Mill, Liberty and the Facts of Life

Philosophy in Review, 2011

John Stuart Mill regarded On Liberty as likely to last longer in its effects than any of his other writings, save perhaps his System of Logic, and it continues to engage students and researchers over 150 years after its initial publication. This book brings together ten very different contributions, each of which illuminates the essay's continuing interest. A caution, however: this is no introductory anthology and, while several essays would be accessible and useful to undergraduate students, the collection as a whole is aimed primarily at researchers, or at least more advanced students. Contributors feel no need to make every aspect of Mill's thought accessible to the philosophical novice, and where appropriate they assume general familiarity with the ideas and terminology of moral and political philosophy. Still, for those with an adequate background, this collection forms a fine introduction to some central interpretive debates around On Liberty.

Philosophy. Journal of the Higher School of Economics, 2018

The work of John Stuart Mill "On Liberty" is almost unanimously hailed as one of the most important expressions of the modern concept of liberty. However, both the internal coherence of the essay and its complex relationship with the rest of Mill's work have often been debated. Mill's essay offers a radical defense of liberty of thought, expression and action, making it one of the strongest expositions ever advanced in defense of individual freedom. But along with this aspect of the work there is also another less obvious one with which it is difficult to integrate: it is the need, defended by Mill in different parts of his essay, to establish political and social mechanisms of control and restraint, thus giving rise to a certain paternalism that has been strongly criticised by some sectors of liberal thought. This essay aims to show that this is a question not of the inconsistency in Mill's political theory, but of approaches whose relationship arises from the global conception of the human and morality that underlies the essay.

Biuletyn Stowarzyszenia Absolwentów i Przyjaciół Wydziału Prawa Katolickiego Uniwersytetu Lubelskiego

In modern democracies the liberty of the individual is ensured and protected by the state or the government. But it is well-known that restrictions on liberty are institutionalized and the individual is responsible for obeying them. The liberty of the individual and its protection is provided through restrictions. On the other hand, the legal system and the government are the institutions that threaten the liberty of the individual. Mill’s thesis on individual liberty implies the primacy of it and sets out the social conditions in which it will be possible to realize and protect individual liberty. The main theme of his treatise On Liberty is the nature and boundaries of individual liberty, the scope of legitimate interference with individual liberty. In other words, the principle establishes a sufficient basis for the legitimate protection of the individual liberty, i.e. what is a restriction of a right, on the one hand, is at the same time a protection of it. An individual must be...

Nineteenth--Century Prose, 2020

This paper addresses the question of whether all that unites the main parts of John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty—the liberty principle, the defense of free discussion, the promotion of individuality, and the claims concerning individual competence about one’s own good—is a general concern with individual liberty, or whether we can say something more concrete about how they are related. I attempt to show that the arguments of On Liberty exemplify Mill’s institutional design approach set out in Considerations of Representative Government and related works. Mill’s approach reflects both his debt to Bentham and his own progressive development of the utilitarian tradition. The paper proceeds by setting out the elements of Mill’s institutional designs and then showing that On Liberty neatly applies them, thereby clarifying the structure of the arguments of On Liberty.

This file contains note for a comprehensive discussion of _On Liberty_. The previous set of notes posted for this work were aimed at replicating the experience on an in-class conversation, while this set aims to offer up a more systematic approach to the text.

2018

On Liberty is a classic philosophical text which considerably influenced our modern political morality. While Mill was not the first to champion individual freedom, his argument is developed in its clearest form here, in On Liberty, as I critically review this piece of work

An Examination of the Famous Founding Text of Liberalism and its Flaws

Attached is the book proposal for an edition of Mill's "On Liberty" that has now been offered a contract with Broadview Press and was published in 2015.

People should be allowed to carry their opinions into practice without molestation as long as the cost borne is entirely their own. The condition of freedom of action is like that of freedom of speech—they must not make themselves a nuisance to other people. Acts of whatever kind, which, without justifiable cause, do harm to others, may be, and in the more important cases absolutely require to be, controlled by the disparagement, and by the active interference, when needful, of other people or society. It is desirable, in short, that in things which do not primarily concern others, individuality should assert itself. The Christian moral system is no exception to the rule that achieving truth requires a diversity of opinions. The exclusive pretension made by an incomplete truth to be the whole, must and ought to be protested against. If Christians would teach infidels to be just to Christianity, they should themselves be just to infidelity.