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Mill and Liberty anniversaries Samuel Brittan: Speech at Routledge Gathering 25/05/06 Anniversaries of people’s deaths or births are artificial affairs. There is no more reason to play the music of Mozart 250 years after he was born than there was after 249 years or will be after 251 years. But given the media fixation on such anniversaries, we might as well take advantage of them to call attention to ideas which may be otherwise overlooked. The 200th anniversary of the birth of John Stuart Mill, which we celebrated on May 20, is a good occasion to discuss the doctrines of his most famous book On Liberty which appeared in 1859 but is as controversial today as it was then. It aimed to put forward “one very simple principle... 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... The only purpose for which power can rightfully be exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant.” Mill clearly had in mind what Isaiah Berlin was to call negative freedom. This does not of course rule out other goals such as prosperity or equity; but nothing is gained by muddling the issue and calling these other goals “positive freedom”. Mill’s ideas were attacked almost immediately by a conservative judge, Fitzjames Stephen and have never ceased to be criticised from both left and right. Worst of all has been the faint praise, diluted with much qualification, which academics have tended to give in their prefaces to modern editions of the work. You only have to think of the number of issues on which the Number Ten policy unit wants to control people’s behaviour, ranging from diet to criticisms of certain religions, to see how far we are from accepting Mill’s teachings even under what is regarded as a moderate and reforming government of the centre left. I want to avoid misunderstanding. It is completely spurious to try to base a contemporary political case on some interpretation of Mill, or for that matter Marx or Keynes or any other great man of the past. They could have been wrong; and in any case little is gained from importing into present politics rarefied arguments about what these thinkers “really meant”. The value of disinterring their works is that it is often a good way into arguments of substance, as well as humanising the discussion. Of course the biography of these great men is of interest as well as their relationship to their own times. But this is not my concern today. Arguments for Freedom Nor do I want to spend a lot of time quibbling over concepts such as self-regarding and other-regarding actions. There is a time and place for such discussions. You can say if you like that any action has a ripple effect on millions of other human beings - like the proverbial gnat on the tail of an elephant that sets off a hurricane in the Caribbean. It is pretty clear that Mill meant direct and obvious effects. “Harm to others” should not be used to stop the study of Trotskyism or to prevent the promulgation of Muslim fundamentalism. Equally however it does justify using the full force of the law against agitators who incite people to kill or wound their class enemies or those whom they regard as infidels to their religion. If we are to use Mill as an entry point we need to emphasise that, for all the ringing declamations in his essay, he did not treat freedom as an abstract right. He claimed that the freedom principle derives from the doctrine of political morality called Utilitarianism which he did not invent but which he tried to clarify in another essay. He defined utilitarianism as the principle which holds that “actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness“. He spent some pages discussing what kind of proof he could give for the principle of utility. In the end he had to fall back on saying that happiness, broadly interpreted, was what people actually desired. This may have some surface plausibility in modern England or the United States, but try to apply it to the Aztecs of Mexico or present-day Iran. It does not work. This does not mean that there was a better proof which Mill failed to find. The fundamental point was made over a century earlier by the great philosopher David Hume: that you cannot derive an “ought“ from an “is“. Bertrand Russell spent many years grieving that he could not prove that cruelty to children was evil. This did not mean it was in any way justified; but it was not amenable to the kind of deductive demonstration used in logic and mathematics. In my view Mill spoils his argument by distinguishing between higher and lower pleasures. This reflected his less attractive priggish side. You might tell your teenage daughter she will ultimately derive more satisfaction from Beethoven’s 9th Symphony than a rock concert. But if even as an adult she prefers the rock there is little more to say. Mill waxed lyrical about how it was much better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a pig satisfied. I must admit that I have always had a sneaking sympathy for the pig. But let that pass. How did Mill hope to move from utility to freedom? He had two main arguments. The first was that no-one could be sure what the best way of life was and that the only way to find out was to let different people experiment as much as possible. If you like “let a thousand flowers bloom”. Later on in the essay there was what John Skorupski in Why Read Mill Today regards as a shift in the argument. This was to say that there was not necessarily one best way to live; but different ways would suit different people and that they must be left to explore for themselves. To bring out the force of both these arguments they can be contrasted with the saying of Lord Reith, the founder of the BBC: “Few people know what they want and fewer still what they need.” The soft libertarian answer is not to deny what Reith said, but merely to add that whatever mistakes people make, they will not be better off if some committee of the Great and the Good tries to decide for them. There is a stronger rebuttal, on which I cannot hope to carry everyone. This is that even if Lord Reith understands my interests better than I do myself, I would rather learn from my on mistakes than be subject to another’s will. Mill believed that there were extra arguments for freedom of speech. The first was that the best, if not the only, way to arrive at truth was to let everyone have his or her say in the hope that the better ideas would triumph. But there was also a supplementary argument, which is that even agreed truths would lose their force and and become mere verbal formulae unless they are frequently challenged and explained. [I am not sure of the force of this supplementary point. It depends I suppose on what you mean by “truths“. It would not do much good to have the theorem of Pythagoras about the squares on the sides of the triangle reasserted and challenged several times a week. On the other hand doctrines about democracy do lose their value if they are mere incantations and not challenged, explained and debated. My problem here is that whatever Mill may have thought, a process such as democracy is both a system and a belief, but cannot easily be considered as true or false.] My own view is that it is no more possible to prove the value of personal freedom than it is to prove the validity of utilitarianism. What one can try to be as persuasive as possible by means of anecdote, works of fiction or history to picture a free society and contrast it with its opposite. But there is no way of disproving somebody like the founder of the Jesuits, Ignatius Loyola, who wrote “In the hands of my superior I must be as soft wax, a thing from which he requires whatever pleases him.“ The main thing one can achieve by evidence and argument is to allay the fears of people who have some attraction towards freedom, but are afraid of its consequences. For instance Milton Friedman, if I dare mention his name, regards the existence of free speech as the outcome of an implicit bargain. I might not want you to be allowed to state your beliefs; but I do care that I should have this freedom myself and will settle, as a second best. for a system in which we are both free to express ourselves. Economic Freedom There is another thing one can do; this is to allay the worries of those who fear anarchy or chaos without a large measure of government control. Here I come to the vexed question of the relation between free markets and more general freedom. On this subject we can indeed follow Mill if we do so carefully. Mill wrote “trade is a social act“ and is “that part of conduct which society is competent to to restrain.“ Most interferences with free trade and market competition were wrong “because they do not really produce the result which they are desired to produce.“ I would add that private property in the means of production is not a human right but has to be justified in terms of its consequences. Mill also said,however, that other things being equal, “leaving people to themselves is always better than controlling them.“ Above all he was afraid of giving too much power to government. Although each particular intervention might be justified on its own, the sum total could lead to an all-powerful government that would dwarf its citizens. The implication was that a government with so much power would inevitably be tempted into acts which would indeed breach Mill’s main freedom principle. There is a passage which I long ago underlined in my own copy of On Liberty:- “Every function superadded to those already exercised by the government causes its influence over hopes and fears to be more widely diffused and converts, more and more, the active and ambitious part of the public into hangers-on of the government, or of some party with aims of becoming the government...If the roads, the railways, the banks, the insurance offices, the great joint stock companies, the universities and the public charities were all of them branches of the government...if the employees of all these different enterprises were appointed and paid by the government and looked to the government for every rise in life; not all the freedom of the press and popular constitution of the legislature would make this or any other country free otherwise than in name.”Our best hope then would be in what the Austrians call Schlumperei. Conclusion Unfortunately there has been for many years a split among liberals with a small “l“. Those who worry mainly about preserving economic freedom have tended to become a Conservative sub group, while those interested in causes such as anti-censorship or open government find themselves on the left and become indistinguishable from the Social Democrats or moderate non-Marxist Socialists. This separation of the two kinds of liberalism in the world of politics impoverishes them both; and so even does their separation in the world of academic disputation. Social liberalism is impoverished when its adherents fail to see that freedom to spend one’s own income in one’s own way - above all in sensitive areas such as health and education - is an essential part of freedom. So too is freedom to start a business or to move money across frontiers. But neoliberal practice and thought are impoverished when there is too great a concentration on ownership, earning and spending, and when matters such as open government or the right of suspects against police are overlooked. The distortion reaches ridiculous levels when neo-liberal think tanks publish league tables of so called economic freedom in which south east Asian dictatorships come out on top high above the more tolerant societies of western Europe. Those of us who care about both kinds of freedom must resign ourselves to being in a minority. The main thing working in our favour is the catastrophic failure of most attempts by governments, wise men or confederations of business, professions or trade unions to run things for us. This failure is most obvious in the economic field but there are all too many governments, such as those of China and south east Asia, which are over praised in the West for moving towards free market economics but have no time for freedom of expression, do not care about the denunciation of cruel and unjust punishments in the US Declaration of Independence and trample on the liberties areas under their control, of which Tibet is only the best known example. If I may quote something I wrote many, many years ago. “The greatest ally of the liberal is the practical failure of attempts to shape society by centralised political means. Although men have a natural inclination to conform and follow fashion and leaders, they have an equally strong and contradictory tendency to find ways around authority and to devise new ideas and projects which neither the conservatives nor the collectivists expected in their ordered vision. (A Restatement of Economic Liberalism,1988, pp. 142-3) It will probably take more years for the follies of political authoritarianism to become evident than it did for the follies of central economic planning. This is partly because these unfree countries can borrow western technology without understanding the underlying ideas which have made it possible. But in the end I still hope that freedom will prevail unless we blow ourselves up in the meantime. |
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