Abstract

Liberty remains, for good and bad, the only moral principle that commands general assent in the western world.

Gertrude Himmelfarb

© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Wednesday, 21 October 2009

The Object of the Essay

After Mill’s death, W A Hunter said that Mill combined two characteristics, a delight in thinking for its own sake, and a desire to ameliorate the poverty and suffering of poor people, and that no man had contributed as much as Mill to the great task of the future, raising the mass of the people to a higher standard of political intelligence and material comfort.

I do not know whether then or at any other time so short a book ever instantly produced so wide and so important an effect on contemporary thought as did Mill's On Liberty in that day of intellectual and social fermentation.

John Morley

In his influence on the world, Mill was remarkably similar to John Locke, the father of English philosophy, but the disciple is perhaps greater than the master. Intellectually the two men had much in common, and both were absorbed in similar subjects. What Locke was to the liberal movements of the seventeenth century, Mill was to the liberal movement of the nineteenth century. Locke was the political philosopher of the revolution of 1688, Mill the political philosopher of the democracy of the nineteenth century. Locke propounded the principle which has been the inheritance of liberals:

Political power, I take to be a right of making laws with penalties of death, and consequently all less penalties, for the regulating and preserving of property, and of employing the force of the community in the execution of such laws, and in the defence of the commonwealth from foreign injury, and all this only for the public good.

J Locke

Locke also thought the state of nature is one of equality. In Locke’s day, Adam was taken as the source of a divine power of government, transmitted to a favored few of his descendants. Something is ludicrous in discussing fundamental questions of government by reference to scriptural myth. Living 200 years apart, though, the two men differed on Christianity, though in an important way they agreed. Locke was typically “a Bible Christian”. He built his religious belief in the proper Protestant way—with the Bible and his inner consciousness—rejecting all interference and interpretation by priests, pastors and theological systems generally. What emerged was a creed of the Bible as it conformed to reason, but he never doubted which ought to give way in the event of a conflict. He died with the happy conviction that he could remain faithful to reason without abandoning his religious teaching, and undisturbed by the effect on religion of the discoveries of science, or of critical clergymen on himself.

Mill wrote not one sentence to encourage Christianity. But, like Locke, he remained faithful to reason. Mill’s attitude to religion may be gleaned from what he had to say about Auguste Comte, a philosopher with whom he agreed in large measure.

If someone was attached to and had a sense of duty to an ideal, a rule of life which disciplined all their other inclinations, then that person has a religion. As everyone prefers their own religion to any other, they will prefer their own an “infidel” belief, to the more orthodox ones. Yet, when their attachment and duty is to the benefit of our fellow creatures, this infidel religion cannot be called a bad one. Many orthodox believers may treat it with contempt, but not M Comte, whome we may join in “contemning, as equally irrational and mean, the conception of human nature as incapable of giving its love, and devoting its existence, to any object which cannot afford in exchange an eternity of personal enjoyment”. J H Levy added that never has the proper sentiment which must take the place of the religious awe of the unknown been more clearly indicated, and never has the libel of humanity in theology been more forcibly pointed out, with its constant appeal to the low motive of personal fear, or still lower motive of personal gain. Mill showed that utilitarianism takes in all that is good in man’s nature—the highest emotions, as well as those that are more commonplace.

In his famous book, On Liberty, Mill followed the precedent of Locke, enlarging his view and perfecting his work. The principle that the aim of political society is not the salvation of souls, but is life, health, liberty, and immunity from harm only slowly became rooted in modern law, but is now accepted by all but the shallowest bigots. Besides his essay On Liberty, still a classic exposition of the social necessity of freedom of thought and speech, Mill advocated proportional representation, a scheme of land reform, and the political, industrial, and social emancipation of women. Mill’s views on the land question have some parallel in Locke, for he laid down that “labor” was the true ground even of property in land—a labor theory of value.

Through On Liberty, Mill showed to us that each of us was entitled to be free of oppression by any ruler. Liberty is freedom, and is fundamentally opposed to authority. It is the necessary and sufficient condition of all inquiry. It is how the human personality and a progressive society are fully developed, and with them truth and morality. Thus truth and morality are for the most part incompatible with authority. Mill explains:

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—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. 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 opinions of others, to do so would be wise, or even right.

These are good reasons for remonstrating with him, or reasoning with him, or persuading him, or entreating him, but not for compelling him, or visiting him with any evil, in case he do otherwise. To justify that, the conduct from which it is desired to deter him must be calculated to produce evil to some one else.

The only part of the conduct of anyone, for which he is amenable to society, is that which concerns others. In the part which merely concerns himself, his independence is, of right, absolute. Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.

The struggle between liberty and authority is the most conspicuous feature of history. Liberty meant protection against tyranny, and to elevate liberty was necessarily to limit and disparage authority. It has been attempted in two ways:

1. by obtaining a recognition of political liberties or rights, which no ruler could infringe without breaching their duty, and which, if they were infringed, resistance or rebellion was justifiable
2. setting up constitutional checks by which the consent of the community, or of an assembly meant to represent its interests, was made a necessary condition to the action of the ruling power.

The assembly became the effective ruler when the demand for it to be elected and limited in duration became the objective of the popular political parties which emerged from people’s desire to limit the power of rulers. The power of rulers had to be restricted because their interests and the interests of the people were habitually quite different. Even an elected assembly will assume the power of a ruler and frustrate the individual’s liberty unless the interests of the representatives and the people coincide.

What people wanted was that rulers should be identified with the them! The demand was that their interest and will should be the interest and will of the nation. A nation had no need to be protected against its own will. People would not tyrannize themselves. Rulers had to be responsible to the nation, which consisted of the people, and ought to be promptly removed whenever people realized their own interests and their rulers did not coincide.

The notion, that the people have no need to limit their power over themselves, might seem axiomatic. That was the theory. But then it was realized that phrases like “self government”, and “the power of the people over themselves”, did not appertain. The people who exercise the power, are not always the same people as those over whom the power is exercised. The “self government” spoken of is not the government of each by himself, but of each by all the rest. People may want to oppress part of their number. So, precautions are as much needed against this, as against any other abuse of power.

The limitation, therefore, of the power of government over individuals, loses none of its importance when the holders of power are regularly accountable to the community, or rather to its strongest party.

“The tyranny of the majority”, in the sense of the ruling party or clique, is one of the evils against which society needs to be on its guard. Society can and does make its own choices, and when it makes wrong ones, or chooses to make decisions about matters that ought to be private not public, it introduces a social tyranny worse than many kinds of political oppression. It need not uphold its tyranny by extreme penalties, though it might, but it leaves victims no means of escape from its venom. They are cemented into the society that is oppressing them. The institution that should be offering them security, torments them and thrusts itself deep into their personal lives, enslaving their very spirit. All that makes existence valuable to anyone depends on the enforcement of restraints upon the actions of other people.

Rules of conduct must be imposed on people because they cannot be relied upon to have a proper sense of morality and duty to others in society. It is worse because people adopt rules which seem to them to be self evident and self justifying. This all but universal illusion is from a natural desire of communities to bond by phatic agreement that all too easily becomes prejudice. They readily believe what is commonly accepted because they are accustomed to believe, and because they are encouraged to follow their feelings rather than reason. They think and act as they think they are expected to. No one will express any misgiving about the rules of conduct adopted by a community because no reasons need be given. Feeling, tradition or social outrage is sufficient. So they amount to reason only occasionally, superstition, envy, arrogance and contempt, social preferences, and anti social preferences, personal desires and fears, more often.

Much of the general morality of a country comes from the interests and impression of superiority of a ruling class, nowadays usually transmitted by the media, all of which are owned by the rich. In Victorian times, British working people considered themselves superior to anyone else in the world, not out of any reality—they lived in terrible conditions and were horribly exploited—but because it was the feeling of the British ruling class. That prejudice is still surprisingly strong. People who would take up arms to defend themselves against any invader of the Sceptred Isle think invading someones else’s country is proper because they are so persuaded by those whose interests are served by the invasion—not working men who are the ones sacrificed with the promise of gushing post mortem praise in the media.

The theological hatred of a sincere bigot is a clear example of popular moral feeling, so religious belief is an instructive case in demonstrating the fallibility of “the moral sense”. The absolute yoke of the Universal Church upon moral judgement was only broken by dissenters as little willing to permit difference of religious opinion as that church itself. They divided the control of popular morality but little changed as a consequence, and only did when smaller sects unable to get the audience of the larger ones asserted their own right to be heard as differing from the others. Thus the right of society, via its major Christian sects, to control dissenters was controverted finally, and the rights of the individual against society were asserted on grounds of principle.

The great writers, to whom the world owes what religious liberty it possesses, have mostly asserted freedom of conscience as an indefeasible right, and denied absolutely that human beings are accountable to others for their religious belief. Yet intolerance over whatever they think they care about is so natural to humanity that religious freedom has scarcely been realized practically. Only where indifference to religion is predominant—in that a majority prefer peace to theological quarrels—have religious people been able to enjoy freedom of conscience. It is the argument for secularism even by the religious.

Mill thought that the majority had not then learned to feel the power of the government as their power, or its opinions as their opinions. When they did so, he thought individual liberty would be as much exposed to invasion by the government as it already was from public opinion. The situation changed with the election in the UK of the post War Labour government, and since then the electorate have felt precisely their power in different governments at least for a while. The feeling though is short lived as a majority feeling, and governments are quickly turned out of power because they utterly inadequately represent the opinions and the power of the people. The so called New Labour Party of Tony Blair did just as Mill suspected—it trampled on individual liberty, introducing an astonishing welter of oppressive laws under the guise of being anti terror law.

There is no recognized principle by which the propriety of government interference is tested. People decide according to their personal preferences. Some, whenever they see any good to be done, or evil to be remedied, willingly invite the government to undertake the business, while others prefer to bear almost any amount of social evil, rather than allow an additional one to a government. Neither generally has a consistent view as to what things are fit to be done by a government. This absence of principle leaves the interference of government improperly invoked and improperly condemned, with about equal frequency.

The Limits of Liberty

In previous times, before people were capable of reasoning for themselves, despotism was a legitimate mode of government, for example, in dealing with barbarians, provided the aim was their improvement, and the means justified by acheiving that aim. Compulsion, either in the direct form or in that of pains and penalties for noncompliance, is no longer admissible as a means to their own good, and justifiable only for the security of others. Individual freedom from external control should be limited only regarding the interest of other people. An act hurtful to others is a prima facie case for punishment by law, or, where legal penalties do not apply, by general disapproval.

Damage to the interests of others can alone justify the interference of society, but it does not always justify such interference. Someone pursuing a legitimate object can necessarily and legitimately cause pain or loss to others, or prevent a benefit they had hoped to of obtain—whoever succeeds in an overcrowded profession, or in a competitive examination, whoever is preferred to another in any contest for an object which both desire. The winner reaps benefit from the loss of others, but it benefits society that it should be able to winnow out the people who are the best at some activity, undeterred by concern for the failure of those less able. Mill thought society should admit no legal or moral right to immunity from this kind of suffering in the disappointed competitors. In today’s postmodern society, it does. People, especially children, are not allowed to compete properly for fear of their being disappointed, and examinations are set such that everyone passes! Society should interfere only when dishonesty has been used, such as fraud, bribery or force.

All restraint, qua restraint, is an evil, but whoever undertakes to sell any description of goods to the public does what affects the interest of other people, and of society, and thus their conduct comes within the jurisdiction of society. Then again citizens may rightfully be compelled to perform many positive acts for the benefit of others, such as:

• to give evidence in a court of justice
• to bear a fair share in the common defence, or in any other joint work necessary to the society of which he enjoys the protection
• to perform acts of personal beneficence, such as saving someone else’s life, or protecting the defenceless against abuse, things which they have a duty to do in the expectation of reciprocity by others in society, and so may rightfully be made responsible to society for not doing.

To make anyone answerable for doing evil to others, is the rule. Society has no or only a rare interest in knowing, or interfering in any of a person’s life and conduct which affects only themself, or, if it does affect others, only with their free, voluntary, and undeceived consent and participation. So human liberty comprises:

1. The inward domain of consciousness—demanding liberty of conscience, in the most comprehensive sense, liberty of thought and feeling, absolute freedom of opinion and sentiment on all subjects, practical or speculative, scientific, moral, or theological. The liberty of expressing and publishing opinions may seem to fall under a different principle, since it belongs to that part of the conduct of an individual which concerns other people, but, being almost of as much importance as the liberty of thought itself, and resting in great part on the same reasons, is practically inseparable from it.
2. This first principle requires liberty of tastes and pursuits, of framing the plan of our life to suit our own character, of doing as we like, subject to such consequences as may follow, without impediment from our fellow creatures, so long as what we do does not harm them even though they should think our conduct foolish, perverse, or wrong.
3. From this liberty of each individual, follows the liberty, within the same limits, of combination among individuals—freedom to unite, for any purpose not involving harm to others, the persons combining being supposed to be of full age, and not forced or deceived.

Mill summarizes that the only freedom which deserves the name, is pursuing our own good in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs, 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. Earlier Locke made essentially the same case as Mill. Everyone had a “perfect freedom” to “order their actions and dispose of their possessions” as they thought fit, subject only to obeying the law of Nature that no one ought to harm another in their “life, health, liberty or possessions”. Is it coincidence that this is the central principle of the witches, called the first principle of Wicce? It is the “Wiccan Rede”:

And it harm none, do what thou wilt.

“Do what you will” was Aleister Crowley’s famous motto, the witches’ rule without any condition, the absence of which makes it a formula for utter social chaos and the destruction of society. These pages show elsewhere that the origin of the witches was the Cathar heretics. The Universal Church of Christ incinerated their leaders alive, the “Perfects”, men and women who tried to live like Christ himself, massacred the “Hearers”, the Cathar congregations, and scattered them pursued by the “Hounds of God”, the Dominicans, armed with the pope’s Inquisition to make sure they remained isolated and outcasts throughout Europe ever after. Yet the principles of the heretics led to the Reformation and the Protestant sects, and as we saw above, it was from the less popular dissentient sects that the notion of personal freedom came. Here then was its likely source. Mill was giving a complete expansion of an heretic principle, and admitted that “it was anything but new” and had “the air of a truism”.

Infallibility and Tyranny

Religion, the most powerful of the elements which have entered into the formation of moral feeling, having almost always been governed either by the ambition of a hierarchy seeking control over every department of human conduct, or by the spirit of Puritanism, the main sects of which desired the same obedience as the Catholic Church they dissented from. The prevailing principle in Europe since the advent of Christianity had been the compulsion of people to follow fixed tenets agreed by the top hierarchy of the Church, and patriarchal religions today are no different, whether fundamentalist Christian or Moslem, or any other fundamentalism. Religious fanatics still wield the sword of moral oppression against those who diverge from what the bigots consider the correct opinion—theirs! The separation of the church and the state is essential in preventing any return to two millennia of compulsion.

No argument, we may suppose, can now be needed, against permitting a legislature or an executive, not identified in interest with the people, to prescribe opinions to them, and determine what doctrines or what arguments they shall be allowed to hear. There always ought to be the fullest liberty of professing and discussing, as a matter of ethical conviction, any doctrine, even if some consider it immoral, for it can only be judged immoral after the fullest appraisal, and people can only understand the judgement by rehearsing the reasoning.

Mill in a footnote considers whether tyrannicide is moral or immoral. He says it has always been an open question. Whole nations and some of the best and wisest of men have considered it to be no crime for a private citizen to strike down a criminal who has raised himself above the law an act of exalted virtue. Certainly the policy of “regime change” by western governments has latterly considered a virtue, and it makes it hard to understand why assassination of similar uncontrolled political criminals in our own countries should be deemed wrong as long as they are defying the will of the majority of the people.

Rulers have the right to protect themselves by the proper channels of the law, as Mill avers, but we as citizens should consider carefully what is going on that our representatives fear assassination so much that they are constantly surrounded by barriers and armed police. Such precautions and restricting press freedom are admissions that the government has made itself unpopular, and to attempt to retain some popularity it turns the general intolerance of the public to its own advantage. The fear of terrorism is being stimulated by unscrupulous governments to enact repressive laws which will eventually be used against us as they always have been in the past—in Nazi Germany, for instance.

But neither people nor governments supposedly acting in their name have any right to exercise such coercion. The power itself is illegitimate. The best government has no more title to it than the worst. It is as noxious, or more noxious, when exerted in accordance with public opinion, than when in opposition to it. If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind.

If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth, if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error. Those who desire to suppress it, of course, deny its truth, but they are not infallible. They have no authority to decide the question for all mankind. We can never be sure that the opinion we are endeavouring to stifle is a false opinion, and if we were sure, stifling it would be an evil still. All silencing of discussion is an assumption of infallibility.

Absolute princes, or others who are accustomed to unlimited deference, usually feel this complete confidence in their own opinions on nearly all subjects. Those who are used to being contradicted in their opinions place undue reliance on opinions they share with all who surround them, or to whom they habitually defer, such as the owner of their preferred newspaper. Doubt in the reliability of their own judgement is too often rectified by people’s trust in the reliability of those in their immediate circle. It is their world, the part of it with which they are in normal contact, their party, their sect, their church, their friends in their class of society.

This personal world has the responsibility of being in the right against the dissentient worlds of other people. Never mind that they occupy their place in the world, their peculiar local place, by mere accident—that they are Christian rather than Moslem because their parents were, that they were born in the south or mid west rather than New York, California or England, that they are of European, African, Asian or native American origin.

An opinion may be true or false, but there is the greatest difference between presuming an opinion to be true, because, with every opportunity for contesting it, it has not been refuted, and assuming its truth for the purpose of not permitting its refutation. Suppression of opinion is for the latter reason because it contradicts the former. The rose or the thistle might be to you the best of all flowers but by hoeing out every other shoot that appears in your plot, you will never know whether you are right or wrong. Wrong opinions and practices gradually yield to fact and argument, but facts and arguments, to produce any effect on the mind, must be brought before it. As the whole strength and value of human judgment, depends on it being set right when it is wrong, reliance can be placed on it only when the means of setting it right are constantly accessible.

An intolerant church, the Roman Catholic Church, even at the canonization of a saint, admits and listens patiently to a “devil’s advocate”. The holiest of men cannot be admitted to posthumous honors, until what the devil could say against him is made known to all, and considered. If even scientific hypotheses were not questioned, humanity could not feel assured of scientific truth, as they are.

It is no objection either that the inquisitor of our ideas is testing them in an extreme case. The beliefs which we most treasure can only prove themselves by a standing invitation to the whole world to prove them unfounded. All of us should neglect nothing that could give the truth a chance of reaching us. If our beliefs stand up, then we can be all the more confident in them and in being able to defend them. Otherwise we should be glad to learn that our previously treasured but false ideas have been shown up to us, and we are no longer living life in error, and attempting to defend what cannot be defended. Though we might still be wrong, we have tried—as much as it is possible for a fallible being to try—to be certain.

Some imagine that they are not assuming infallibility because they agree there should be free discussion on subjects are at all doubtful, while regarding some principle or doctrine as immune to questioning because it is so certain. They mean they are certain it is certain, but others who doubt it are forbidden to express their view. It is not the feeling sure of a doctrine that is an assumption of infallibility. It is the undertaking to decide that question for others, without allowing them to hear what can be said on the contrary side.

Nor is it any defence of defined infallibility that restraints on discussion are justified not on a question of the truth of doctrines, but of their usefulness. The usefulness of an opinion is itself a matter of opinion, as disputable, as open to discussion, and requiring discussion as much as the opinion itself. There is the same need of an infallible judge of opinions to decide an opinion to be noxious, as to decide it to be false, unless the opinion condemned has full opportunity of defending itself. The truth of an opinion is part of its utility. If we want to know whether or not it is desirable that a proposition should be believed, how can we exclude the consideration of whether or not it is true?

Nor is the assumption of infallibility any more right when the objectionable opinion is considered immoral or impious. Far from the assumption being less objectionable or less dangerous because the opinion is called immoral or impious, it is the most fatal case. It is when people of one generation commit those dreadful mistakes which excite the astonishment and horror of posterity. Then we find instances memorable for their horror in history, when the law has been used to root out the best men and the noblest doctrines. The infallibility of someone’s opinion decrees someone or some doctrine false, and so it must be. That is one side of a coin. The other side is that the false doctrine of the previous side is infallibly correct!

No Christian more firmly believes that atheism is false, and tends to the dissolution of society, than Marcus Aurelius believed the same things of Christianity. To Marcus Aurelius and several other emperors, accused by Christians of persecution, Christianity was a pernicious doctrine of despair at the world which subverted the heart of Roman society. Persecution has always succeeded except when the persecuted party had already grown too strong. No reasonable person can doubt that Christianity might have been extirpated in the Roman empire as impious, immoral and subversive. Nevertheless, it spread, and became predominant, because the persecutions were only occasional, lasting but a short time, and separated by long intervals of almost undisturbed propagandism.

People believe “truth will prevail”. Truth has no supernatural power to prevail just because it is true. It is mere sentimentality to think it. Those who claimed to uphold “The Truth” for well over a thousand years were the most vigorous suppressors of truth. The real advantage which truth has is that, though belief in it can be expunged once, twice, or many times, in the course of ages it will repeatedly be rediscovered. Extinguishing the belief does not extinguish its truth.

What is boasted of as a revival of religion is always, in narrow and uncultivated minds, at least as much the revival of bigotry, and that abides in the middle classes of this country at all times. From this permanent leaven of intolerance in the midst of a people goading their feelings, little cause is needed to provoke them into persecuting those whom they have always thought proper objects of persecution. If those persecuted do not conform, they become heretics subjected to constant persecution or death. Yet these people are expected to abandon conclusions they have arrived at while suffering the disapprobation of their peers.

The prevailing opinion is to suppress the heretical thought, and that is what the Universal Church and its immediate offspring wanted to do. No one can pursue a course of scholarly analysis without realizing it is futile unless they follow their intellect to whatever conclusions it may lead. Truth gains more by the errors of those who prepare, study and think for themselves, than by the “true opinions” of those who only hold them because they will not think, or will hold only to unquestioned dogmata. Dogmatism is the distinctive feature of the Christian churches, and why they hounded out the heretics.

The intellect and judgment of humanity ought to be cultivated, a thing that Protestants did not deny until many of them turned back to medieval Catholicism by becoming fundamentalists. Now Christians think themselves humane enough. In former days, when it was proposed to burn atheists, charitable people used to suggest putting them in a madhouse instead. They opted to burn them to cleanse their souls! Perhaps today, they would choose the madhouse. Then the Christian judges would applaud themselves. Instead of persecuting for religion’s sake, they would have adopted a humane mode of treating the unbelievers, but they would be silently satisfied that the atheists had obtained their deserts.

Whatever people believe on subjects it right to believe, surely they ought to know the grounds of their own opinions and be able to defend them at least against the common objections. Christian believers have decided they will believe without grounds. Yet their beliefs are not mathematical truths, the peculiarity of which is that the argument is all on one side. There are no objections, and no answers to objections in mathematics, only premises and proofs. But on every subject on which difference of opinion is possible, the truth depends on a balance to be struck between two sets of conflicting reasons. It has to be shown why that other theory cannot be the true one, and this one is.

Anyone who knows only their own side of the case, knows little of that. Their reasons may be good, and no one may have been able to refute them. But if they are equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side, if they do not so much as know what they are, they have no ground for preferring either opinion. The rational position for them is suspension of judgment. Nor is it enough that they should hear the arguments of adversaries from their own teachers, presented as they state them, and accompanied by what they offer as refutations. Ninety nine in a hundred of what are called educated people are in this condition, even of those who can argue fluently for their opinions.

They must be able to hear them from people who actually believe them, who defend them in earnest, and do their utmost for them. They must know them in their most plausible and persuasive form. Without so doing, they have never thrown themselves into the mental position of those who think differently from them, and so do not thoroughly know the doctrine they profess.

How can answers be known to be satisfactory, if objectors have no opportunity of showing that they are unsatisfactory? And if the general public are not always able to be so critical, at least their professional advisers, their politicians, theologians and philosophers should be, and it cannot be accomplished unless all objections are freely stated, and placed in the most advantageous light which they admit of. Comprehension of the truth can never really be known except to those who have attended equally and impartially to both sides, and tried to see the reasons of both in the best light. This is so important to a proper understanding of moral and human subjects, that if there are no opponents of important truths, they must be invented and given the strongest arguments that the most skilful devil’s advocate can offer.

The neoconservative followers of Leo Strauss take this as modern justification for the use of some of Plato’s proposals for keeping ignorant people in check in the Greek republics. But Mill wanted arguments to be invented to elicit the best rational defence against them, whereas the Straussists’ reading is that society is prohibited from promoting truth because liberty is more important. To defend society and their conception of liberty within it, they think arguments and even facts can be invented. The ends of the two interpretations are quite opposite. Mill aims for perpetual inquiry to dig out the truth and so improve society, but the Straussists want to propagate lies—they call them myths—that dim witted people can easily accept, so the wool can be pulled over their eyes, and they can be enslaved by a ruling elite. Freedom to them is a denial of history in which progress depended upon coercion. For them, only the rulers can know the truth which is deliberately kept from the common people because they are not capable of comprehending it.

Christianity

The Catholic Church has its own way of dealing with this embarrassing problem. It makes a broad separation between those who can be permitted to receive its doctrines on conviction, and those who must accept them on trust. Neither are allowed any choice as to what they will accept, but those of the clergy, who can be fully confided in, may admissibly and meritoriously make themselves acquainted with the arguments of opponents, to be able to answer them, and may, therefore, read heretical books. The laity not unless by special permission, hard to obtain. This discipline recognizes a knowledge of the enemy’s case as beneficial to the teachers, but finds means, consistent with this, of denying it to the rest.

Christians are so called because they follow the teaching of Christ—a man considered to be God incarnate and therefore speaking with the highest possible authority—and his apostles, as stated in the maxims and precepts of the New Testament. Yet it is scarcely too much to say that not one Christian in a thousand guides or tests their individual conduct by reference to those laws. Rather they use the local standard, the custom of their nation, or their class, besides something of their religious profession.

They have thus, on the one hand, a collection of ethical maxims, which they believe to have been vouchsafed to them by divinely infallible wisdom as rules for their government. On the other, a set of everyday judgments and practices, which go a certain length with some of those maxims, not so great a length with others, and stand in direct opposition to some. So, they are overall a compromise between the Christian creed and the interests and suggestions of worldly life.

They pay homage to their Christian standard, but their real allegiance to the others. All Christians believe that;

• the blessed are the poor and humble, and those who are ill used by the world
• it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven
• they should judge not, lest they be judged
• they should swear not at all
• they should love their neighbor as themselves
• if one take their cloak, they should give him their coat also
• they should take no thought for the morrow
• if they would be perfect, they should sell all that they have and give it to the poor.

They are not insincere when they say that they believe these things. They do believe them, as people believe what they have always heard lauded and never discussed. But they believe these doctrines just up to the point to which it is usual to act upon them, in the sense of a living belief regulating their conduct. The doctrines in their integrity are serviceable to pelt adversaries with. And they are normally to be given as the reasons for whatever they do they think laudable. But anyone who reminded them that the maxims require an infinity of things which they never even think of doing would just be classed as unpopular people who affect to be better than others.

Christian doctrines can have little hold on the minds of ordinary believers because they show minimal inclination to do as they say. They have an habitual respect for the sound of them, but no feeling which spreads from the words to the deeds forces the mind to take them in, and make them conform with formulas meant to be uttered directly from the material mouth of God. The sayings of Christ coexist passively in their minds, producing little effect beyond the comfort of merely hearing amiable and bland words. Christian conduct is always for others, to direct them how far to go in obeying Christ.

All languages and literatures are full of such general observations on life, and everybody acquiesces. They are received as truisms, yet of which most people first truly learn the meaning when experience, generally of a painful kind, has made it a reality to them. But western Christians are mainly insulated from true physical hardship, and confused by having to do what a super being tells them though they are merely mortal. Excuses are readily at hand—no one can be a god, even though this God was a man and asked them to do what he did as a man! As they cannot do what Christ said they should do, they feel justified in doing what all their best friends and nearest relatives do. They follow that local, ad hoc morality mentioned above, that might be approved by local pastors, but is a far cry from their professed beliefs— though they often seem so ignorant, they do not realize it.

No one’s opinions deserve the name of knowledge unless they have had the mental process required of them in carrying on an active controversy with opponents either forced upon them by others or gone through themselves. If there are any persons who contest a received opinion, or who will do so if law or opinion will let them, let us thank them for it, open our minds to listen to them, and rejoice that there is some one to do for us what we otherwise ought, if we have any regard for either the certainty or the vitality of our convictions, to do with much greater labor for ourselves.

Popular opinions on subjects not palpable to sense are often true, but seldom or never the whole truth. Each half of a controversy might have a portion of the truth, and it is the outsider whose view supplies the union, though they will often be stoned for their trouble by the original parties. In the human mind, one sidedness has always been the rule, and many sidedness the exception, black and white the rule, shades of grey the exception, and full color thinking confined to geniuses. Progress is made by appreciation of fragments of truth.

In politics, it is almost a commonplace, that a party of order or stability, and a party of progress or reform, are both necessary elements of a healthy state of political life, until the one or the other shall have so enlarged its mental grasp as to be a party equally of order and of progress, knowing and distinguishing what is fit to be preserved from what ought to be swept away. Each of these modes of thinking derives its utility from the deficiencies of the other, but it is in a great measure the opposition of the other that keeps each within the limits of reason and sanity. Truth, in the great practical concerns of life, is much a question of the reconciling and combining of opposites.

Some claim the opposites have already been reconciled and combined. Christian morality, for Christians, is the whole truth on that subject and if anyone teaches a morality which varies from it, they are wholly in error. It remains an important case in practice, so none can be fitter to test the general maxim.

But before pronouncing what Christian morality is or is not, it is desirable to know what is meant by it. It means the morality of the New Testament, but can anyone who derives their knowledge from the book suppose that it was intended as a complete doctrine of morals? The gospel expresses itself in terms most general, often impossible to interpret literally, and lacking the precision of legislation. Moreover, it always refers to a preëxisting morality, and its precepts refer to how that morality was to be corrected or superseded by a higher one. It is the religion imposed on the Jews as ancient Judaism, and its morality that of the Old Testament, an elaborate system, but often a barbarous one intended only for a barbarous people, subjects of the Persians, then the high civilization of the ancient near east.

To extract from the New Testament a body of ethical doctrine, has never been possible without eking it out from the Old Testament. S Paul declared himself opposed to any interpreting of the doctrine and filling up the scheme of his master by reference to Judaism. But he too has to assume a preëxisting morality, namely, that of the Greeks and Romans. His advice to Christians is largely an accommodation to that, even to the extent of giving an apparent sanction to slavery, something the Essenes did not accept.

What is called Christian morality, but should be called theological morality, was not the work of Christ or the apostles, but is of much later origin, having been gradually built up by the Catholic Church in its first five centuries, and much less modified by Protestants than they think. Indeed, they have contented themselves with cutting off the additions which had been made to it in the Middle Ages, each dissenting sect supplying the place by fresh additions, adapted to its own character and tendencies. Undoubtedly modern life is much influenced by this morality and its early teachers, but it is incomplete and one sided in many important ways. Unless ideas and feelings not sanctioned by it had contributed to the formation of European life and character, human affairs would have been in a worse condition than they now are.

So called Christian morality has all the characters of a reaction. It is a protest against Paganism. Its ideal is negative rather than positive, passive rather than active, innocence rather than nobleness, abstinence from evil rather than energetic pursuit of good. In its precepts “thou shalt not” predominates over “thou shalt”. In its horror of sensuality, it made an idol of asceticism, which has been compromised into one of legality. It holds out the hope of heaven and the threat of hell, as the appointed and appropriate motives to a virtuous life. In all this, it falls far below the best of the ancients, giving to human morality selfishness by disconnecting everyone’s feelings of duty from the interests of their fellow creatures, except so far as a self interested inducement is offered to him for consulting them. It is a doctrine of passive obedience. It inculcates submission to all authorities found established, but who are not to be actively obeyed when they command what religion forbids, yet who are not to be resisted, far less rebelled against, for any amount of wrong.

A duty to the state was of considerable importance in Pagan morality, even infringing on the just liberty of the individual, but purely Christian morality has no such duty, or it is hardly noticed. It is in the Koran not the New Testament, that we read the maxim—“A ruler who appoints any man to an office, when there is in his dominions another man better qualified for it, sins against God and against the State”. What little recognition the idea of obligation to the public obtains in modern morality, is derived from Greek and Roman sources, not from Christian. As, even in the morality of private life, whatever exists of magnanimity, high mindedness, personal dignity, even the sense of honor, is derived from the purely human, not the religious part of our education. It never could have grown out of a standard of ethics in which the only worth, professedly recognized, is that of obedience.

The sayings of Christ contain and were meant to contain, only a part of the truth. Many essential elements of the highest morality are not provided for, nor intended to be provided for, in the sayings of Christ, and so have not found their way into the system of ethics erected by the Christian Church. This being so, it a great error to persist in attempting to find in the Christian doctrine a complete rule for our guidance. Consequently, this narrow theory is becoming a grave practical evil, detracting greatly from the value of moral training and instruction. By discarding the secular standards which once coexisted with and supplemented Christian ethics, and so trying to form an exclusively religious morality, the result is a low, abject, servile character, incapable of comprehending let alone sympathizing with the conception of Supreme Goodness, despite supposedly submitting itself to the Supreme Will.

Christian ethics cannot therefore stand alone in the modern day as a system of ethics suitable for civilization. At the least, other ethics must stand side by side with Christian ethics to offer a satisfactory morality. 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. Much of the noblest and most valuable moral teaching has been the work, not only of men who did not know, but of men who knew and rejected, the Christian faith.

Not the violent conflict between parts of the truth, but the quiet suppression of half of it, is the challenging evil. There is always hope when people are forced to listen to both sides. It is when they attend only to one that errors harden into prejudices.

1. If any opinion is compelled to silence, that opinion may, for aught we can certainly know, be true. To deny this is to assume our own infallibility
2. Though the silenced opinion be an error, it may, and very commonly does, contain a portion of truth, and since the general or prevailing opinion on any object is rarely or never the whole truth, it is only by the collision of adverse opinions that the remainder of the truth has any chance of being supplied
3. Even if the received opinion be not only true, but the whole truth, unless it is suffered to be, and actually is, vigorously and earnestly contested, it will, by most of those who receive it, be held in the manner of a prejudice, with little comprehension or feeling of its rational grounds
4. The meaning of the doctrine itself will be in danger of being lost, or enfeebled, and deprived of its vital effect on the character and conduct, the dogma becoming a mere formal profession, inefficacious for good, but cumbering the ground, and preventing the growth of any real and heartfelt conviction, from reason or personal experience.

Freedom of Action

Before quitting the subject of freedom of opinion, what of those who say, that the free expression of all opinions should be permitted, on condition that the manner be temperate, and they do not pass the bounds of fair discussion. Where are these supposed bounds are to be set? People are most offended when the attack upon their views is telling and powerful. An opponent whom they find difficult to answer and shows a strong feeling on the subject, will face the accusation of an intemperate attitude. How an opinion is asserted, even though it be true, may be objectionable, and justly incur censure, but the principal offences are mostly impossible, unless by self betrayal, to be able to prove. The gravest of them is, to argue sophistically, to suppress facts or arguments, to misstate the elements of the case, or misrepresent the opposite opinion, and, particularly, to stigmatize those who hold the contrary opinion as being bad and immoral. But all of it is done, sometimes in good faith.

Now besides freedom of speech, what of freedom of action? Let us examine whether the same reasons do not require that men should be free to act upon their opinions to carry these out in their lives, without hindrance, either physical or moral, from their fellow men, so long as it is at their own risk and peril. This last proviso is of course indispensable.

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.

No one would assert that people ought not to put into their mode of life, and into the conduct of their concerns, any impress whatever of their own judgment, or of their own individual character. On the other hand, it would be absurd to pretend that people ought to live as if nothing whatever had been known in the world before they came into it. As if experience had as yet done nothing towards showing that one mode of existence, or of conduct, is preferable to another. Nobody denies that people should be so taught and trained in youth, as to know and benefit by the ascertained results of human experience. But it is for individual people to find out what part of recorded experience is properly applicable to their own circumstances and character. The traditions and customs of other people are, to a certain extent, evidence of what their experience has taught them, presumptive evidence, and as such, have a claim to respectful consideration.

There has been a time when the element of spontaneity and individuality was in excess, and the social principle had a hard struggle with it. The difficulty then was, to induce men of strong bodies or minds to pay obedience to any rules which required them to control their impulses. Now people are most likely to ask what is usually done by celebrities, the wealthy, or generally people of a higher social class. That is what the best people do, they say. They do not choose what is customary in preference to what suits their own inclination, they do not have any inclination except what is customary. They follow their peers, fads and fashions, personal inclination being restricted to which of several current fashions are to be followed.

On the Calvinistic theory, the one great offence of humanity is self will. All the good of which humanity is capable, is comprised in obedience. You have no choice. Thus you must do, and nothing otherwise. “Whatever is not a duty is a sin.” Human nature is so corrupt, it has to be killed within! To have faculties, talents, abilities and to want to use them according your own will is evil. They are to be used for the will of God or they are to be forever suppressed. People are better off without them. To one holding this theory of life, crushing out any of the human faculties, capacities, and susceptibilities, is no evil.

But, if it is any part of religion to believe that man was made by a good being, God, it is more consistent with that faith to believe, that this being gave all human faculties that they might be cultivated and unfolded, not rooted out and burnt, and that this being takes pleasure in people making full use of the abilities He has given them.

There is a different type of human excellence from the Calvinistic, a conception of humanity as having its nature bestowed on it for other purposes than merely to be abnegated. Besides “Christian self denial”, “Pagan self assertion” is one of the elements of human worth—a Greek ideal of self development, which the Platonic and Christian ideal of self government blends with, but does not supersede. It is not by wearing down into uniformity all that is individual in themselves, but by cultivating it and calling it forth, within the limits imposed by the rights and interests of others, that human beings become noble.

A people, it appears, may be progressive for a certain length of time, and then stop. When does it stop? When it ceases to possess individuality. But power today is apparently that of masses. Governments seek the support of the masses. Public opinion now rules, but public opinion is led by the middle classes, the literate classes able to express their own interests, what Marx called the bourgeoisie and petit bourgeoisie. Their thinking is done for them by people like themselves employed by rich men as pundits and hacks offering instant wisdom in their name through the media. Public opinion is conditioned by the media and reflected in it in a dangerous feedback system, beloved by media magnates, that pressurises the leading politicians sometimes rightly, often not, but always unbearably. So, no government by a democracy, either in its political acts or in the opinions and qualities it fosters, could today rise above mediocrity. Nor, of course, is it democratic.

Mill thought that the freedom of the press had been on a knife edge always. He wrote that the law regarding the press is as servile as it was in the times of the Tudors, but he thought that only a fear of insurrection would drive ministers from their propriety. That is exactly what has happened. Fear of terrorism is cited as the reason why disgraceful laws have been enacted and the press have been gagged in certain respects People should be outraged.

Every one who receives the protection of society owes a return for the benefit, and the fact of living in society renders it indispensable that each should be bound to observe a certain line of conduct towards the rest. This conduct consists in:

1. not injuring the interests of one another, or rather certain interests, which, either by express legal provision or by tacit understanding, ought to be considered as rights
2. each person’s bearing their share—to be fixed on some equitable principle—of the labors and sacrifices incurred for defending the society or its members from injury and molestation.

There are many who consider as an injury to themselves any conduct which they have a distaste for, and resent it as an outrage to their feelings, as a religious bigot, when charged with disregarding the religious feelings of others, has been known to retort that they disregard his feelings, by persisting in their abominable worship or creed. The case of the Bombay Parsis is an instance.

When this industrious and enterprising tribe, the descendants of the Persian fire worshippers, flying from their native country before the Caliphs, arrived in Western India, they were admitted to toleration by the Hindu sovereigns, on condition of not eating beef. When those regions afterwards fell under the dominion of Moslem conquerors, the Parsis obtained from them a continuance of indulgence, on condition of refraining from pork. Parsis to this day abstain both from beef and pork. Though not required by their religion, the double abstinence has had time to grow into a custom of their tribe, and custom, in the East, is a religion.

The notion that it is everyone’s duty that others should be religious, was the foundation of all the religious persecutions ever perpetrated, and if admitted, would fully justify them. It is a determination not to tolerate others in doing what is permitted by their religion, because it is not permitted by the persecutor’s religion. It is a belief that God not only abominates the act of the misbeliever, but will not hold us guiltless if we leave him unmolested.

No community has a right to force another to be civilized. People entirely unconnected with those others considered uncivilized ought not to step in and require that something, with which all those others are directly interested and are satisfied, should be stopped because it is a scandal to the unconnected people thousands of miles distant, who have no part or concern in it.

If civilization has got the better of barbarism when barbarism had the world to itself, it is too much to profess to be afraid lest barbarism, after having been fairly got under, should revive and conquer civilization. A civilization that can thus succumb to its vanquished enemy must first have become so degenerate, that neither its appointed priests and teachers, nor anybody else, has the capacity, or will take the trouble, to stand up for it. If this be so, the sooner such a civilization receives notice to quit, the better.

Summary and Conclusion

Two maxims form the entire doctrine of this essay. The maxims are:

1. the individual is not accountable to society for his actions, in so far as these concern the interests of no person but himself
2. 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.

Mill has been subjected to much admiration but also much criticism. He is accused of not being consistent or coherent, that utility and liberty are incompatible, of overstating his case in not appreciating the importance of culture and custom to society—after all we are social animals, and society requires a good deal of conformity to work. We have to take it that he is applying one of his own maxims. In the face of what he perceived as a rising tide of mediocrity and conformity, he played the Devil’s advocate by overstating the opposite case, surely a valid tactic when trying to get a move towards a happier medium.

The thing is not to let the schools and universities go on in a drowsy and impotent routine—the thing is to make the nation ever higher and higher by their means.

Alexander Humbolt

Further Reading

• More about morality, and justice as fairness, and more, the Principle of Humanity
• A lot more on religious origins—five linked webpages
• More on the death of God and secular Christianity

Skeptical Resources—Internet infidels | Jesus Never Existed | Steven Carr’s Website | Christianism | Early Christian Writings | God is Imaginary | “Religion Detoxification” | Our Judaio-Christian Heritage | Archaeoastronomy | No Deity | No Beliefs | Evil Bible | Bible God | ex-Christians | Jesus Police | Islamic Faith Freedom | Atheist Experience | American Atheists | Jovial Atheist | Askwhy! books
Other Resources—Early Christian Docs | Resources for Study | Traditional Bible-History | Traditional Bible World History | Traditional Bible History | about.com biblical history | Apologetics web sites | Advent Ch Fathers | Orion center links | Wikipedia | Traditional Jewish History