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John Stuart Mill: The Freedom to Make & Express Opinions
Why Freedom is so Important for Everyday Life
John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty addresses a crucial question to living in a polity: can the rulers in place restrict your freedom in exchange for the collective good?
Mill’s ‘Harm Principle’ answers this question directly, stating that we should be allowed to do something unless we are doing harm to others.
I believe that principle is invaluable for any polity today.
As an empiricist, Mill values pluralism or what he calls the “experiments of living” because of the value different individuals provide to one another in any given polity.
For Mill, individuals are “free to form opinions” as they wish and the best way to do this is to have access to those opinions. Mill’s view of liberty takes into account the natural fallibility humans have both in their views and actions. Therefore, he sees that any one person, wherever they may find themselves, should not have the right to impose their views on others due to the very serious likelihood of them being wrong.
Similarly, his justification of what we may think of as ‘hate speech’ today seems well-defended since our terms change according to the wants and needs of the populace of the time.
