Main content
Course: Wireless Philosophy > Unit 10
Lesson 7: LiberalismLiberalism
In this Wireless Philosophy video, Geoff Pynn (Elgin Community College) questions how liberty can be reconciled with the state’s authority, and explains John Stuart Mill’s “Harm Principle.”. Created by Gaurav Vazirani.
Video transcript
Hi, I'm Geoff Pynn. I teach
philosophy at Elgin Community College, and in this video I'm going
to talk about liberalism. What justifies the state's authority? This is a difficult question. On the one hand, without the state,
society as we know it couldn't exist. We'd be forced to fend for
ourselves, focusing all our energy on gathering and protecting
what we needed to survive from the scarce natural
resources available to us. To gain the benefits of society,
we need to accept some kind of state authority. The
trouble is that none of us seems to have a choice in the matter. We're
forced to accept the state's authority -- not only because most of us can't
leave, but more importantly, because the state has the
power to coerce us to accept it. If we don't want to obey,
the state can use the threat of violence to
make us change our minds. If we resist and disobey, the state
has the power to use actual violence to compel our obedience. But doesn't this make the state the moral
equivalent of a benevolent gangster, handing us benefits with one hand
while threatening us with the other? The root of the problem is the idea that
individuals have a moral right to be free. When someone gets you to agree
to something by threatening you with violence if you refuse, you
aren't really making a free choice. The ideal of individual
freedom, also known as liberty, is one of the building blocks of modern
Western ethics and political philosophy. How can liberty be
reconciled with the idea that the state's authority
over us is legitimate? Well, for one thing,
liberty has its limits -- we don't have a moral
right to *absolute* freedom. You aren't free to poison someone's
food just because you don't like them. You aren't free to steal
your neighbor's crops just because you
forgot to plant your own. In general, our liberty doesn't include
the freedom to cause harm to others. The philosophy known as
liberalism treats this limitation on our liberty as the
basis for state authority. If the state's laws are all aimed at
preventing us from causing harm to others, then they ought to be fully compatible
with our individual right to be free. It doesn't infringe upon a
person's liberty to prohibit them from doing something their
liberty doesn't entitle them to do. The English philosopher
John Stuart Mill defended just such a requirement in
his book, On Liberty: "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." The Harm Principle, as Mill's
idea has come to be known, has been extremely influential. It suggests the ideal of a
liberal state, whose soul function is to protect and promote
the liberty of its citizens, preventing them from
harming one another, while infringing on their
freedom as little as possible. Notice that the Harm Principle
does not allow coercion just to prevent you from
harming yourself. "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." Forcing someone to do something for
their own good is known as paternalism. Mill thought paternalism
was unjustified. It requires that rulers be able to
identify what's in someone's own interests better than they can themselves.
This might be justified in the case of children or some people
who are incompetent to care for themselves, but when it comes to
most of us, Mill thought, no one's in a better position to know
what's good for you than you are. The Harm Principle says what
conditional law must meet to be legitimate: It has to prevent someone
from harming others. But some laws intended to
prevent harm may still be illegitimate. That's because a law preventing one
sort of harm might lead to other harms. Consider, for example,
government censorship. Censorship might be defended
on the grounds of harm prevention, allowing falsehoods
and immoral opinions to freely circulate could
cause all sorts of harm. And yet, one of the hallmarks of
liberalism is opposition to censorship and the defense
of free expression. How does that work? Well, Mill thought that censorship would
lead to more harm than freedom of speech. He gives two reasons.
The first is that, while falsehoods may cause harm,
sensors can make mistakes too. If the government censors something
on the grounds that it's false, but, in fact, it's true,
then it's causing the very harm it's supposedly
trying to prevent. Still, you might think, well-informed,
methodical and honest sensors are likely to prevent the spread of
falsehoods much more frequently than they'll prevent
the spread of truths. This isn't a very strong argument
against government censorship. The deeper reason Mill gave
concerns the value of liberty itself. Mil thought that, for most
people, liberty was an essential ingredient of a worthwhile life. We only truly flourish
when we make and pursue rational choices about
what to do with our lives. Making and pursuing free
choices requires learning through experience and
deliberating, evaluating and revising our goals and values
in light of what we learn. Without the freedom to make
mistakes, we can't do any of these things. So Mill's second reason
is that freedom of speech is necessary for us
to find true happiness. If we are denied the freedom to be
wrong, we can't engage in the rational deliberation required for us to
find the right way to live our best lives. Instead, our beliefs would be held for
reasons we couldn't fully understand, and our lives mapped out for us us in
ways we hadn't really chosen for ourselves. Censorship would make the rational
deliberation that liberty requires impossible, and leave
us to wither on the vine. Mill defended the freedom
of association, religion and occupation on similar grounds. He promoted the idea that
we should be exposed to "different experiments in living" --
a variety of ways of structuring our lives and
relationships -- in order to discover and pursue for ourselves
the best way to live. The liberal ideal is
certainly appealing, but many difficult questions remain.
What's the line between actions that are genuinely harmful and those
that are merely offensive -- unpleasant, undesirable or unwelcome? How great a risk of harm
must an action present before it can be
legitimately prohibited? After all, just about
anything we do could cause harm. Can the state prohibit people
from allowing harm; for example by requiring them to
assist others at risk? Can the Harm Principle justify
taxing people for national defense, public health, or other modern
governmental functions? Most importantly, for our purposes: how is
liberalism connected with democracy? In the modern world, the
two concepts have come to be tightly linked, so much
so that many nations identify themselves
as liberal democracies. But what's the relationship
between the two ideas? On the face of it you might think that
liberty and democracy are incompatible -- the majority could
vote to restrict liberty, in violation of the
Harm Principle. Mill himself was
keenly aware of this risk. He worried that in a
democracy, minority groups could be subjected to
the tyranny of the majority. And yet, Mill defended
a version of democracy as the ideal form of government. In order to exercise our liberty we
must deliberate and make choices about how to
govern our own lives. And, Mill thought, no thought no form of
government could allow us to do this better than democracy could. What do you think?