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TSR Wiki > Study Help > Subjects and Revision > Revision Notes > Politics > Mill's Defence of Liberty - by C.L. Ten

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• Ten’s contribution devoted in large part to disputing utilitarian justifications for P of L: has a go at different types of utilitarian defences.

• JSM’s conclusion on absoluteness of individual liberty firm & clear; question is how he arrives at it. (Not immediately clear what JSM means by ‘utility in the largest sense’)

• (e.g. of pork eating) ‘Neither intensity of distress nor the number of people who share it seem to affect the conclusion that it’s illegitimate for the maj. to impose its values on the rest of society’. (Same for Sabbatarians or Cats in Spain) – in telling public that they have ‘no business to interfere’, JSM setting up a principle of non-interference which is deliberately insensitive to such ‘utilitarianly’ relevant considerations. If the balancing of utilities is required at all levels where interference with liberty contemplated, would make no sense for JSM to insist on ‘perfect freedom’ in ‘tastes & pursuits’, & contrast this with the qualified acceptance of freedom in cases where there’s harm to others.

• Why should the morality-dependent & other forms of distress be discounted from the utilitarian calculus? – does doing so increase utility overall?

• According to Gray, JSM’s P of L identifies as wrong only those acts which harm the vital interests of others in security, & it presupposes the equal distribution of moral rights to security & autonomy. The princip is adopted by JSM as a utilitarian strategy which will best promote the goal of maximising happiness (but absolute/quasi-absolute)

• Gray argues that, according to JSM, direct pursuit of utility will produce social instab cos it sometimes requires people to sacrifice their vital interests, a sacrifice which they would regard as unreasonable. On the other hand, P of L, by protecting the vital interests, sets reasonable terms of social co-operation.

• Liberty valuable partly as
  1. A constitutive element of autonomous choice and partly as
  2. an instrument for the discovery of the variety of human natures.

• JSM’s argument for lib relies on the empirical claim about the irreversibility of liberty, namely that those who are used to making their own choices would want to continue to do so – Gray admits that claim of irreversibility is only a conjecture for JSM & lacks certainty which only a science of ethology, or character formation, could have provided. JSM aware of widespread & deep-seated illiberal preferences, & case for lib accordingly fought on the ‘higher ground’ of principle where ‘intrusively pious members of society’ have to ‘mind their own business’.

• So Ten concludes that an indirect utilitarian defence of Millian Liberty, though formally sound & logically coherent, fails on the basis of dubious empirical assumptions.

• Also claims that if utilitarians give full weight at the critical level to illiberal preferences & sources of distress, they wouldn’t, at intuitive level, accept JSM’s princip of liberty.

• Ten concludes that indirect util doesn’t provides a firm enough basis for Millian liberty. ‘Mill discounts certain types of distress and certain types of pleasure, & indirect util doesn’t seem to be able to account for this’.

• Another sort of Utilitarian defence of Liberty: involve claims that notion of utility must be reinterpreted so that certain kinds of pleasures/pains don’t even enter the utilitarian calculation at any level of moral thinking: excluded not cos. that’s required by util strategies for maximising utility, but cos. they’re not the relevant kinds of utilities which a reconstructed utilitarianism would take account of in the first place. (Seems v. close to JSM’s position) – but interesting question is whether the reconstruction of utilitarianism is dictated by considerations external to utilitarianism, as Ten believes, or whether it’s required to preserve the internal coherence of utilitarianism.

• Wollheim interprets JSM as discounting morality-dependent distress as the basis of social intervention. So, if homosexuality between consent adults causes no distress except to those affected simply cos. think that it’s wrong, then homosexuality’s a self-regarding act which should never be interfered with. ‘As an interpretation of what JSM means by self-regarding conduct, this comes close to the truth’. But Wollheim also thinks that exclusion of morality-dependent distress can be justified by adoption of utilitarianism: Ten thinks he’s wrong. If such beliefs based on erroneous utilitarian calculations, then OK, but doesn’t explain why non-utilitarians should have their non-utilitarian moral outlook ignored when making util calculation: ‘utilitarian calculation is incomplete in the first place without the inclusion of such distress.

• Williams’ e.g. of racial discrimination/prejudice vs. a minority (Utilitarianism: for and against). – feelings of the maj. may be irrational from various points of view, but unclear why they’re irrational from a utilitarian point of view (say really hate sight of people with diff skin/clothes/styles of worship… (say false belief: min will take jobs: clearly false, & so in a sense, irrational). In deciding whether racial min to be deported, utilitarian will presumably take into account ‘consequences of the prejudice’, and they may well count in favour of the deportation of the minority. Nothing in Williams’s racial discrimination e.g. to show that utilitarian justified in totally disregarding distress caused by all false beliefs, or distress of deeply prejudiced people.

• (Could be argued that in practice certain types of pain ought to be discounted as part of a utilitarian strategy of happiness in LR)

• Conclusion: Ten concludes that JSM’s defence of liberty doesn’t seem to be based on an appeal to the most common forms of utilitarianism, namely hedonistic & preference utilitarianism.

• Hedonistic Utilitarianism: the only thing intrinsically desirable is pleasure, and all forms of pleasure are intrinsically desirable.

• Preference Utilitarianism: seeks to maximise the satisfaction of desires.

• Has been argued, e.g. by Berger, that Mill’s defence of liberty still utilitarian in character, relying on a concept of happiness that is ‘hierarchical, pluralistic, and essentially non-hedonistic’. Berger believes that freedom & individuality (or autonomy) valuable even when don’t promote pleasure cos. happiness, and not pleasure, is JSM’s ultimate standard of value. JSM’s concept of Happiness related to the dev of people’s ‘higher faculties’, & there’s a diversity of different ingredients of happiness. Autonomy is one element of human happiness, & living an autonomous life requires freedom to choose one’s life plans & to develop one’s capacities. Freedom therefore one of the essential interests of persons, &, like the other essential interests, is protected by rules of justice which confer rights to liberty & autonomy. So: for JSM, happiness is pluralistic and non-hedonistic (also, see later, hierarchical)*. But these features are insufficient to provide an adequate defence of Millian liberty. JSM wants to defend each person’s right to liberty & autonomy/individuality. But utilitarianism (purely aggregative), so if conflicts: sacrifice the individualities of some in order to promote a greater increase in the individualities of the rest. As happiness hierarchical, the non-essential interests of even numerous individuals can never outweigh the essential interests in liberty & autonomy of a single indiv.

• Ten attracted to the ‘hierarchical, pluralistic, and essentially non-hedonistic’ doctrine attributed to JSM. (However, he doesn’t recognize it as a version of utilitarianism).

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