

1:39:51 Wes: Right. It's part of social studies, it's part of history, but it seems it's very

1:39:55 Mark: much open to there being very different communities with different educational standards, different things they consider important. So we could have this kind of multiplicity not just on the individual level, but on the group level. Right. That's in some ways comparable to the different civilizations. It's just that, you know, they would all, all the ones within England would have to be sufficiently liberal to get along with his requirements of not suppressing minority opinions and the freedom to leave and you know, really substantial stuff that actual backwards despotic regimes do not have.

1:40:38 Wes: Yeah. And it's not something we're unfamiliar with.

1:40:39 Mark: Right.

1:40:40 Wes: We have lots of different sorts of private schools. And it's just that I think the innovative part there is just the idea that the government should pay for all that instead of having a public school system unless it's absolutely necessary, puts in that caveat. Unless there are circumstances in which it might be the only way to prevent illiteracy and things like that. But in most cases instead of having a public school system, you have a private school system and the Government pays for it in that way. It's an interesting idea. I mean, it's not just like a school voucher idea that we debate these days where some people would get the benefits and you'd still have the vast majority of kids not really having school choice and that sort of opportunity. What if everyone had school choice and what if it were all. All done privately and paid for? I think Bernie Sanders could live with that.

1:41:34 Mark: Or you could have the public option, but it would just be, it would be one among different options you could choose. It would not be the default that if you don't have the money that that's what you get slotted into. Yeah, so I raised that, raised that just to try to connect this back to the discussion of international relations. And like, are there any special problems brought about by the fact that. So you could end up having the Amish community or something, that the equivalent these that have its whole own educational system, that this kind of plurality is great as far as Mill is concerned.

Or do you think as soon as you have those subcultures then separate is inherently unequal, that you're going to have some sort of repression within the individual subculture that is like, that's unavoidable. That's almost the whole reason for having the individual subculture. So we can treat our women in worse ways than everybody else does.

1:42:27 Wes: Yeah, you might have those forms of oppression. I mean, he acknowledges that social repression is going to happen, but we can't socially oppress sub communities into not being oppressive either. Right, we can't. If you think it's a form of social oppression to require certain headwear, for instance, by women, but a community does that, I think it would be a far worse tyranny as, as I think France has done. I'm not sure what the status is right now in prohibiting people from doing that, because to the woman doing that, it's not just, oh, a man made me do that, it's this is my culture, this is my custom.

I mean, many women who were subjected to that of course would not want to do that. But to at least some women, that's the thing. And then there are enormous social consequences. And I think overall he explicitly talks about plurality as a good thing. Right. He brings up the example of Europe where this is where he thinks Europe had the advantage over China. Just all these different nations and different customs and different languages allowed for what he calls a progressive and many sided development. I'm looking here at page 65 and 66 in my edition.

So he's lamenting at some point, he's lamenting the way it is in England. And he says, the circumstances which surround different classes and individuals and shape their characters are daily becoming more assimilated. Formerly different ranks, different neighborhoods, different trades and professions lived in what might be called different worlds at present, to a great degree, and the same, comparatively speaking. They now read the same things, listen to the same things, see the same things, go to the same places, have their hopes and fears directed at the same objects, have the same rights and liberties and the same means of asserting them.

They tend to raise the low and to lower the high. A combination of all these causes forms so great a mass of influences hostile to individuality that it is not easy to see how it can stand its ground. And so on. The demand that all people shall resemble ourselves grows by what it feeds on. If resistance waits to life is reduced nearly to one uniform type, all deviations from that type will come to be considered impious, immoral, even monstrous and contrary to nature. There's a great argument for pluralism in this text because it is the ground on which individuality thrives.

To be able to be subjected to a lot of different influences. Mark, I know you were saying people could sort of get caught in their own communities and sort of walled off from other communities, but I would say it's the case that in the United States we get exposed to a lot of difference. The pluralism, there's actually a lot to be said for it, and it actually works. There's a certain amount of insulation and segregation, but I think people benefit from the interaction.

1:45:34 Mark: He characterizes this freedom from the tyranny of the majority, from the tyranny of custom, as enabling people to be innovators, to be more truly themselves. But the way that you hear this used as political rhetoric is like, you know, our state wants to be free from the civil rights laws. You know, this is just a historical example. So they want to be free to obey their custom and not be progressive. So it's not the example that Mill is giving. He wants people to be free so that they will be innovative and more truly themselves. But no, leave us alone.

We want to remain sheep. Like, that's the way that the demands for freedom more often, as a practical matter come out. It's just Mill is going to. In the same way that most individuals are going to be failures. They're not actually going to produce an experiment of living that any of the rest of us are going to follow. I think that if you don't have the freedom, then people won't have the ability to break away from custom. But freedom certainly does not guarantee that anybody's going to break away from custom. And in fact, most people are going to remain sheep.

1:46:43 Wes: Right? That's the interesting thing about this text because you might think he's celebrating diversity in the way it's often celebrated today. And the way it's often celebrated today. It's as if diversity means diversity of cultures. There are all these different cultural units and that's supposed to be a wonderful thing in itself. And in some sense my conformity to the customs of those different, of my particular culture is meant to be this salutary expression of my identity. And that's precisely not what he means. He thinks that, that he is praising that pluralism, but he's praising it insofar as we can get exposed to many different influences from many different cultures, many different points of view.

And that type of variety allows us to more truly become ourselves. We get a far greater variety of things that we can try on to see if, if they are ways of life, let's say, to try and see more, let's say, components of ways of life to try and to see if they are suitable to us so that we can sort of fashion our own very particular and even if eccentric if we like way of life. And of course, that's not for most people. He doesn't. Yeah, like you said, Mark, he doesn't think that they're simply going to escape the confines of their particular culture, their particular opinion.

But he does say in places something to the effect that there's this spectrum and that everyone benefits from this. You may not be the freest of all people and you certainly are probably not going to be a genius, but you're way better off in a pluralistic society anyway than you would be otherwise. And I think there's no doubt that someone who lives in, for instance, in some relatively uniform non pluralistic society simply doesn't. There are lots of other benefits to that, but they don't have access to the sorts of benefits you have in a pluralistic society.

And arguably there's going to be far greater scope for true individuality in mill sense in a pluralistic society than in one that is uniform. Even if you're not genius, even if you're not eccentric, bucking the trend, all that stuff.

1:49:00 Dylan: The individual is the fundamental element that he wants to see growing. Right? And pluralistic society is one way of encouraging that.

1:49:13 Mark: Right.

1:49:13 Dylan: The main good is having individuals being able to actualize themselves and having the broadest possible means for doing so. And that's the divine diversity that he's talking about. I think that's a good point, Wes. He basically is completely unconcerned about the notion of diversity of culture. What he means by diversity is diversity of individuals. And they might be cultivated by being exposed, as you say, to pluralistic aspects of society and engaging with lots of different ideas through different cultures. But the end endgame is cultivation of individuals.

1:49:52 Mark: All right, thanks guys. I really enjoyed this. I like the fact that he gets so concrete in so many areas, which just makes me want to think of more concrete situations in which these ideas are problematic. One of the points we didn't talk about was his Sabbatarian legislation. So in other words, that people should have work off on Saturdays or Sundays. And it seems like that's the kind of thing that should be prohibited because it's just based on a religious prescription. You should let people work as much as they want. But he says that there is a social benefit in allowing that people to have a day off.

And if you really just don't have any institutional support for this, then people will just ignore it. And so it kind of falls in the category of because this is a social thing, then you could restrict it. As long as the justification for your restricting it is obviously not a merely religious one, that you're making some sort of utilitarian argument for it. But just that particular example just got me thinking about the whole realm of how we set a standard hours for work of the week. And that whole issue that I think way too much about this was instructive in seeing really the extent to which he would allow interventions in economic, say circumstances that I think this is just the fact that it's called On Liberty.

I feel like some of the things in here, you know, we heard coming out of the arguments against paternalism and things we heard coming out of Russ Roberts mouth and I think get used in a lot of ways that are are contrary to the spirit and letter of Mill and that what Mill has to say is more interesting and nuanced than what the mere terms of the harm principle and restrictions on society and on social opinion to interfere in the lives of individuals. It's an important lesson, but there's more to it than that.

1:51:58 Wes: Aren't you glad I suggested this?

1:52:00 Mark: I am glad.

1:52:02 Dylan: This is good.

1:52:03 Wes: Like so initially I had suggested a free speech episode which we are also going to do shortly. And so I had found a few readings including of course on Liberty that's off cited and the whole free speech debate. Yeah, I was like, really? We haven't done this. I even like googled like Partially Examined Life on liberty to see if I'd just simply forgotten that we had already done this. I'm glad we did the whole thing instead of just an excerpt from it. And we'll be able to talk even more about the whole free speech thing and arguments that will attempt to limit it. I think that'll be an informative juxtaposition when we get to that.

1:52:38 Mark: I might make my kids read this. I was thinking about that.

1:52:42 Wes: I was thinking the same thing as you, Mark. You saying everyone should be forced to memorize this. I just thought, really, everyone should have to read this. Speaking of despotism. And just that thought crossed my mind so many times. There's nothing ordinary about the book. Or even though in many ways it's part of the foundations for everything an American reflexively believes. That's even. All the more reason because it's way more nuanced than to use Mill's point. Our beliefs tend to sediment and die unless we really address them and think about them. And this book is a good way of adding more nuance to your position, whether you're more prone to think that we have too much free speech or prone to think we have too little. I guess that's my closing after all.

1:53:28 Mark: Any last words, Dylan?

1:53:31 Dylan: You guys summed it up good.

1:53:32 Mark: Cool. Next time we're going to be talking about Blaise Pascal's book Pensées. You know, like with Pascal's Wager. Our closing song reflects my interview with John Philip Shenale on Nakedly examined music number 12. It is called Flavor, written and sung by Tori Amos. The version from the 2012 Gold Dust album which Phil did the string arrangements for. I picked this not just because certain things in the lyrics, the battle of the minds, all the different flavors, the points of view that Mill encourages, but also because I think Tori is one of those experimental life geniuses that freedom and the encouragement of non conformity allows us to experience.

You can hear the interview with phil@nakedlyexaminemusic.com Everybody should use their free speech to put constructive things up on our Facebook group and our blog page, in our many other ways of getting in touch with us. Email us@pelarshealcexaminedlife.com if you have suggestions for things for us to cover or questions or whatever.

1:54:32 Wes: And the Supreme Court has also ruled that your donations are a form of free speech.

1:54:38 Mark: Take advantage of that. All right, Good night, folks.

1:54:41 Dylan: Good night.

1:54:41 Wes: Good night.

1:55:02 Unknown speaker: Cries below cries, You must pick a side Will you choose fear? Will you choose love? What does it look like, this orbital born from the face fringes of the Milky Way High what does it feel alright? This orbital? From the fringes of the Milky Way Rain Flavor I sing Flav Flavor, flavor. Who's God then? He's God. They all want geo jurisdiction. In the book of Earth. Whose God? Spread fear, Spread love. What does it look like, this orbital Born from the fringes of the Milky Way I what does it feel like this? From the fringes of the Milky Way Rain, Flame, flame, flame I see flavor, flavor. Turn up the frequency. Milky way rain. I see the flame. Spread that flavor, Flavor, flavor Sa.