Perhaps the best sense of Mill’s understanding of harm is given in his phrase, “affects prejudicially the interests of others”. However, harm is not simply or necessarily pain, and it does not need to be physical or violent in character.
Mill did not specify in any great detail what he meant by “harm”, leaving the American philosopher Joel Feinberg to take up the slack with four volumes on the topic. The most well-known caveat to the reign of freedom, as I just noted, concerns actions that do “harm to others”. Freedom, harm, and respectįor Mill, the value of freedom is given, and he argues that any regulation of human conduct needs to be rigorously argued for and justified. Your information is being handled in accordance with the ABC Privacy Collection Statement. My point is not simply that we should read, and read carefully, the people who have formed our views, but that if we do read carefully, we might actually learn something, something new - and wondrous. Here, then, I want to give an example of how putting Mill in a proper perspective might actually help us to think through some dilemmas about freedom. The picture of Mill as a staid Victorian simply doesn’t ring true. So in thinking about Mill for today, I think it is crucial to recall that Mill considered himself, and was considered by others, including the editor of the Times, to be on the very radical side of politics. Or the 1848 letter to John Pringle Nichol in which Mill claimed that the editor of the Times ought to be flogged for his criticism of Saint-Simon, adding that he would gladly wield the whip himself. England has never had any general break-up of old associations & hence the extreme difficulty of getting any ideas into its stupid head. In England on the contrary I often think that a violent revolution is very much needed, in order to give that general shake-up to the torpid mind of the nation which the French Revolution gave to Continental Europe. To give some sense of the tone of his political outlook, as a background to my argument, this is a passage from a letter to his friend John Sterling after the 1830 revolution in France: In considering Mill’s legacy, I think it is very important to remember that Mill was not a defender of the rich or of the powerful. In the last chapter of his Autobiography, Mill claimed that his ideal went far beyond democracy and that he would class himself as a socialist. Mill apparently saw no conflict at all between his description of himself as a liberal and his loyalty to French socialists such as Saint-Simon, and even the pleasantly delirious Charles Fourier. Mill called himself a liberal, but a complicating factor was that he also professed a passionate adherence to some form of socialism. By this is meant the principle that our actions should not be the subject of regulation unless they cause harm - or, more exactly, harm to others. However, in terms of our modern understanding of the value of freedom, the main legacy of On Liberty in the popular and philosophical language of our age is taken to be the “harm principle”. So the question, then, is what is at stake in that defence? My argument here is that what Mill defends is the sovereignty of the individual. So I read On Liberty as a work defending liberty, a work that does provide a specific discussion of liberty of discussion, but that does not give a separate justification for it different from conduct, or rather, from any other form of conduct. He does not offer any separate defence for speech than the defence he offers for any other form of human conduct. But my claim here is a little different again, which is that what Mill defends in On Liberty is liberty. There’s something to that objection, in the sense that Mill does, of course, talk about discussion, for example. Now, one might object, and many people have said to me, it doesn’t matter - that’s what he is talking about. The word “speech” doesn’t even appear in On Liberty. As far as I can ascertain, the phrase “freedom of speech” appears only once or twice in Mill’s Collected Works, primarily in regard to somebody in parliament, say, being allowed the freedom to speak - that is, they have the floor.
It is rarely noted that the phrase “freedom of speech” does not appear at all in On Liberty. Mill did not, in fact, defend freedom of speech. But I contend that Mill has been very much misunderstood. References to Mill’s On Liberty, first published in 1859, has become something of a staple in Australian politics. John Stuart Mill is one of the glittering “ornaments” of the liberal tradition - and, particularly, of thinking about freedom of speech in liberal democracies like Australia.
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