Isaiah Berlin – Two Concepts of Liberty (Postive and Negative Liberty)

English philosopher John Stewart Mill’s essay “On Liberty” is one of the classic texts of modern liberalism: it’s been hugely influential in politics, even more so than you might realise, as we’ll be seeing shortly.

The question he’s grappling with is, when can the government legitimately restrict your freedoms by imposing and enforcing laws?

Always? Never?

Only sometimes?

The technical way of phrasing this question is “What is the proper scope of criminal law?”

Mill offers a famous and pretty simple answer – the Harm Principle. If your action harms somebody else then the government can legitimately step and try to stop you from doing it, or punish you when you do.

But only if it harms someone else – if the only person you’re harming is yourself, then the law should have nothing to say.

The classic example is drinking – if you wanna drink yourself to death, fine, that’s your call. But the moment you get behind the wheel of a car, that’s when the law kicks in, because you’ve started endangering somebody else.

As the old saying goes, “your freedom to swing your fist ends where my nose begins.”

Note that Mill is saying the government *can* legitimately interfere if you’re harming someone else, not necessarily that it should.

In any competitive act the winner – the person who gets the job or the contract or whatever – gains benefits from the same process that harms – in the form of disappointment or denial of goods to – the loser.

But Mill says some competitions are good for society and therefore we might argue that we should keep them. Harm to others is a necessary but not sufficient condition for curbing liberties.

The Harm Principle is about the motivation behind the law, se there are ways of being sneaky about it.

The example that was taught to me was, imagine a law that requires every citizens to jog for thirty minutes a day.

If you pass that law because it will improve people’s health, well then the Harm Principle says that you shouldn’t do that, because people’s cardio fitness is your own business and if they don’t wanna exercise, that’s their call. But if you pass that law to reduce the cost of public healthcare and so have more money to spend on good things for other people, then the Harm Principle says it’s OK.

So there are ways of getting around it. Take for instance, “soft paternalism.” It might be inconsistent with the Harm Principle for the government to ban you from smoking, but it would be fine for them to put warning labels on cigarette packets, tax smoking, say you can only do it in certain areas, and generally try to discourage you from doing it. It would also be consistent with the Harm Principle for them to say it’s legal for you to smoke cigarettes but make it illegal for anybody to sell them, therefore effectively depriving you of smoking, just via a more roundabout route.

So now that we know Mill’s Harm Principle and what it entails we can start looking at it a little more closely.

And as usual in philosophy, the devil is in the details. How do you define harm? That’s a whole philosophical debate in itself – and it’s actually surprisingly difficult to do – but it’s obviously gonna have a huge impact on what your liberties are.

If my freedom to swing my fist ends where your nose begins, well the next logical question is “How big is your nose, mate?” One popular definition of harm is “making somebody worse off than they would otherwise have been,” and that looks pretty intuitive, but we get into some interesting cases involving Over determination

Suppose John is going to murder Susan on Friday, and we find out so we lock John up for attempted murder.

But Susan gets hit by a bus on Friday and dies anyway, so she’s no worse off that if we had let John kill her.

So how do we justify locking him up?

Now that might not be a very realistic case, but what about doctors who murder terminally ill patients?

That is a real phenomenon, and we do punish them even though at least the doctors would say they aren’t really harming anybody in the sense of making them worse off.

So how do we justify that, on Mill’s account?

Or argue against it?

Now those are issues that we could get into but I’m gonna leave you to puzzle over those because there are roads less travelled I think we could go down.

Mill doesn’t think the Harm Principle applies to everybody, he makes some exceptions, and they’re particularly important exceptions given the period of history he was living in and the impact his ideas have had on liberalism today.

Remember Mill is talking about when the government can step legitimately in and restrict your liberties, and thinks that so long as you’re only harming yourself the law should stay out of it.

So listen to this paragraph: “It is, perhaps, hardly necessary to say that this doctrine is meant to apply only to human beings in the maturity of their faculties. We are not speaking of children, or of young persons below the age which the law may fix as that of manhood or womanhood. Those who are still in a state to require being taken care of by others, must be protected against their own actions as well as against external injury. For the same reason, we may leave out of consideration those backward states of society in which the race itself may be considered as in its nonage… Despotism is a legitimate mode of government in dealing with barbarians, provided the end be their improvement, and the means justified by actually effecting that end. Liberty, as a principle, has no application to any state of things anterior to the time when mankind have become capable of being improved by free and equal discussion. Until then, there is nothing for them but implicit obedience to an Akbar or a Charlemagne, if they are so fortunate as to find one.”

In other words, personal liberty applies to adults, but not for all adults – only “civilized” ones, by which he means mainly white Europeans. Not “barbarian races.” Well so what? Mill had some Victorian ideas about society – he was a Victorian after all!

He lived through the high day of British colonialism in India and in the West Indies; in fact he worked for the East India Company, administering the bureaucracy that ran between the British government and its invading and occupying forces in India.

But can’t we just take the good stuff from him and forget about that other stuff, especially if the good stuff is logically distinct from it? Well it’s tempting to do that, and when Mill is taught in schools and universities we often do skip over those more nasty parts.

But remember my video on Falguni Sheth and her discussion of the way Power makes exceptions for people it doesn’t like?

She focused on liberalism’s tendency to do this, and by looking at Mill we can see that liberalism’s ability to make exceptions along racial grounds – that’s no accident. We know by looking at Mill that it was deigned to do that from the very beginning. To give you the context of it, there’s a whole practice of critiquing Enlightenment texts and saying,

“OK, we’re not gonna throw these out but some bits are very good and some bits are not so good.”

And the reason this is historically important is because it’s by making those exceptions that Mill’s liberalism justifies colonialism and imperialism. And in case you think this is all a big exaggeration, Mill literally explicitly defends conquering “barbarous nations” elsewhere. It’s tempting to focus just on the Harm Principle but that’s not everything he left beind.

And just as no extended discussion of Nietzsche’s concept of the ubermensch would be complete without noting the ways that the Nazis took it and used it, I think so too no discussion of Mill’s liberalism would be complete without noting the ways that governments in his time and now have interpreted it.

But hang on a minute, Mill says that conquering other nations against their will is OK so long as you’re trying to improve the lives of the people who live there and they have no capacity for self-improvement.

He sees imperialism as a tool to help native peoples build the kind of societies that they couldn’t build on their own.

Mark Tunick says that Mill advocated “tolerant imperialism: so for instance, he didn’t think Indians should be allowed to run India but did think that they might do it one day, when Britain had sufficiently improved their country. Now, “tolerant imperialism” might be a long way from what the British Empire actually did in India and everywhere, but that doesn’t mean Mill necessarily wanted it that way. But what counts as “improvement,” and who decides when a nation has been improved enough to run itself – there’s the rub.

Mill thought that industriousness is a mark of improvement, as are the kinds of conditions that foster laisez faire capitalism.

And it’s for the colonial powers to decide when a nation can run itself, not the actual people. In other words, his imperialism was explicitly capitalistic. A nation is “improved” and made “more civilised” by allowing colonial powers to create new markets through which to exploit it for profit. When it came to India, Mill thought that administrators should be “Indian in blood but English in spirit” i.e. that local people should be taught to go along with colonialism and helped to shape their country according to the wishes of the colonisers, not helped to build their own country from their own vision at all.

David Goldberg says Mill fails to recognise that whilst colonialism is great at creating new markets (that is after all what it’s forl) it’s not so good at setting anybody free or laying the groundwork for them to peacefully assume that freedom. He says, “Mill’s argument for benevolent despotism failed to appreciate that neither colonialism nor despotism is ever benevolent. Benevolence here is the commitment to seek the happiness of others.

But the mission of colonialism is exploitation and domination of the colonized generally, and Europeanization at least of those among the colonized whose class position makes it possible economically and educationally.

And the mandate of despotism… is to assume absolute power to achieve the ruler’s self-interested ends. Thus colonial despotism could achieve happiness of colonized Others only by imposing the measure of Europeanized marks of happiness upon the Other, which is to say, to force the Other to be less so.

Mill’s argument necessarily assumed superiority of the despotic, benevolent or not; it presupposed that the mark of progress is (to be) defined by those taking themselves to be superior; and it presumes that the ruled will want to be like the rulers even as the former lack the cultural capital (ever?) quite to rise to the task.” Was Mill just of his time? Well we’ve gotta be careful with saying that, because in one sense it’s true in that a lot of people thought like that back then, but in another sense, it kindof assumes, albeit indirectly, that that time isn’t *now*.

That colonialism and imperialism have had their day and are no longer around, which a lot of people both in and outside of academia would say is not entirely true. It’s important to realise that the question here isn’t,

“Was John Stuart Mill personally a racist?”

A lot has been written on that, and Mark Tunick quite rightly points out that he was more progressive certainly than some of his contemporaries. But we’re not worried about whether we’d be comfortable having round him to dinner, right: he’s dead. We’re worried about the extent to which his legacy – liberalism – can be used for imperialism and colonialism, and what we can therefore do to improve it. So that’s Mill’s Harm Principle: its meaning and its legacy.

We’ve done a lot of political philosophy lately so next time we could either do “Can Art Be Defined?” or we could do “the Ethics of Collateral Damage,” so leave me a comment telling me which one you’d rather see and for more philosophical videos from me every Friday