 Welcome to Free Thoughts from Libertarianism.org and the Cato Institute. I'm Aaron Powell. I'm Trevor Burrus. I'm John Samples. And I'm Matthew Feeney. And today we're going to be talking about the first half of John Stuart Mill's classic text on liberty. This text is one of the central pieces of the Western classical liberal tradition, the argument that the state and society, which we'll get to when Mill has interesting arguments about that, are very limited in what they can do to restrict the individual both in terms of his actions and more importantly, what we're going to talk about today, his opinions and his expression of those opinions. So our topic, just to kick things off, is what Mill calls civil liberty. So this is the liberty that we have in relation to others and to the state. And he's approaching this, we should say, from a bit of background from a utilitarian perspective. Mill's text utilitarianism is one of the great works of that philosophical tradition. He grew up heavily influenced by Jeremy Bentham, the founder of that tradition. And his father. And his father. And Mill has a very interesting backstory that his father decided to forge the ultimate mind. I think you wanted to forge the utilitarian philosopher in the same way that you want your kids to be Star Wars fans. I think it was like every day, you had to do this and watch the movies, go to the conventions. Yes. I mean, his father seemed rather more committed to it than I am. I'd also help explain the nervous breakdown that John Stuart Mill suffered when he was 20 or something like that. Yes. Although, I mean, we would say it's hard to draw lines of causation here, but it seems to have worked. Mill was a rather brilliant guy. I still think there are things I disagree with on liberty, but I think this is probably outside of maybe Plato, the best written text in the western philosophical canon. You've never read Nietzsche? He's a better writer than Nietzsche. It's remarkably well written. Heger? Hegel. Yes. Well, Nietzsche's better than those two. So John, as our least frequent contributor to the podcast, why don't you kick us off? So what struck me about in rereading this after a long time and probably longer than I want to admit is how contemporary it is, because sometimes if you read Machiavelli, the prince or the discourses even, you get this idea that a lot of the interpretation adds to this idea that there's a specific historical context and you can get abstractions that have to do with now, but you've got to go, you've got to work at it. What struck me about this is, and it may be the point may be that we are just downstream from him and he created the river, but what struck me about it was like every issue is the issue we're still debating today, or if it's not, it strongly implies it, because take, for example, the notion of free speech, free opinion. The whole debates we had around at the time of Black Lives Matter a year or two ago, there was claims about the need for limiting speech and so on, but those were the same arguments, right? They were about the harm done. So I think it's a brilliant piece and I was just struck, because I thought it would probably sound like it was 1830 or whatever in Britain and you get used to that, but it's not. It's right now. It's striking at times because you're reading it and you can very easily just outright forget that the book is as old as it is until he mentions in passing some rather contemporary like... To him. Right. So like when he'll say, and as an example, when people say that corn dealers are starving the poor, but outside of those random specific instances, the book reads, you could republish it today and no one would know. Yeah. I think on some of the earlier points, so at the beginning of the book, it did read to me as if something that could have been written last week, he writes about the increasing inclination to stretch unduly the power of society over the individual and mentions that people are prone to intolerance and all this other kind of stuff. He does say that his arguments don't work for backwards states, which might be something that we would disagree with, but no, it does. The actual quote I have it in my notes is, despotism is a legitimate mode of government in dealing with barbarians provided that the end be their improvement and the means justified by actually affecting that end, since he actually was involved with managing India, I guess that would explain partially. I have to say now, having listened to Tony Blair this morning and the about the invasion of Iraq ... What? What? Well, what I'm saying is ... Did Tony Blair comment this morning on the evasion? No, no, no. Oh yeah. Yeah. The chill-cost inquiry. Oh, okay. But the general point on John Stuart Mill is let's imagine the goals were to get rid of the dictator. But there was a more expansive agenda about changing the culture and turning it into a liberal democracy, which implies either a couple of things. One is, which I think was the position taken because Mill's position had been rejected, is that if you just get rid of the bad guy, then things will be fine. But if that's not true, as it turned out not to be, because people were very tribal among other reasons, then you get something like Mill as the assumption, right? There's people that aren't ready for liberal democracy. Now, George Bush wasn't like that and Tony Blair wasn't like that, but on the other hand, they made a mess too. Well, I think a lot of people believe that there are people not ready for liberal democracy, but it doesn't follow from that that despotism is therefore the legitimate mode of government that they can exist under. And of course, there's different ways to have illiberalism that are not despotism. It's a funny term too, to use the term despotism as something good is an odd choice. Well, that's sort of the overarching point in the first part of the introductory remarks where he lays out the harm principle. And I'm going to read a section on this just so everyone is on the same page and we don't have just same copies, so I can't tell you exactly where this is. But 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 that 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. That 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. And that pretty much lays it out. But the interesting thing, and John kind of put on this in terms of how moderate it is, and this is an observation made to me by Julian Sanchez, our colleague, a while back when the gay marriage case was happening, which was he, Julian, said that we're all millions now, because every, both sides had to make a claim based on that gay marriage should be allowed because it's good for people or gay marriage shouldn't be allowed because it's bad for people or kids. So like the anti-gay marriage side, we're making million arguments about how, you know, with these really bad scientific studies about kids growing up. And but the interesting thing is before, and you see this in Scalia's dissent of this, before you never need, before like older, like communities, like tight-knit communities, you never needed to justify banning something like homosexual marriage because it harms people. You just saying it was wrong or ooh, was like enough to ban something like that. And we, of course, we still ban a lot of things because we think ooh about that. But this is a natural, I mean, the million standard in some sense is a natural for a post-Christian West, right? I mean, once, this is kind of Max Weber and stuff. What do you do after everything has been the, is no longer God-filled universe, right? And so religion is in decline as a, you know, a practical thing. And you've got to have some other standard for figuring out things. And so, in a sense, the gay marriage was kind of a holdover from the past because people were against it because it was wrong and because the deity had said so, I guess. But that wouldn't fly anymore. Yeah, and but Mill is at the front end of that period. And he does say, I mean, I think religion and Christianity lurks in the background of this essay in a lot of ways. Yeah, he certainly doesn't shy away from talking about it at all. It seems incredibly critical the way I read it. Yes, one of the parts that really stood out to me was that Marcus Aurelius was a good Christian despite his persecution of them. But it did seem to go on to the radical point a bit more and maybe on gay marriage is that he does outline the three components of human liberty. And they do sound, I imagine, pretty radical in 1859 when this was published, the first being the freedom of consciousness, the inward domain, but he also goes on to talk about the principle of liberty of tastes and pursuits and then also, thirdly, the freedom to unite for your own purposes. And I suppose we might take all that for granted now, but that does strike me as a radical point that people don't pick up on. I mean, the actual freedom of tastes and pursuits was something that stood out to me in particular. I think the even more radical and I think one of the areas where I have the hardest time with his argument is not just that these are the liberties that need to be protected, but that when we talk about protecting these liberties today, we tend to say we're protecting them. What we mean by that is protect them from the state. So we have a bill of rights that says Congress will make no law, basically abridging these things, freedom of religion, freedom of speech or conscience and assembly, but Mill takes it a step farther and says it's not just laws that can abridge these liberties, but also basically social pressures that there's just as you can't pass a law that says people can't believe these particular set of religious beliefs, you're also not allowed to shame them, to ostracize them, it's not entirely clear where the line is there because he says you don't have to associate with them, you don't have to praise them and you can criticize because much of his defensive free speech is if we allow people to speak freely, then bad ideas are open to criticism, but saying we can't use social pressures in addition to laws is incredibly radical in terms of respecting these views. He seems to equate public opinion, the weight of public opinion with coercion early, but then it becomes the part where he later in the essay, it seems to me it becomes clear what he has in mind, the enemy is custom and that's what this is, that's the force of custom and the good guy is individuality and so custom, public opinion, all of that constrains and individuality is a good in itself. Well, I do find that the social coercion, shaming is coercion kind of thing, it is a little bizarre because of how much he thought the same thing, how much he is for criticizing people on his free speech defense, which makes it really interesting about why is the case that, so if you really criticize someone's ideas, but it's not, doesn't go so far shaming, and that's why I don't really buy that distinction because with government action, you have a pretty clear distinction about what it is that is a problem, which is the application of force and with civil action, his distinction is quite unclear to the point that I think it's unworkable. There's also, to me, this was interesting because of the gay marriage case, the gay marriage Supreme Court case is interesting because when it started out and the arguments for 20 or 30 years before that were always about minorities protecting the rights of minorities, and that's very million, right, and it was protecting the rights of minorities against custom, religion, public opinion. But by the time you actually got the case, it was the opposite, right, in the sense that public opinion had come around to the side of gay marriage, and it was true that the other, and then custom, religion, whatever was on the other side, they then became the minority. Does Mill then opt for protecting them? And the answer is probably no because of individuality being his, I think there's a conception of the good life of human nature or of the preferred way of living that is lurking here. That's not, he seems on the one hand to want to be neutral among all ways of living, and yet I think ultimately he prefers and says that the development of the society to greatness, too, requires individuality. Are you saying that you think that Mill, when the anti-gay marriage people were in the minority that he wouldn't want to protect? Though he would then. He would. But then the question is after the decision or even before the decision when you had basically what was referred to by some gay marriage advocates as a consensus, would Mill support define that consensus because that would also be complaining about define Obergefell, the decision. So this was the difference between consensus on what ideas count as bad or what ideas count as defeated versus custom because it seems like, so if custom is a coercive threat, custom is just a kind of set of settled ideas and they may be irrational. Customs can be bad, they can be harmful, but it could also be the case that they're simply a certain set of ideas has had its opportunity to defend itself over time, has failed repeatedly, and we're not going to keep giving it the benefit of the doubt. We're not going to keep giving it the opportunity to defend itself because we've got better things to do. So take an extreme example like Holocaust denial. Like it feels like you can say, we shouldn't say, well, you know, that's an idea that you can express and each time you express it, what we need to do so that we're not coercing you or morally shaming you is say, well, you've marshaled evidence, now let me marshal evidence and let's hash this out that the idea is so wrong and has been so wrong and the evidence against it is so strong that at some point it simply is just consensus that it's wrong and we don't really need to bother with it anymore or we can say like these particular set of ideas are so wrong that continuing to hold them in light of what we know is itself a morally blameworthy act. Like I'm just, I'm not entirely sure how we distinguish wholly discredited ideas and the way we ought to treat those from the coercive weight of simply customary. Oh, well, I was only going to say it sort of takes us to the second chapter, not that I want to jump head too much but on that point, I mean, Mill does say that one of the arguments for freedom of conscious and expression is that even if an opinion is false, it's worth allowing it because it makes sure that the negative of it is never just taken as dogma or truth. It's always worth having people around who will stand up for holocaust denial because it allows us who do believe that the Holocaust happened to strengthen the arguments and always be vigilant for evidence and things like that. Well, he definitely addresses, I was looking for the part here, essentially everything you said, Aaron, about the way that you will build a body of truth that becomes kind of unassailable, but it doesn't mean you can make it illegal to talk against it. I think it's different than custom because I think he's talking more about ideas in the free speech chapter and custom are things where they just ways that are ways things that are done and like the hardest thing about changing them is like being the first mover to not do it that way. Like it just persists because it's been going on so long. So if you're going to suddenly say, oh, I'm going to walk down the street in this way as opposed to this way, like that that's kind of custom and it's different than free speech, I would say. Well, I'm not so I'm not pushing back on the idea about that we shouldn't make wholly discredited ideas illegal, but that where the line is between social consensus that an idea is so discredited as to be, you know, we don't necessarily need to take it seriously or listen to the proponents of it and the kind of social aproprym that he objects to that, you know, it seems like it's almost like it becomes bad if enough people think you're wrong and tell you you're wrong and say, look, I don't have time for this, then that crosses some line that's, you know, that we have to always keep giving credit to bad ideas, lest we slip into coercion. But those people are going to be individuality, they're going to be eccentric individuals, and he seems to have a strong like for that. And, you know, that's part of the argument, actually, the people that seem to be sort of crazy and stuff, you want to let them talk because they might turn out to be right. And then he has all these arguments. I just think he's got a problem. I think he's assuming this may be a time bound thing. It's 1840 or 1830. And Christianity is still strong and all of that. And he's arguing against that kind of custom, that kind of public opinion. And he's arguing for a conception of individuality that we recognize as the artist, the eccentric, the, all of that stuff that's become familiar to us. He's not there yet. Once you are there, then public opinion, you know, has a right. Once public opinion is on the side of individuality, then those kinds of people maybe or don't have the same status as the previous ones. I think that that's the, if you did think of someone who is actually an illiberal, who would criticize this. I mean, you pretty much, if you criticize this in most ways, except for you could be just purely deontological as well as utilitarian, but you're just, it's such a statement of liberalism in the classic sense that you'd have to just sort of say, I'm not a liberal. And of course, there are people who increasingly say that they are liberals on the grounds that they are against individualism. I mean, they are actually against a tenant that is foundational to liberal thought in many ways. And so some feminists say those communitarians, people like this, who say, I mean, even some conservatives will say they're against individualism in the sense of, no, you're not allowed to trailblaze your own path while taking your drugs and having sex with who you want to the community is actually the operative element of this. But that's why we can prescribe this stuff, which is interesting because if you look at it, so maybe his preference for individualism, which John has been saying is sort of an undercut, he just really likes people who let their freak flags fly and whatever. And they, you know, his, him particularly, I don't know about his preferences, but just speaking about feminism at the time when he was speaking about it was unbelievably individualistic. But the interesting part near the beginning of the introductory, which he could, you could use this to criticize his preference for individualism. The likings and dislikings of society or of some powerful portion of it are thus the main thing, which has practically determined the rules laid down for general observance under the penalties of law or opinion. And in general, those who have an advance of society and thought and feeling have left this condition of things unassailed and principle. However, they may have come into conflict with it in some of its details. Basically, the idea that, like the way society is, is based on people's preferences who are in power and they like this and it's illegal and they don't like this and it's legal or vice versa. But his preference here is for individualism and it's not clear that that's like the right thing. Yeah. In fact, I think the illiberals that Trevor just talked about have their own kind of harm principle. So the Holocaust denial, which is illegal in some countries in Europe is based on a harm argument, which is this speech hurts people that, you know, to do this is an insult or does, is an attack on particularly the Jewish community or other people that are related to communities that were affected by the Holocaust. And that's something I think liberals always have to fight against is that no, this, yeah, you're right, this might cause some kind of harm that is hurtful, but it should be allowed nonetheless. Yeah. I mean, he addresses that sort of argument and I think it's chapter three, which we are planning to talk about today where he, he brings up kind of notions of disgust for one. So he's talking about Muslim prohibitions on eating pork and how that rises to it's, you know, there's, there's this profound disgust at the very thought of people eating pork or witnessing someone eating pork and they see that as effectively a harm that should be prohibited and he dismisses that as a different sort of thing that's not. I wanted to raise the question about this, the harm principle. I mean, what is, does it make sense? Does it, is it workable at all? Now, we're sort of, you know, with this, you sort of work in the idea that, you know, if I say something about Matthew, about his origins in New Zealand or something and make comments about sheep and so on. This isn't a hypothetical. This, now that that's. How horrible the all blacks are, everything is. That sort of thing. But that's one thing. I should be allowed to do that. But if I punch Matthew, that's, you know, that's the borderline, right? And that's really Supreme Court doctrine, actually, and you've got to get really up to the punch, really close to it with the speech. But if the general principle is harm, I mean, all sorts of things do harm to others. All kinds of speech does harm. I mean, to some extent, I think the definition of harm is everything is well can be argued to be conventional. That so we end up talking this issue for listeners who haven't heard it. One of our earlier episodes with Andrew Cohen on toleration, we go fairly deep into the harm principle and the difference between hurt, merely hurting someone, which is not something that you can maybe have these terms backwards. But the difference between just like doing something they don't like or in some way hurting them in a morally permissible way versus a non-permissible way. And there's a lot of things like we tend to see, say, competitive harms as perfectly acceptable. So if I go and smash your business or steal from you or build a wall around your shop so people can't come in, that's not morally permissible. And we can have laws against that. But if I, and what I've done to you is I've taken away your living. I've reduced the amount of money that you're earning. That's the effect of my actions. But if, on the other hand, I start a business right next to yours and undercut you on price and take all of your business. And the effect is I've taken away your business. I've reduced the amount of money that we see as permissible. And you can provide arguments for why those are different. But there are cases where it becomes harder and harder to distinguish morally permissible hurt from immorally permissible or impermissible harm. Let me try one to introduce a different element of this, one that is relevant for us today. And I don't know about him. Rob Dreyer had a piece this weekend where he said, you know, he was talking about the abortion pill, whatever the R is. R, 486. Yeah. And he said, basically, so if this is legal to sell, then your pharmacy would sell it to you. And if you're a woman, you buy it. That's a free exchange. But Dreyer's response to it was, well, that means that a Christian, meaning a crisp person is against abortion or has a particular conception of that kind of teaching, religious teaching, can't work as a pharmacist because that would implicate them and they would be forced to, if you can't ban the drug, it would force them to be involved in a religiously forbidden act. Well, that would do harm to them. They've trained all the years to be a pharmacist and all that sort of thing and you're putting them to a choice between doing something to, what, I don't know, a grave moral sin. And if they're right, it may actually send them to hell and that would be very harmful. Or having their working in the field they've been working in. That seems to me to fit the idea and also introduce what for us is religious liberty is going to be at the front part of this discussion for us. I just want to slip in a note real quick here before Matthew looks like he has a response to this. But just when we're talking about this and we're talking about this, what counts as a harm and what doesn't, we're doing it within Mill's moral context, which is utilitarianism. So you might, the listener might be thinking, oh, well, this violates certain, one of these things violates rights and one of these doesn't or there are deontological constraints that clear this up, but those don't apply here. What applies here is utilitarianism, which says the only moral consideration, the only thing that counts for deciding whether an action is moral or not is the quantity of pleasure or pain or happiness that it creates. And so if it looks like two actions have exactly the same effect on the world, create the exact same amount of happiness or cause the exact same amount of pain, but Mill is committed to them being different somehow, then that looks like a problem for Mill, even if it's not a problem within other moral contexts. Yeah. Well, as so often happens, Aaron said what I was thinking. However, I will add that the example that you gave Aaron about the building a wall around a business. I mean, it reminded me of Mill's discussion about the difference between inciting a riot in a market and publishing an article about how corn dealers are ruffians or whoever. And the utilitarian point made me think, because I think a lot of people today think of utilitarians as thinking of people like Peter Singer or other consequentialists. And it reminded me that Mill, not that he would necessarily particularly care, but this doesn't help liberals who care about animal cruelty or anything. The harm principle is harm to other humans, other persons, which is one reason I remember when I first read this essay that I found it rather unsatisfying, although I was a vegetarian at that point. Well, Mill is also a rule utilitarian. Yeah. So I guess we should explain what that means. So follow the rules that have the best consequences or utilitarianism. Yeah, as opposed to the actual, as opposed to the actual utilitarianism. So evaluating every action individually. Yeah. So you could be... So this is how you get around the problem of why can't we torture this one guy, which utilitarians, who are act utilitarians, have a difficulty with or at least ostensibly have a difficulty with, because we'll torture that one guy to, I don't know, free 100 nuns or 100 dolphins or whatever. So we just add up the acts and we're like, okay, it's good, but Mill's point would be that if the rule against torture is broken in such a way, then the utility, the disutility that results from the breaking of the rule and the fact that people are now worried that they might be the person to get tortured itself as a utilitarian calculus. So the consistency of the rule is important for utilitarianism. So two following up on that. The two ideas seem to be, one is with the pharmacist example I was talking about. And what do you say about with the pill, the fetus or whatever is, I don't know the technical term, is about a day old or 12 hours or something like that. What utilitarian standing does that have to, that's one thing. The second thing though is it seems to me that this is, a lot of this is our other utilitarian philosopher, Ronald Coase, right? So you don't do any harm to the pharmacist if you raise the price of the pharmaceutical enough that you can reimburse them for their, to not practice essentially for all the trouble they've gone to, to the point where they're indifferent, that is the abortion, the person who's against abortion but wants to be a pharmacist. And then you go forward from there, you've got one indifferent person and two winners and you win. And that's the end of it. Yeah, that's the, that's like the Coase is dealing with social cost is like an inevitability of living together. I mean, I mean Coase wasn't advocating going up to someone and like chopping off their arm and then giving them like 200 million dollars and being like, here you go, dude, we're all, we're all even Steven now. I mean, so like whether or not it's a violation of, of not just a condition of living together and having different sort of externalities creep over like the train and the, you know, sparks flying over that's, that's different. But now I think that the, going back to Aaron's question about how do we deal with the harm principle, I mean, and back to my point at the beginning about how we're all millions now. It is interesting that it is initially very satisfying and ultimately incredibly unsatisfying because for all the reasons I've been stating here, but you think about the free speech debates that have been happening now. I mean, these people are, I mean, in like the Yale situation, they're not in a safe space. They're crying about it. They're absolutely, they feel oppressed and marginalized. And I mean, we can say either, oh, well, you should not feel that way. You should like, you know, like grow a spine and like and realize that this stuff doesn't actually hurt you. But they believe it actually hurts them. So we should probably have to take that into account just like their subjective opinion of their own hurt. And so this speech is hurting them. And then therefore what? But strangely in a way, I think this does bring us back to Coase because Coase and Pareto and all those guys are, if you look at social scientists, they don't buy utilitarianism at all. The reason they don't is because there's no way to measure utility. If there were, we could say to the Yale students, yes or no. We've got this measure here and you're hurting really bad. We can see that. Yeah. But so the Coase and all of that Pareto, all that stuff is ways out of actually doing stuff and having policies without a conception of utility. I wanted to make a quick argument that the one doesn't necessarily, I think, need to reject million liberalism in order to justify a lot of what we would call the illiberal policies that say people in the United States call for when it comes to freedom of expression and freedom of speech. Because I think that you can, well, this isn't an argument that I would accept. But I think that you could frame the arguments against, say, racist speech or against the bakers refusing to bake the cake for gay couples or against triggering expressions on campus within that, within Mill's little exception for barbarism. Because I mean, he says, he says like, he's very clear as you as Trump read. Who is the barbarians? Yes, his despotism is legitimate mode of government when dealing with barbarians, with basically people who are not. Like racists or barbarians? Yes. And so I think a lot of the framing of these arguments are these ideas are basically barbaric, that there's something backwards, retrograde inhuman about these kinds of expression about the hatred of gays or about hatred of women or what gets called hatred of women about racism, that these are the kinds of things that only barbaric people would accept and so we are, therefore, justified in stamping them out, that this isn't about freedom of expression. Now, that's super interesting because that, I mean, that argument, as you said, you don't accept it. I mean, it's bad, but it's interesting why it's bad. And I think it's actually something that people, some people who who do accept some version of argument, but they don't use the word barbarians, which is not commonly used anyway. So shame. I mean, but like you do get this idea from like the anti free speech people that like when they don't let, I don't know, Dinesh D'Souza speak on campus, that means when you say, well, his idea should be heard. And they're like, no, like Nazi shouldn't be heard and barbarians and people who just are literally not deserving of things like only falsehoods and hate should not be heard, they're barbaric. I think that's interesting how, of course, what that does is ends up being this because by making that concession that despotism is a legitimate form of government for barbarians, it basically turns what he's trying to do an argument for liberalism and to just a definition of if you're already liberal, then you can live in a liberal society. If you aren't liberal, then you can't live in a liberal society. And so the entire endeavor of writing on liberty is like kind of worthless in some basic sense. It's only a place where liberals who agree to leave people alone and not have barbaric opinions can live. And if you're not, we're going to rule over you like despots. Well, there is a sense in which I think, and we spoke at the beginning about how modern this text sounds. And there was a section in the chapter on discussion and thought that I thought applied so well to these Yale campus controversies because Mill throughout the book seems to be a fan of Socrates who we've discussed on this podcast before, who was a big fan of this negative way of arguing that the way to gain knowledge is by constantly questioning and arguing. And I thought that Mill might as well have been writing about today's college campus controversies when he writes a person who derives all his instruction from teachers or books, even if he escapes the setting temptation of contenting himself with cram is under no compulsion to hear both sides. Accordingly, it is far from a frequent accomplishment, even among thinkers, to know both sides. And the weakest part of what everybody says in defense of his opinion is what he intends as a reply to antagonist. It is the fashion of the present time to disparage negative logic, that which points out weaknesses in theory or errors in practice without establishing positive truths. Such negative criticism would indeed be poor enough as an ultimate result, but as a means of attaining any positive knowledge or conviction worthy of the name, it cannot be valued too highly. And until people are again systematically trained in it, there are a few great thinkers and a low general average of intellect in any but the mathematical and physical departments or speculation. And I think that's some possibly because of where I work, I hear about these college campuses, college campus debates all the time, but I feel like if we are not fans of racism and sexism, the best way to not only defeat racist and sexist, but also to sharpen your own arguments is to debate these people is to make sure that you put your own arguments to the limit as well while doing that. Well, so that gives an opportunity. We'll move into chapter two. Yeah, we've kind of been jumping around and floating where it says yeah. It's full-throated defense of freedom of speech of thought and discussion. I just want to return to that. I mean, isn't there something troubling about mill and then not just because of the prejudices of our time, but the distinction between barbarians and non-barbarians, which we've just indicated one way it could be used to unleash an internal despotism. It was about an external despotism. Isn't there something problematic about that in general? I mean, I think the biggest problem in our time would be that you end up describing parts of, I mean, there's certainly misuse of the idea. Everyone's going to turn out to be a barbarian that's not... When the chips are down, yeah. Yeah, I'm thinking correctly. But in general, I think that's something those kinds of you're in or you're out of civilization is... It's a very 19th century concept. Yeah, but we live through the 20th century too, right? Well, I mean, but sort of the very, you know, just the use of the term like savages and just sort of casual conversation, which they all were pretty clear in their mind that... And I think what he means by barbarians, I think we probably agree, are not so much, you know, illiberal racists, but people who beat each other on the head and cause extreme violence to each other constantly and don't resolve their disputes in civilized manner kind of situation. Maybe given the time at which he was living, and I perhaps had a more of a depressing interpretation of it, and I could be wrong, but I thought he might have meant people who lived in some of the British colonies. Well, I think it does mean that he means Indians and some of the people in African colonies are not capable of liberalism. Well, he also says it. He also says, I think you have to take these together is basically this philosophy is not for children or barbarians. And I think that you should have to take those two together. Like, what do you think is qualified? He does seem to view despotism as a means to an end saying despotism is a legitimate mode of government in dealing with barbarians provided the end be their improvement and the means justified by actually affecting that end. Yeah, there is a I mean, yeah, it's definitely the case that in his defense is that he believes that people who are in a state of barbarism now might become better. This isn't like a Greek conception where these are just or Roman conception where these are people that just are screwed from the start, right? This is I think he does believe, but that's civilization improving. See, I would argue that Mill ultimately is deeply, perhaps not liberal because he's committed to a teleological conception of both government and history that focuses on progress and improvement. And maybe it's done by liberty, but he really maybe not. You mean couldn't you clarify that? So he's that he's committed to he this is not an intersectional wig kind of view of history it's later in the he talks about progress and he says progress can be the best way to have progress is individual liberty that I'm talking about here and society gets better and everything. But that may not work and there's another way he equates progress with improvement of the individual in society. But he suggests there's another way and that it can lead to mistakes and so on. But maybe not. And I would argue apart from Mill is that once you have this goal of society being progressed you've opened the door or improvement of people. You've opened the door to what you're talking about that is either you may not call them barbarians but they're not quite where they need to be and you're going to make them be where they need to be if liberty doesn't do it if they don't engage in reason debate and so on. If for example they're ignorant voters or something like that. So we've discussed a fair amount of the stuff that comes up in chapter two but let's formally move on to that. And this is his his defense specifically of freedom of thought and discussion. And so Mill kind of makes he says when we're talking about arguments for allowing people to hold whatever opinions they want and to express whatever opinions they want. There's the opinion that's being expressed there's can be one of three things ultimately. It can be true. It might be that the opinion being expressed is true. It might be that it's false and it might be that and he says this is most of the time it sits somewhere in between. It's got some stuff that's true some stuff that's not. And so he then moves on to consider each of these and Mill one of the really wonderful things about this book just from the structure of the argument perspective and from Mill's ability as a thinker and writer is his capacity to anticipate counter arguments and then to and this is a skill that many people too many people lack and that we would all do better to develop is not only to anticipate those current arguments but then to express them in terms often stronger than the person who believes them would actually be capable of making to present the strongest case against his before then moving on to show why he's right and why the counter argument doesn't hold up and he's remarkably good at this and as you read it one of the really delightful things is how often would find myself saying well but here wait a second here's an objection and then a couple of sentences or a couple of paragraphs or a couple of pages later Mill raises exactly that objection but sharper and more focused than it was in my mind at the time and deals with it the ones that the one that I thought the same thing but the one that I'm I don't didn't see him address really when it came to and this is coming I guess is like the second or third time I brought this up when it came to religious doctrine which is what he spends a lot of time talking about her heresy I mean that if these people are going to hell I mean if you're if you're a Puritan and if they're if they're correct I mean if that's a you know plantation Puritans who are very concerned about whether someone hears something that will actually I mean pollute them and make them believe something that will send them to hell I mean this is a huge harm that you can totally understand why you'd be against free speech and none of the stuff works that he that he to addressing that point I mean he has a really interesting arguments but I don't think anything addresses that specific I made I wrote a paper in law school on precisely this problem I remember that that was a good one Supreme Court jurisprudence is pretty clear that the the court says we won't if you come to us with something that is based in a religious claim we the court and therefore the United States will not weigh in on the truth or falsehood of your religious beliefs we won't tell you that you're wrong in thinking this particular thing or that it's not true but if we think that if if you believe genuinely that like this law of obeying this law would mean that you burn in hell for eternity or I'm going to whip my child you know all the time because it's the only way to make her experience the salvation of the Lord sure so if you if your court says no is hinges on in the afterlife I will get either enormous pleasure or enormous pain if I and this law will decide that then saying no you have to follow it is if the pleasure of pain is great enough is the same thing as basically dismissing it as saying your belief isn't actually true because if it were true if it were true that like not being able to hand out these pamphlets of the man is going to send you to hell and you will burn for eternity then it would be absolutely monstrous of us to prevent you from handing out those pamphlets and so I mean you could just qualify it by saying like look we're not concerned we're only concerned about this lie the harm principle doesn't apply to heaven and hell it only applies to while you're alive but even that seems to be again dismissing these religious beliefs it does seem to have an element of what later became like the late Rawls I think which is that you really don't allow into the public sphere non-public arguments and religion being things that aren't like language or data or whatever things that are evident to others and others can understand you can't have these private experiences they're ruled out of order basically or if you if you if you're an incredibly divergent person a person whose conception of the good is really really horrible and awful and then you're not going to be allowed into the order of public reason I think we should but when we're talking about the free speech chapter we should go so Aaron kind of mentioned these but at the end of it this is chapter two he goes over the three things he says we have now recognized the necessity to the mental well-being of mankind on which all their other well-being depends of freedom of opinion and freedom of the expression of opinion on four distinct grounds which will now briefly recapitulate first if any opinion is compelled to silence that opinion may for ought we can certainly know be true to deny this is to assume our own infallibility secondly though the silence to pinion be an error it may and very commonly does contain a portion of truth and since the general or prevailing opinion on any subject 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 and then thirdly 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 a manner of prejudice with little comprehension or feeling of its rational grounds that one is the my favorite one the third one the idea that even if you're correct if you don't let people challenge you you're going to be really bad at being correct that it's it reminds you of state churches in in Europe which are just boring and there's another aspect to this though that I think shows maybe something that mill is just assuming that is I was thinking about this the famous quote about he who only knows his own argument only knows part of it I was thinking about who is it who are the people or group of people I've ever run into or heard about that know not only their own arguments but everyone else is perfectly the answer is the only people I've ever heard that that group were lobbyist if you get to know people who lobby the government what you find is they know each other's arguments they know what the other person's going to say that's part of the job right because you have to be able to so the argument develops in a very million way you say this I know you're gonna say this so when I have FaceTime with the member I'm gonna say this and so so the in a sense the million ideal is the people you know about 30 feet that or a couple blocks that way on K Street because they actually do know not only their own brief but everything the other side says now what that suggests is without saying anything bad about lobbyist is that there's probably an additional assumption which is that you're not doing it professionally as a as a job you also want for your own personal you want to have the right thing the truth you want to know the truth and the best way to know the truth is to know all the arguments one way or the other so you need something additional now who knows lobbyist may be like that but they may also be doing it professionally so there's an additional assumption that he doesn't articulate there I just think there's an enlightenment ideal under a human nature of the good the good life that underlies all of this which is fine but it's not neutral among yet that was my reaction to what Trevor said was if ultimately for a lot of these truths or falsehoods that we're dealing with the they're going to believing them one way or another is going to have an impact on like how you go about living your life the choices that you make and it's not at all clear except for those of us who are really into intellectual stuff that having a whole bunch of good reasons for believing something and then and so acting upon that belief and having things happen in your life because you acted upon that belief it's not entirely clear how that's all that different from having bad reasons for believing this thing and still acting the same way and so having all of the same effects in your life except for as you said this distaste for having bad reasons for believing things and that that somehow that a kind of moral purity is contributes to a valuable life but that does seem I want to say it's idiosyncratic because I think most people would say like yeah it's better to have good reasons than bad reasons for your beliefs but it seems dedicated to a certain way of living that I happened to like and I think the rest of you at this table happened to like but our tastes are not universal that actually we're really weird we are weird I mean it but if yeah I think you're right by we I mean by we I mean like the western enlightenment in liberal people including us but I mean the whole group of western enlightened liberal people are kind of weird right I think Aaron's right if there was a magic button and if I pressed it everyone in the world would become a libertarian because they thought they would each get a free pony right and I thought like this isn't I wouldn't press the button because I want people to be you know persuaded I want people to come about it in their own their own way right there's a that I think I would push that but I would push the free because I because I utilitarian argument here probably probably okay well I see utilitarians now is that yeah or they would come to learn the true value of liberty that was not necessarily having the pony as they experienced more of it well I well the interesting question I think around all these is to is and this goes back to what I was talking about the individuality and mills preference for individuality and some people just certainly don't have that preference does mill that like with with this like enlightenment individualistic liberal thing project he's working on does he let the Amish exist in his world that was my point about progress before if you and if individuality is the definition and improvement is the deaf movement toward individuality do you and you know it also I mean it assumes a lot of stuff like that people are actually happier in a world in which there's lots of diversity of life's ways of living and all of that that seems to me far from clear this this a similar point is made by people who are very anti homeschooling for example so if you think of people who want to homeschool their children because they don't believe an evolution and they believe in literal creationism so if you look at mill well there's a chance that this opinion might be true maybe the Bible is true maybe there's some truth to it but then the third which is what Trevor highlighted earlier is you know well an evolutionist like me you know we might not like the fact that you know children are taught nonsense at home whatever but at least it means that I'll be able to sharpen my skills when I ever happen to meet them and discuss evolution and the point is I don't meet these people like I it's a it's a strange argument to me and of course this probably wasn't what mill was thinking of but it is similar I suppose if I understand your Amish point correctly right which is I don't know if the third option is as applicable well I mean that's part of my point but my point is the Amish are not liberal I mean like I mean you can say that the right of entry which is interesting I mean it's voluntary to some degree except for mills into social co-origin and they're pretty pretty coercive but do they violate the harm principle precepts and things like that we let them exist as an enclave within liberalism well his point early that this doesn't apply to children Rasi so are they barbarians I don't well I don't know so you can but once your Amish and you turn 18 I guess you free to do whatever and Amish parents can teach their Amish kids whatever they want another potential empirical objection here to the idea that what we need is to vigorously defend our ideas in public and hear the the ideas of others and critique each other so this is the you know deliberative democracy people make the same argument that the way that you improve democracy is by having citizens hash out their political differences in council meetings and such and that if we the more we we listened to each other and the more we directly engage with each other though the better off we'd be the more tolerant would become but the the opposing literature to this says no there's pretty good evidence that it has precisely the opposite effect that when you get people of differing opinions together and have them argue with each other it makes them more extreme in their views it makes them more resentful of the other side it angers them and this this empirical evidence may be mistaken but it can't be I mean it it's not clear with the other way it's not clear the other way and if that's true then especially from utilitarian standpoint it may be the case that going out and critically engaging with all of these people as opposed to either just ignoring them or excluding the bad ideas and the ones we feel more comfortable thinking are bad may make us all better off what's the difficulty of of his defense of free speech is that it could feasibly be tested out as a utilitarian I mean I mean you could as you said you could be like no you're actually wrong this is not what happens or like you know people you know when people are allowed to speak on these issues they don't refine their ideas they get worse at them they don't listen to truth like falsehood is brought up none of these stuff actually happens so we should eliminate free speech which is interesting because he does not he doesn't have a deontological like you should be able to speak because it helps it helps you realize yourself you have a right to do it regardless the consequence whatsoever I don't I think the utilitarian problem is can be stated otherwise too this morning while again to bring this back up the Tony Blair speech on Iraq was going on something people have strong feelings about still in your in United Kingdom and here and I sent to Aaron and Matthew a comment that was made during the speech which this being a family podcast we won't repeat but it was about something that families are sitting around right now listening to us that's why I've always pictured the listeners are free thoughts I feel there's someone out there has their children listening I certainly hope so but this was a something that about that should be done to Mr. Blair now what I would say is it's clear to me and this is applies to large percentage of the comments on news articles and so on the person who did this did this for a reason they got they like they liked it was easy to do and it was pleasurable to express themselves in this way and yet the rest of us got nothing out of it except a slight diminishing of my belief in freedom of speech you got an email that was pessimistic of course and but again that's my point there's this sort of I mean I think mill is saying throughout this essay that if you let people be free in general and just put a harm limit on it everything will turn out better for everybody but it seems to me that there's just lots of useless speech now that doesn't mean we get rid of it but it doesn't pass a utilitarian test in itself. Well it could pass the rule utilitarian test which is that which is that the rule of free speech means maybe if you could figure out like okay that internet commenter you know like Jews are bad 97483 on YouTube cannot comment people are going to have an exception for him on free speech rule and then other people don't have like he said that that having that rule broken is going to be problematic on utilitarian grounds but I mean again that's not even clear. Yeah I'm not sure that a rule that said we don't have comments on news articles and blah blah blah. Except for Ken M. Yeah I mean he does say like I think he his response to that would simply be we don't know and that the the kinds of beliefs that if we were to go back a thousand years and say ask those people which are the things that fall into the category of useless speech and therefore we shouldn't extend these freedoms to a lot of them are probably going to be what we would still consider useless speech but there would be some diamonds there. Yeah there would be some things. Internet commenter in 1000 AD who thinks that the sun actually is at the center of the solar system. Yeah or John Roberts in the Westboro Baptist Church or basically everything Socrates said. Yes I mean that there's a but like so it's that we can't know that our judgment is not infallible and so we because and especially these utilitarianism and so we're not we're judging overall happiness you know so like yes you may be made slightly less happy because you had to see this vile tweet and Matthew and I were made slightly less happy because you felt the need to forward it to us that that would enjoy it. That doesn't matter because the utility we gain from the occasional truths that get expressed and weren't suppressed vastly outweighs that. Yeah I think the Westboro is a harder case actually and it was it got to the court because it was a harder case I mean what was being said was protected speech but it was being said at the funerals of I mean you're a parent of a dead soldier and you hear these people yelling these things that seems to me to be pushing the million principles pretty hard. As does not not the Westboro Baptist Church but I remember a few years ago there was a pastor in Florida who was intent on burning I think a hundred Quran's on the front yard and I was quite happy that I live in a country where the worst thing that could happen was that the secretary of state called him and said please don't they couldn't was not capable of saying you know of banning it knowing for well that had he carried this out that they would almost certainly have been riots all across the Muslim world in which people could have been hurt or killed but the rule if the rule is you can speak and how and generally you can speak unless you're under certain circumstances. I think that would be satisfied under some sort of rule utilitarianism. Well we're out of time so I think that's going to have to conclude our discussions of chapters one and two on a future episode though we will discuss the rest of John Stewart Mills on Liberty. Thank you for listening. If you enjoyed today's show please take a moment to rate us on iTunes. Free Thoughts is produced by Evan Banks and Mark McDaniel. To learn more find us on the web at www.libertarianism.org.