Comprehend John Stuart Mill's views in defense of freedom of expression.
Answers
Answer:
Dubbed "the most influential English-speaking philosopher of the nineteenth century", his conception of liberty justified the freedom of the individual in opposition to unlimited state and social control. Mill was a proponent of utilitarianism, an ethical theory developed by his predecessor Jeremy Bentham
Explanation:
That is the central question addressed in John Stuart Mill’s essay, ‘On Liberty’. The work is a milestone in the history of classical liberalism and the most spirited defence of free speech and free action ever written. At its heart is the basic insight that the individual is sovereign over his own body and mind, and the only purpose for which power can be exercised over any member of a civilised community against his will is to prevent harm to others.
John Stuart Mill (1806-1883) was born in London around the turn of the nineteenth century. His was an unusual upbringing: his father set out with the intention of cultivating in his son a genius intellect to carry forward the cause of utilitarianism, which was to be effected by teaching him Greek at three and Latin at eight, encouraging him to ask questions about everything he read, and shielding him from association with children his own age other than siblings. When Mill’s father took up a post as a senior administrator with the East India Company, the younger Mill followed him into the company’s employment, where he would remain until the Company was abolished around a quarter of a century later. A turning point for Mill came, however, when he was hit by a mental crisis upon arriving at a realisation that even the creation of a just society, his life’s goal, would not make him happy; he concluded from this episode that education must cultivate the emotions as well as the intellect, and that there are important values existing outside the scope of utilitarian philosophy, such as autonomy and dignity.
Freedom for Mill meant, in the first place, freedom of thought and freedom of speech. There are, he says, three kinds of belief: those wholly true, those partly true, and those wholly false. If an opinion is condemned to silence, it may be one that is wholly true—to deny this possibility would be to assume our own infallibility. The silenced opinion may, on the other hand, be an error containing a portion of truth—in which case the only chance of the full truth being obtained would be through the ‘collision of adverse opinions’. The condemned doctrine may, of course, be entirely false. Even this, though, would not justify censorship, as it is only when vigorously and earnestly contested that true beliefs become more than mere convention and prejudice.
Freedom for Mill also meant optimal cultivation of individuality: a man should be free not only to think and speak as he pleases, but also to act as he pleases, subject only to the condition that he cause no harm to others. Individuality is the basis for improvement of society: it is as a result of citizens expressing the full scope of their individuality that society becomes aware of new and better practices. Individuality is, just as importantly, the basis for the growth of each human being according to his own particular needs. This is a good in itself. The end of man is not to act as a cog in a societal machine; the end of man is ‘the highest and most harmonious development of his powers’.
These principles are profound and have stood the test of time. They are well known and, nominally at least, widely accepted. And yet some of Mill’s most penetrating observations remain overlooked despite their enduring—and indeed increasing—significance for modern man.
In the first place, Mill has much of importance to say about the opponents of free speech, their motivations, and the gravity of their error. He rightly establishes that underlying the belief that one person or group has the right to silence another person or group is the assumption of infallibility. He accepts, admittedly, that men acknowledge, in theory at least, their own fallibility; but very few of them think it necessary to guard against this fallibility, or indeed recognise the possibility that they could be fallible in matters of which they feel certain. Men place this unbounded confidence not in every idea they have, but in those ideas that are shared by all around them, or by those to whom they habitually defer. In short, they tend to repose trust in the infallibility of ‘the world’. But—and here is where Mill displays his characteristic perspicacity—what this means in practice is the part of the world with which each particular man comes in contact: ‘his party, his sect, his church, his class of society’. Few, unfortunately, care to reflect that other ages, countries, sects, churches, classes, and parties have thought, and still do think, the exact opposite. In fact, it is precisely where a man is at the same time most un-self-reflective and most parochial that he is likely to be the most convinced of the infallibility of his belief.