In this lecture and the next we're going to be dealing with neoclassical utilitarianism in political theory as distinct from the classical utilitarianism of Jeremy Bentham. You'll remember that last time we looked at neoclassical utilitarianism in other disciplines and particularly in economics with the transition to marginalist economics of Pareto and Edgeworth and in philosophy through the lens of Charles Stevenson's critique of David Hume. I made a promise to you at that time, that we would show how those currents in philosophy and economics played into and buttressed the transition in thinking about politics which is our central concern. So this class and the next one, where I have to deliver on that promise. You'll see from the title of the class Synthesizing Rights and Utility that I'm signalling that one of the reasons Mill is such an important figure is that he takes on the tension between the two enlightenment goals of, on the one hand, respecting individual rights and on the other having a scientific theory of politics that we've been talking about since the beginning of the course. For him we'll see that the scientific theory of politics is unpacked as his utilitarian theory of social organization and his conception of rights comes out of what he calls the harm principle which is spelled out in perhaps his most important work, a short essay by the name of On Liberty. So, we're going to spend most of our time talking about Mill's argument in On Liberty, although we will also pay some attention to his book on utilitarianism. But because the concept of harm is so central to Mill's discussion, I thought it would be useful to start out by just getting some sense of what it means to harm someone. What would you say it means to harm somebody? Well, for example all sorts of physical assault. Physical attack, assault, absolutely that's clear and unambiguous case. What would you say constitutes harm? Theft. Theft. Stealing from somebody, that would seem to constitute harm as well. Any other suggestions? Drugs for example. Taking drugs. Who are you harming when you take drugs? Yourself. You're harming yourself when you take drugs. Okay, so we're going to see that, that starts to put on more complex matters that Mill is going to talk about. What else? Emotional it is. Hurting somebody's feelings, emotional damage that can be done to people. These, you can start to see once we get into these more subtle and nuanced cases, are going to create a lot of at a minimum borderline issues and perhaps some deeper conceptual issues when we think about the meaning of the term harm and the work that's going to have to do for Mill. What I'm going to do is give you the framework within which he thinks about these and other problems and we'll come back to some similar arguments later. Let me just tell you a little bit about the man. He published On Liberty in 1859. It was one of his more mature works. He lived between 1806 and 1873. His father was a man by the name of James Mill who was a contemporary and disciple of Jeremy Bentham. He was a true believer. He was a Jeremy Bentham groupie if you like. James Mill was determined to raise his son on Bentham's utilitarian principles. He wanted to have them the most utilitarian possible education that he could for his son. So he didn't send him to school. He home schooled. He hired tutors. He didn't want to waste time on all the extracurricular activities in his school. It turned out that the young John Stuart Mill was in fact a genius. He spoke fluent Greek and Latin before the age of seven. He was doing calculus, very advanced calculus at a very early age. So he was precocious and brilliant child and he was raised, as I said, by these tutors at home and he had virtually no other life. The net effect of this was that at around the age of 17 or 18, he had a nervous breakdown. He was so isolated. He was a kind of super nerd, had no social life. He had a terrible time emotionally and never quite forgave either his father or Bentham for having had this mindless utilitarian regime inflicted upon him. Even though as we'll see, he incorporates and builds on Bentham's utilitarianism, he has a much more measured view of it and recognizes some of its important limitations. So, that's a sense in which he is not an extreme thinker in the way that Bentham was. He's a much more nuanced and subtle thinker. We'll get into some of those subtleties. It's also worth just taking a moment before we get into Mill to talk about the role of his wife Harriet Taylor Mill, particularly in a course like this where we're looking at the most influential ideas in the modern West it's tends to be a very male-centric course. So, it's important to notice that Mill himself acknowledged that Harriet had a huge role in the writing of this book. In fact, he says that they discussed every single sentence between them and that nothing stayed in this book that wasn't endorsed by her and in important respect. It was their joint effort. Now, once we get into Mill's argument, it's going to get complex and nuanced as I said. But going in, we're fortunate that actually has one important commonality with Bentham if not either. That is that he reduces his entire doctrine to a single paragraph. So, we can start out with the bumper sticker version of his theory. He says the object of this essay, this is the essay On Liberty, is to assert one very simple principle as entitled to govern absolutely the dealings of society with the individual in the way of compulsion and control. Whether the means used be physical force in the form of legal penalties or the moral coercion of public opinion. That principle is that the sole end, notice how categorical this is, the sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action if any of their number is self-protection. That's the only reason you can interfere with somebody. The only purpose for which power can rightfully be exercised over any member of a civilized community against his will is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant. He cannot be rightfully 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. Those 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 does otherwise. To justify that, to justify compelling him, the conduct from which it is desired to deter him must be calculated to produce evil to someone else. The only part of the conduct of anyone for which is amenable to society is that which concerns others. In the part which merely concerns himself, his independence, his a right absolute over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign. Now, we're going to spend quite a lot of time talking about the component parts of this. But do you feel like you understand what he's saying? After all, he doesn't pull his punches here. Does it make sense to you, not in the sense of whether you agree with it, you understand it? Yes. So, how would you articulate it back? He believes that you can be- you can compel somebody else. And you can sort of affect other people, but only in a way that is not detrimental to that person. So, this is an important distinction between what he's going to call self-regarding and other regarding behavior. The things that affect you alone, nobody can interfere with you. But if you harm others, then society steps in. That's the basic intuitive notion. It's like a nation and the UN, you have sovereignty. But if you're if you're really reckless. Somebody must step in. We'll get into that later and partly depends whether the UN has that capacity to step in but it's certainly as a suggestive analogy. Now, what is protected? What's protected is what he refers to self-regarding actions. So let's think of a few cases that are in some way similar to the ones you brought up at the beginning, but in some ways different. What would he say about alcohol? What do you think? Well, he would say that you can drink. You can drink, sure! And in fact this was a live issue in his day because the people were talking about prohibition and it would become a live issue in America in the subsequent decades from when he wrote it, but this is clearly self-regarding. He says, "To interfere with somebody for their own good is unacceptable." So, we don't make paternalistic judgments. Starting to sound very analogous to the denial of the possibility of interpersonal comparisons of utility. You want to get to destroy your brain drinking, that's your affair. What about drunk driving? Well, he would say that this should potentially hurt someone because you can kill someone when you drive drunk. I think that's exactly what he would say. So, we won't stop people drinking, but we will stop them from driving drunk because then they really are a threat to others. So, he would make that kind of distinction. What about smoking pot? Where would he be? Would he be with Colorado? Yeah, it's not a problem. Not a problem. Not a problem. No problem smoking pot. You can get stoned out of your mind every day as long as you don't hurt anybody else. What about taking heroin? Certainly more detrimental to yourself than pot, but detriment to yourself is not a concern as detriment to others. And I think you can be a raging heroin addict and not be affecting anybody else. So what about a parent who is taking heroin or is stoned on pot all the time, and as a result is not taking care of his children? That's the problem. Would the government intervene, do you think? Social services. Certainly. Okay. What might social services do? Take away the child. Take away. They might say exactly. I think that's how Mill would think about it. They might say, "Well, you're free to live and have drug abuse binge every weekend. But if that's the case, we have to protect your children." So I think that's exactly what they would say. Those would be the kinds of lines that they would try to draw if applying his harm principle. What about prostitution? That's the tricky one, because we can say that prostitute has the right to do whatever she pleases. But then, if you think. After all, the interaction between the prostitute and the John is a parade of superior transaction. They wouldn't do it if they weren't made better off by it, so it's a voluntary transaction. To the point, because, first, she can harm herself through this process. The prostitute might become harmed. She's harming herself because of what she's doing. She's harming herself? Mill would say, "Yeah, if she may well be harming herself, but after all we said the harm principle is not there to protect you from yourself. It's in that sense of self-regarding action." So crimes like prostitution are sometimes called "Victimless crimes." And Mill would have a hard time I think ruling them out. Is there any other way we could. Yeah, you look troubled by this. When you are regarding prostitution. I think up to a certain point you can regard it potentially as victimless. But it's very easy to turn the corner to sex trafficking, sexual slavery. And when you take that corner, it's certainly not benefiting everybody. That's a very interesting observation. The prostitute is often in the grip of the power of a pimp, or a sex trafficker, or sex trafficking organization. I think you're dead right to say that at some point you're going to cross a line there and Mill is going to have to confront the fact that some apparent choices are so coerced that we don't regard them as voluntary at all. And this is what lawyers sometimes refer to as "Adhesion contracts." If for instance, after a hurricane hits, the only store with the water in the neighborhood starts to jacks up the price by a thousand percent, what we call "Price gouging." And people buy it because they're going to die if they don't get water. This, again, is what lawyers call it a kind of adhesion contract. And so, over some line, we're going to have to say no harm is relevant here, but notice this doesn't have anything to do with the moral turpitude of prostitution. So many employment contracts, sweatshop contracts, and so on would be objected to as adhesion contracts. But what Mill would be unequivocal about would be the fact that we don't like prostitution wouldn't be a reason to prescribe it. One more thing, it also can destroy the institution of marriage. It can hurt somebody else. It can destroy the institution of marriage. That's certainly an argument that gets made. And we'll see later in the course when we talk about Lord Devlin in connection with the anti-enlightenment and tradition. He makes exactly that argument for outlawing prostitution that it destroys the social fabric, the norms, the institutions of society. Mill is unequivocal that there's no such thing, that the only thing there is, is individual rights and freedoms. There's no social interest for Mill. There is no right of society that can be imposed upon the individual. Mill is acutely aware that we have deep disagreements about moral values in society and to impose one person's moral values on another is just simply to do that. And you might appeal to the name of factoring in society's interest but really you would be imposing the tyranny of the majority opinion upon the individual. So he wouldn't be impressed by that kind of argument. But we will return to it as I said later.
