On Liberty

Gli appunti sono dedicati all'inquadramento del periodo storico e, per sommi capi, della biografia dell'autore. La parte principale è dedicata all'analisi linguistica e contenutistica di "On Liberty" di John Stuart Mill, confrontato con altri testi basilari della sua bibliografia.

The permissibility of actions depends upon facts about the flourishing and separateness of persons. Persons differ from other creatures in having the task of discovering for themselves, by conjecture and refutation, what sort of life will fulfil them. Compulsory slavery impermissibly prevents some persons from pursuing this task. However, many people may conjecture that they are natural slaves. Some of these conjectures may turn out to be correct. In consequence, voluntary slavery, in which one person welcomes the duty to fulfil all the commands of another, is permissible. Life-long voluntary slavery contracts are impermissible because of human fallibility; but fixed-term slavery contracts should be legally enforceable. Each person has the temporarily alienable moral right to direct her own life.

This set of notes is aimed at structuring an ongoing conversation about John Stuart Mill's On Liberty.  After an initial, mostly unguided session, each subsequent session would begin with a recap of our previous discussion.  That way, we could preserve continuity in our exploration of the text, while also allowing that exploration to be guided by student participation.  The goal of these notes was thus to frame our previous conversation in such a way that the next conversation could grow out of it in a flexible but productive manner.

[NB: These notes were prepared as part of a class taught by Prof. William Schweiker at the University of Chicago, for which I served as the Teaching Intern.  Any references to particular participants have been altered in order to preserve student privacy.]

This article presents a reading of Mill in which his view of self is social rather than individualistic. I will provide criticisms of the radically-individualist interpretations of Mill offered by John Gray, R. P. Anschutz, and Robert Wolff. Gray and Anschutz get Mill wrong from the right, and Wolff gets Mill wrong from the left. Mill's individualism has at times been overstated, leading to a neglect of the importance that he places on positive community influence of moral agents. This heavy emphasis on individual detachment can lead to an (intended or not) impression that Mill's individual is thoroughly atomistic. An overemphasis on the individualism in Mill neglects the importance of community's role in nurturing the individual to be united with fellow citizens, to develop sympathetic affections, and to be integrated into a unified web of corroborative associations.

Diese Seminararbeit versucht den utilitaristischen Einfluss in Mills (und Taylors)  Werk "subjection of women" zu analysieren. Oft wird dieses nämlich isoliert von Mills restlichen Werken betrachet. So sind zuerst die Grundprinzipien des Utilitarismus strukturiert. Als nächstes wird diskutiert, ob die Freiheitsprinzipien in "On Liberty" den utilitaristischen Prinzipien widersprechen oder sich mit ihnen vereinen lassen, da es in "Unterwerfung der Frauen" auch um Freiheitsprinzipien geht. Und zum Schluss die Hauptargumente in "Unterwerfung der Frauen" mit dem Ganzen verglichen.

Dies war meine erste Seminararbeit und ist deswegen strukturell und in Sachen zitieren verbesserungswürdig. Meine neueren Arbeiten sind in diesen Bereichen bessere Beispiele.
Note: 5.5/6

The trend towards a freer sphere for public discourse seems set to continue in Singapore. While this freedom has enabled the public to actively contribute towards Singapore's socio-political ecosystem, it has also revealed, and possibly exacerbated, divisions within society. This paper seeks to address the extent to which public discourse should be managed in light of growing demand for political openness. This paper will take a principled approach, primarily focusing on Mill's seminal work, On Liberty. This paper will (1) critique his reasoning in order to derive and adapt certain principles which Singapore should rely on in managing public discourse; and (2) demonstrate how these principles might be applied towards policy.

The legal debate regarding the right to commit suicide requires a critical review of the relationship between the individual and the community in present liberal political thought.  Modern liberal political thought postulates that the government or community must be neutral about what is good both for members of the community and the community itself.  It also postulates that there exists a sphere of action which affects solely an individual. 

The neutrality postulate and the harm of self/harm to others dichotomy are best explicated by John Stuart Mill in his essay On Liberty, in which Mill separates and categorizes the individual and the community.  This separation and categorization has animated much of constitutional law discourse over the past twenty-five years.  In fact, the dichotomy has become an archetype for structuring a number of important constitutional law decisions.  However, in tort, criminal, and other nonconstitutional law areas, this model is being replaced by a more communitarian model.

The use of Millian thought in constitutional law is an attempt to alleviate the tension between claims of right by an individual and claims of community interest by the state.  Yet, review of legal responses to suicide will show that such an attempt (1) is in conflict with legal thought outside of constitutional law, and (2) cannot succeed in structuring a solution to a debate about a right to commit suicide, but can only result in exacerbating the tension found in American liberalism.  Such a review shows that, by creating a right of autonomy which purports to dignify the individual, such a right instead cuts off the individual from other members of the community.  In this situation, an ideal of reconciliation or hope for and from the community can no longer exist.

The legal debate regarding the right to commit suicide requires a critical review of the relationship between the individual and the community in present liberal political thought. Modern liberal political thought postulates that the government or community must be neutral about what is good both for members of the community and the community itself. It also postulates that there exists a sphere of action which affects solely an individual. The neutrality postulate and the harm of self/harm to others dichotomy are best explicated by John Stuart Mill in his essay On Liberty, in which Mill separates and categorizes the individual and the community. This separation and categorization has animated much of constitutional law discourse over the past twenty-five years. In fact, the dichotomy has become an archetype for structuring a number of important constitutional law decisions. However, in tort, criminal, and other nonconstitutional law areas, this model is being replaced by a more com...

This paper addresses the question of whether all that unites the main parts of John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty—the liberty principle, the defense of free discussion, the promotion of individuality, and the claims concerning individual competence about one’s own good—is a general concern with individual liberty, or whether we can say something more concrete about how they are related. I attempt to show that the arguments of On Liberty exemplify Mill’s institutional design approach set out in Considerations of Representative Government and related works. Mill’s approach reflects both his debt to Bentham and his own progressive development of the utilitarian tradition. The paper proceeds by setting out the elements of Mill’s institutional designs and then showing that On Liberty neatly applies them, thereby clarifying the structure of the arguments of On Liberty.

In this paper it is argued that the stock of ideas profoundly shaping Grote’s Platonic interpretation in the early 1860s was John Stuart Mill’s, and especially the latter’s account of individuality and his advocacy of intellectual freedom and liberal education expounded in the System of Logic and On Liberty – the sequence of which Grote clearly recognized. The main thesis of this paper is that Plato and the other Companions of Sokrates integrated extensively Mill’s defence of the values of individuality, freedom and self-development into a framework which remained tied to the empiricism he shared with Mill. It can even be argued that the Plato should be read in the light of On Liberty, a work that provided to Grote, inter alia, the analytical and conceptual framework to develop and enlarge his interpretative scheme. Through this brief examination I wish to provide a new look upon Grote’s groundbreaking interpretation in Plato and shed a new light on an aspect which has been insufficiently addressed in my earlier work.