Mill: Utility and Liberty

John Stuart Mill was raised as an experiment. His father taught him Greek at three, Latin at eight, and Ricardo's political economy at thirteen, and kept him away from other children so the design would not be contaminated. The aim was to produce a perfect instrument of reform.

At twenty it broke. Mill asked himself whether achieving every change his father wanted would make him happy, and the honest answer was no. The collapse lasted months and he came out of it partly through reading Wordsworth, which is a detail worth keeping, because it explains everything distinctive in his later work. A utilitarianism that had no room for poetry had missed something, and he spent his career putting it back.

The repair shows in his best-known revision. Bentham had counted only the quantity of pleasure, which produced the notorious conclusion that pushpin is as good as poetry if it yields as much. Mill argues that pleasures differ in quality as well as amount, and his evidence is a procedure: ask people who have genuine experience of both kinds which they prefer. Those competently acquainted with both do not trade intellectual and emotional pleasures for larger quantities of simple sensation, even at a cost in contentment. Better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied, because the fool only knows one side of the comparison.

The standing objection is that this abandons hedonism. If some pleasures are better regardless of how much pleasure they contain, the standard is no longer pleasure. Mill's reply is that the judgement of competent judges is itself the criterion, so nothing external has been imported. Almost nobody finds that fully convincing, and it remains the oldest open wound in utilitarianism.

His enduring achievement is elsewhere, in a short book about liberty. The harm principle states it: the only purpose for which power can rightfully be exercised over any member of a civilised community, against their will, is to prevent harm to others. Their own good, physical or moral, is not sufficient warrant.

That second sentence is the radical one. It rules out coercing an adult for their own benefit, however clearly the benefit is established. Mill's reasoning is partly that nobody is better placed than you to judge your own interests, and more deeply that being coerced for your own good corrodes the capacity for self-direction that makes a person more than a machine.

He is unusually clear-eyed about where the real threat comes from, and it is not the state. Social pressure (the tyranny of the majority, the weight of respectable opinion) can crush individuality far more thoroughly than any statute, because it reaches into places law cannot and leaves no one to appeal to. Against it he sets experiments in living: unconventional lives are valuable because nobody knows in advance which arrangements work, so eccentricity is a public good and conformity a hidden cost.

The chapter on free speech contains his sharpest argument, and it is not the familiar one about being fallible. Suppose you are certain an opinion is false. Suppressing it still costs you, because a true belief that has never had to survive attack decays into a formula you repeat rather than a position you hold. He calls the result a dead dogma. The test is easy and most people fail it: take something you believe firmly and try to state the strongest case against it, from memory.

Two honest limits. The harm principle is not self-applying, since almost everything affects others somehow, and the distinction between harm and mere offence does a great deal of unexamined work. And On Liberty explicitly excludes children and what Mill called backward states of society, a colonial exclusion tied to his thirty-five years at the East India Company. It is not a stray remark, and it sits in the middle of the most influential defence of freedom in English.