 Hi, welcome back to these short lectures on 19th and 20th century philosophy. I'm Matt Brown. Today, we're going to be focusing in on mid-19th century British philosophy, particularly the work of John Stuart and Harriet Taylor Mill, and especially their famous co-authored work of liberal political philosophy on liberty. Now, John Stuart Mill was born in 1806, and Harriet Taylor Mill, originally Harriet Hardy, was born in 1807. They met in 1931 and began collaborating almost immediately. They married in 1851, two years after Harriet's first husband, John Taylor, died. From the beginning, John Mill idolized Harriet Taylor, and after her untimely death, he acknowledged significant debts to her in several of his works, most notably his Principles of Political Economy, the work we'll talk about today on liberty, an essay on the enfranchisement of women, which he actually credited to her as the primary or sole author, and a variety of other works. Let's talk a little bit about their intellectual background. So John Stuart Mill's father, James, was the product of the Scottish Enlightenment. The major figures you might be familiar with from the Scottish Enlightenment include David Hume, the empiricist, philosopher, Adam Smith, the political economist. These are major late 18th century Scottish thinkers, and that's the milieu that James Mill was trained in, and then James Mill became close ally of Jeremy Bentham. Together, Bentham and James Mill developed the theory of hedonistic utilitarianism, according to which the ethical good is identified with maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain for the greatest number. And Mill and Bentham inspired a group of intellectuals and political reformers and politicians known as the philosophical radicals. Now, John Stuart Mill received an extremely rigorous education at the hands of his father, James, mastering Greek and Latin and reading most of the classical canon by age 12, becoming an expert in math, logic, political economy and science in his mid-teens, writing his first treatises at the age of 15. He became a true Benthamite utilitarian in ethics and in politics. But in his 20s, John Stuart Mill had a kind of a mental break, became somewhat dissatisfied with the life path he was on, and he became increasingly interested in the British romantics, particularly Wordsworth and Coleridge, and the somewhat more complex, more perhaps spiritual, you might say, picture of the human condition that they afforded. And he would go on throughout the rest of his life attempting to synthesize the sort of enlightenment, empiricism and utilitarianism of his father with the insights that he found in Romanticism. Now, in his own life, Mill was well-known primarily as a politician and a reformer as well as a philosopher, but primarily for his work in theoretical philosophy. He was a naturalist and an empiricist. He was also, he did a lot to advance our understanding of inductive inference and was a sort of important thinker in the early discussions of what would become philosophy of science. He was also a political economist, political economy being the 19th century science that would eventually become economics or become known as economics. Today, he's much more known for his work in ethics, where he defends a form of utilitarianism different from his father's and Bentham's, which is sometimes called eudaimynistic utilitarianism, also for his defense of liberalism and political philosophy. And as I said, he was also a political economist and had a political career in parliament. Now Harriet Hardy, her father was Thomas Hardy, not the famous novelist, but a surgeon who ensured that she was educated. She was educated at home. She grew up in the Unitarian Church. She was involved early on in the politically radical community active at that time in the church and particularly issues of women's rights. She married John Taylor at age 18 and they had three children during their relationship. She stayed active in the church. First, she wrote a number of short pieces for the Unitarian Journal, the monthly repository. John Sir Mill also worked closely with his stepdaughter, Helen Taylor, Helen Taylor, who was obviously the daughter of Harriet and John Taylor, after Harriet died in 1858. So Harriet dies in 1858 and Mill and Helen work together on, again, topics related to feminism and liberalism. Now the influence of Harriet Taylor on Mill is most significant in his work on liberalism, on equality, social equality, on his sort of feminist themes, on the rights of women. And, you know, today we're going to talk about that major work of the mills on liberty. So on liberty is sort of John Sir Mill's statement of his liberal political philosophy, Mill and Mills, I should say, in the introduction they distinguish between two types of threats to liberty. The first is the old kind of threat of authoritarian rule of monarchs and dictators, right? But also there's a new kind of threat that he's concerned with, the threat of the tyranny of the majority, as he calls it, that you might also experience in a democracy. In the book, they consider several reasons that one might seek to restrict liberty, why a government might seek to restrict the liberty of its citizens. The first is that you might seek to restrict the liberty of others for their own benefit, right? So government might restrict one's liberty for one's own benefit. This is a paternalistic reason. Now the mills reject this reason and say, this is never an appropriate cause to restrict liberty. They also consider the possibility that we restrict one's liberty in order to ensure that they act morally, when this is known as moralism. And again, they reject that idea. It's not the case that one ought to restrict liberty only to ensure that one acts morally. Third, a government might restrict one's liberty to prevent one from harming others. This is known as the harm principle. And then fourth, one might seek to restrict liberty for utilitarian reasons to maximize happiness and minimize unhappiness. This is the principle of utility or the utility principle. Now the mills think that three is a necessary condition, but not by itself sufficient. And the fourth condition is not by itself adequate, right? So in other words, they think that in order to restrict liberty, you need to have both. On the one hand, you need to have a harm, right? The possibility of harm and you need to be preventing harm. So this means that there are no restrictions of one's actions in so far as they only affect one's self, right? Only in so far as they affect others. But even then, restrictions might do more harm than good. So something like this principle number four, the utility principle, also has to be accounted for. In other words, preventing harm is not by itself sufficient. So now it's important to note that in this essay, the mills are not talking about just any kind of rights, any kind of liberties. They have very specific set of liberties in mind, which we might call basic liberties. The first are liberties of conscience and expression, the liberty to believe what one will and to express one's belief in speech or writing, say. The liberties of action and character, the liberty to form one's own tastes and desires and to pursue them, right? And then the liberties of association, liberties of who one interacts with, what kind of groups you form. These are the kinds of liberties that they're talking about and they devote a chapter to each of these, of these basic liberties. The chapter that I gave you to read is chapter two. It's concerned with the liberties of conscience and expression, and specifically with freedom of expression. So the argument for the defense of free expression is complex. Now recall, a necessary condition on restricting liberty for the mills is the harm principle. So the first thing we have to ask is can speech or writing harm someone, right? It's important to note here that the mills deny that mere offense is a harm, right? So if I say something to you and you take offense, you don't like what you're hearing and it bothers you on an emotional level, that's not sufficient. That's not harm according to this essay, right? No matter how offended you might be by something someone says, that's not a sufficient reason to restrict their ability to say it for a government in particular. But of course, in voicing my opinion, I might convince you to believe something false, right? Or I might convince you of something true, but that might lead you to then go act in a way that's going to harm yourself or harm others. So my expression can cause harm in those kinds of ways. And that means, at least there's an entry here, right? We might be justified in restricting free expression because there is some possibility of harm. Now that possibility of harm is not enough to justify those restrictions. We have to consider not only the harms but also the benefits of speech and the harms and benefits of regulating it in order to know whether and when restrictions for freedom of expression are possible or necessary, and Mill mounts a pretty broad defense of a certain kind of freedom of expression. He does it in this way. He says, look, beliefs or opinions that one might see to express, they might be true, right? So the opinion you seek to silence or censor might be true or they might contain a portion of the truth or they might be false, right? Mill argues that if the silenced opinion might be true, you know, if the majority believes one thing and seeks to censor everything else, one of the things they censor might be the true opinion. And there are obvious reasons that the true opinion is a good thing to have access to. And similarly, it might be the case that, you know, we have several opinions, none of which contain the whole truth, but each of which contains a portion of the truth. We, you know, often that's the case, right? Mill also thinks, though, that even if the opinion you seek to express is false, that that has its own benefit in leading to deliberation and discussion, because it helps assure that the true opinion does not become a prejudice, right? If we settle on the true opinion and then we ban all other views from being expressed, you know, we may stop believing the true opinion for good reasons and just become to believe it as a dogma, right, as a prejudice. But if we have to defend the true opinion against false opinions, then it's, we believe it for the right reasons. It becomes lively in our minds because it, because we have to continue to reaffirm it for the reasons that we believed it in the first place. Also, and this is somewhat more complicated and worth the further discussion, Mill thinks that if, if we don't have to compare the true opinion to alternatives, we might lose the very meaning, you know, it might lose its meaning or significance for us entirely. We wouldn't understand, we wouldn't really even understand what we believe, we would just sort of believe it by rote, right? And that's, that's not a good situation either. Now, of course, Mill is keen to point out that we are not infallible, you know, our belief is never completely certain. So we don't know whether the opinion and question is true or false or partly true, but insofar as that sort of exhausts the possibilities, he has a defense of expressing opinions in all these possible cases, right? Although we don't really know which case we're in. Okay, so that's a very broad overview of the Mill's arguments and on liberty. Now, you know, how exactly do these arguments work? There's a lot more detail here to get into. Are these good arguments in favor of freedom of expression, freedom of speech? What are the limits, right, on Mill's view? He doesn't think that it's completely unrestrictable. So what are the possible limits of expression? What kinds of, what are the limits of the argument? What does he leave anything out, right? Is he missing something? We'll talk about all of this and more in class or on Discord or in the comments here. Let me know if you have any thoughts and I look forward to talking with you again soon.