Rawls J. Lectures on the History of Political Philosophy

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(ii) Reasons of excellence and ideals of human perfection, speciﬁed by

reference to our, or to society’s, ideals of excellence and perfection. (Utili-

tarianism, II: ¶6; On Liberty, IV: ¶¶5, 7. All of IV: ¶¶3–12 is important.)

(iii) Reasons of dislike or disgust, or of preference, where the disliking,

disgust, or preference cannot be supported by reasons of right and wrong,

as deﬁned in Utilitarianism, V: ¶¶14–15.

Thus, one way to read Mill’s Principle of Liberty as a principle of public

reason is to see it as excluding certain kinds of reasons from being taken

into account in legislation, or in guiding the moral coercion of public opin-

ion (as a social sanction). In the case of public reason, the three kinds of

reasons given above count for zero.

I call your attention here to a question of interpretation. I have read the

ﬁrst clause of the Principle of Liberty as saying that society should never in-

terfere with an individual’s belief and conduct unless that person’s beliefs

and conduct injure the legitimate interests, or the moral rights, of others.

This doesn’t always ﬁt with Mill’s own way of stating the principle. He says

in I: ¶9: “. . . the sole end for which mankind are warranted...ininterfer-

ing with the liberty of action of any of their number is self-protection.” Or:

“...topreventharmtoothers.” Or: “the conduct...mustbecalculated to

produce evil to some one else.” Or: “the only part of the conduct of any-

one for which he is amenable to society, is that which concerns others.”

And in I: ¶11 he speaks of conduct “hurtful to others,” and in IV: ¶3, of

conduct that “affects prejudicially the interests of others.”

Obviously much that others do concerns us, but that is not to say that

what they do produces evil to us. As Mill says in IV: ¶3, “The acts of an indi-

vidual may be hurtful to others . . . without going the length of violating

any of their constituted rights.” “Concern” and “affect” are general terms

covering much. We must decide, then, how to resolve this implicit ambigu-

ity and vagueness of Mill’s language and to do so in a way that makes sense

of his text. To this end I read the leading text as given by III: ¶9 and sup-

ported by IV: ¶3. So we say the following, drawing on IV: ¶3:

First Clause: Society should never interfere with the individual’s beliefs

and conduct by law or punishment, or by moral opinion as coercive, unless

the individual’s beliefs and conduct injure—that is, wrong or violate—the

legitimate interests of others, either in express legal provisions (assumed to

be justiﬁed), or by tacit understanding ought to be considered as (moral)

rights.

This still needs some commentary and interpretation, but we are now

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getting a deﬁnite doctrine. Now let’s take bits at the start of III: ¶9 and later

parts of the paragraph to render it more exact: Society is to allow the culti-

vation of individuality “within the limits imposed by the (moral) rights and

the (legitimate) interests of others.” Hence, individuals are “to be held to

rigid rules of justice for the sake of others” and within these limits they are

to give fair play to the nature of different persons, allowing them to lead

different lives as they choose, because “whatever crushes individuality is

despotism.”

Accepting this for the moment, I continue the exposition.

Now, Mill is not denying that in other contexts—say in the context of

personal life, or in the internal life of various associations—considerations

that fall short of violating the (moral) rights of others can be sound rea-

sons. Of course they can be. Nor is he denying that our dislike of and our

annoyance with the beliefs and conduct of others is painful to us, even

when it does not affect our rights or legitimate interests. Of course it is

painful! And so it is a disutility, to use the general term.

His view is that to advance the permanent interests of humankind as a

progressive being, society does better if it resolutely adheres to the Princi-

ple of Liberty which directs it to exclude the three kinds of reasons noted

above. Thus, Mill’s principle imposes a strategic constraint on the reasons

admissible in public political discussion and thereby speciﬁes an idea of

public reason. (Compare this to the idea of public reason in Restatement.)

3. Second Clause: If certain kinds of individual belief and conduct do

injure the legitimate interests and moral rights of others, as shown by the

considerations of right and wrong admissible by the ﬁrst clause, then public

discussion may properly take up the question whether those beliefs and

conduct should be in some way restricted. The question may then be dis-

cussed on its merits, but of course excluding the three kinds of reasons

noted above.

Observe that because injury to the legitimate interests or moral rights

of others (as currently understood, or speciﬁed) can alone justify the inter-

ference of law and moral opinion, it does not follow that it always does jus-

tify it. The question remains to be discussed on its merits in terms of ad-

missible reasons.

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2. To publicly justify our political judgments to others is to convince them by public

reason, that is, by ways of reasoning and inference appropriate to fundamental political

questions, and by appealing to beliefs, grounds, and political values it is reasonable for oth

ers also to acknowledge and endorse. Rawls, Restatement, p. 27. See also §26.

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Third Clause: The question must be settled by those merits.

4. In conclusion, the substantive force of Mill’s principle of liberty is

given by the three kinds of reasons excluded by the ﬁrst clause, with the

last two clauses saying in effect that reasons of right and wrong, as deﬁned

in Utilitarianism, Chapter V: ¶¶14–15, especially reasons of moral rights and

justice, must settle the case. The result is that only certain kinds of rea-

sons—only certain kinds of utilities—are appropriate to invoke in Mill’s

form of public reason.

§4. On Natural (Abstract) Right

1. Let’s ask why Mill said (in I: ¶11) that he would forgo any advantage

to his argument which could be derived from the idea of abstract right as a

thing independent from utility.

One obvious reason, certainly, is simply to inform the reader of his

philosophical position and to reafﬁrm his ofﬁcial utilitarian view that all

rights, whether moral, legal, or institutional, are founded on utility (Utilitar-

ianism, V: ¶25).

Utilitarians generally recognized the various rights of private property,

for example. They held that these rights are justiﬁed because they promote

the general welfare. But it is also possible, in principle at least, to argue that

restrictions on the right of private property, or its abolition altogether,

might be even more favorable to the general welfare, in view of present or

future social conditions.

Mill accepts the general form of this argument. The special features

of his view arise from his interpretation of utility in terms of the perma-

nent interests of man as a progressive being. The idea that rights have

a philosophical justiﬁcation apart from utility, whether utility is under-

stood in Bentham’s or in Mill’s way, or in some other way, all utilitarians re-

jected. This was one of their objections to the idea of natural rights, which

Bentham described as “nonsense on stilts.”

2. But a second reason why Mill mentions his disavowal of abstract

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3. Bentham said in Anarchical Fallacies: “Natural rights is simple nonsense: natural and

imprescriptible rights, rhetorical nonsense,—nonsense on stilts.” See Nonsense upon Stilts,

ed. Jeremy Waldron (London: Methuen, 1987), p. 53. This book contains the text of three

historically important critiques of the rights of man, those of Bentham, Burke, and Marx.

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right is that his formulation of the principle of liberty may seem to presup-

pose it. This he wants to deny.

But if the overwhelming majority of society wants very much to inter-

fere with the self-regarding conduct of but a few others—and Mill, in his

strong chapter on “Liberty of Thought and Discussion,” says they have no

right to do so (On Liberty, II: ¶1)—we want to ask why shouldn’t they? On

some ways of understanding utility, the sum of utility would certainly seem

to increase.

Mill also says at the same place (II: ¶1) that the principle of liberty of

thought and discussion is to govern absolutely the dealings of society with

the individual when the question of compulsion and control arises. I as-

sume here that Mill means by “absolutely” that the principle of liberty ad-

mits of no exceptions, that it always holds under the normal conditions of

the democratic age (at least barring very special circumstances). One is led

to ask how the principle of liberty could always hold and allow of no excep-

tions, even in the case of a single individual, unless the principle invoked

some natural right which could not be overridden.

Here we have to keep in mind Mill’s statement in II: ¶1, where he says

that even a whole people lack the power (right) to silence political discus-

sion, even against a single person. This power, whether exercised by the

people or by their government, is illegitimate. He says: “If all mankind mi-

nus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary

opinion, mankind would be no more justiﬁed in silencing that one person,

than he, if he had the power, would be justiﬁed in silencing mankind.”

Once again, this prompts us to ask: how can the number of persons fail to

make any difference as to the justiﬁcation of silencing discussion unless

some doctrine of natural, or abstract, right lies in the background? Is Mill

simply indulging in a rhetorical ﬂourish?

3. I interpret the passages that suggest a doctrine of abstract right as

Mill’s way of saying that it is better for the advancement of the permanent

interests of man as a progressive being that the public political conception

of the coming democratic society always afﬁrm the principle of liberty

without exception, even when applied to the case of a single individual dis-

senter.

Keep in mind that what Mill is doing is advocating the principle of lib-

erty as a principle subordinate to the principle of utility to govern the

public political discussions as to how to regulate basic political and social

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institutions. Recall that he regards these institutions as ways to form and

to educate a national character suitable for the democratic age. He is say-

ing that when we understand the role of the principle of liberty and the

present and future conditions of its application, we will see that there are

no good reasons founded on utility for making any exceptions when utility

is properly understood as the permanent interests of man as a progressive

being.

This interpretation is conﬁrmed by what Mill says in II: ¶1. He writes:

“Were an opinion a personal possession of no value except to the owner; if

to be obstructed in the enjoyment of it were simply a private injury, it

would make some difference whether the injury was inﬂicted only on a few

persons or on many. But the peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an

opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the exist-

ing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those

who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of

exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose what is almost as great a

beneﬁt, the clearer perception...of truth, produced by its collision with

error.”

Of course, Mill has in mind opinion on general matters of doctrine, po-

litical and social, moral, philosophical and religious. He believes it is in the

permanent interests (security and individuality) of man as a progressive be-

ing to know which of these general doctrines are true, or most reasonable;

and he believes also that the necessary condition of reasonable belief on

these questions is complete freedom of discussion and inquiry. “The beliefs

which we have most warrant for have no safeguard to rest on, but a stand-

ing invitation to the whole world to prove them unfounded” (II: ¶8).

Thus by silencing one person in expressing an opinion, we do injury to

the public process of free discussion. And this free process of discussion is

necessary for advancing the permanent interests of man as a progressive

being in the present age. Moreover, the injury done to free discussion is

done without any compensating advantage. Not only does the silencing of

discussion educate to the wrong kind of national character, but it tends to

deprive society and its members of the beneﬁts of truth. This last point is

made in On Liberty, II: ¶¶3–11, the “infallibility argument,” in which Mill ar-

gues that no human, regardless of his convictions, is infallible; and if all

who express contrary opinions are suppressed, those who are wrong will

lose the chance to discover the truth.

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Conclusion

As we have discussed it, the idea of public reason involves the idea of ad-

missible reasons vs. those reasons that are not admissible. But grounds

must be given for why all reasons are not admissible, since it is easy to think

that surely all reasons should be tallied up. Different political conceptions of

justice may, of course, hold different reasons as admissible and offer differ-

ent grounds for doing so.

In justice as fairness, the grounds for limiting the reasons admissible in

public reason are the liberal principle of legitimacy—the principle that the

collective political power of citizens on matters of constitutional essentials

and basic questions of distributive justice should turn on the appeal to po-

litical values that all citizens may reasonably be expected to endorse, and so

rest on a shared public understanding. Given the fact of reasonable plural-

ism, which free institutions lead and sustain, citizens have a duty to one an-

other to exercise their power in accordance with this principle. A demo-

cratic society in which this is done realizes an ideal of civility.

Mill’s grounds for his idea of public reason are different, of course, but

hardly antithetical. His principle of liberty along with his principles of

moral right and justice, and the other principles of the modern world, are

all principles subordinate to the supreme principle of utility. The principle

of liberty is to be strictly followed in public discussion. This is part of soci-

ety’s basic institutions educating citizens to a certain national character:

one that, of course, takes the equal liberties for granted, and promotes in

the most effective way the permanent interests of humankind.

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4. See Restatement, pp. 40–41 and 90–91, on the liberal principle of legitimacy and the

fact of reasonable pluralism. See also Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia Uni-

versity Press, 1993; paperback ed., 1996), pp. 137, 217.

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mill iv

His Doctrine as a Whole

§1. Introduction

1. Once again, I state the question we want to consider about Mill’s

doctrine. I have supposed that his principles of the modern world, as he

calls them, his principles of justice and liberty, have roughly the same con-

tent as the two principles of justice. Hence Mill’s well-ordered society

would have, I think, basic institutions quite similar to those of the well-

ordered society of justice as fairness.

The name “the principles of the modern world” is taken from The Sub-

jection of Women, IV: ¶2, where Mill says that “the law of servitude in mar-

riage is a monstrous contradiction to all the principles of the modern

world.” Elsewhere in Subjection, Mill uses other designations such as “the

principles involved in modern society” in I: ¶23; “the principle(s) of the

modern movement in morals and politics” in IV: ¶5. He speaks also of “the

peculiar character of the modern world,” which is followed by a statement

of the nature of modern institutions and social ideas, and the principles of

an open society allowing freedom of movement and unfettered choice of

individuals, and securing equality of opportunity, as opposed to the aristo-

cratic orders of the past in which all were born to a ﬁxed social position (I:

¶13).

2. The main principles of the modern world would seem to be the fol-

lowing, although Mill does not discuss their relative importance. All refer-

ences are to The Subjection of Women.

(a) The principle of equal justice and equality of (basic) rights.

II: ¶¶11–12, 16; IV: ¶¶3, 5, 9, 18 (see also Utilitarianism, V: ¶¶4–10)

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1. As before, because there is no standard, readily available text, I have referred to

paragraphs within each chapter. This necessitates numbering those paragraphs by hand.

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(b) The principle of liberty.

I: ¶13; IV: ¶¶9–20 (see also On Liberty, I: ¶¶9–12)

of life.

I: ¶¶13–15

(d) Equality of opportunity.

I: ¶¶23–24

(e) The principle of free and fair competition, economic and social.

I: ¶¶14–16

(f ) The principle of (social) cooperation as among equals.

II: ¶¶7–12

(g) Principle of modern marriage as equality between husband and

wife.

I: ¶25; II: ¶¶12, 16; IV: ¶¶2, 15–16, 18

(h) True principle of public charity: to help people to help themselves.

IV: ¶11

3. I comment that Mill’s feminism, as we might call it, is different from

much of the more radical feminism of the present day. His feminism simply

means full justice and equality for women, and doing away with the subor-

dination to which women had for so long been subject. The position of

women in marriage Mill saw as intolerable. He had in mind, for example,

the fact that at law, their property became their husband’s, and that they

owed obedience to their husband. Leaving royalty aside, the social subordi-

nation of women stood out, for Mill, as “an isolated fact in modern social

institutions, a solitary breach of what has become their fundamental law; a

single relic of an old world of thought and practice exploded in everything

else, but retained in the one thing of most universal interest” (I: ¶16).

Although this seems clear and perhaps even obvious to many today, it

was not so in Mill’s time. His contemporaries thought him a fanatic on two

subjects. One was the increase of population, which he thought depressed

the well-being of the working classes; the other was the subordination of

women. He was viewed as simply unbalanced on these topics; people

shook their heads and stopped listening.

But Mill saw these topics as related. The well-being of the working

classes required limiting the size of families; yet this was also required for

the equality of women. Moreover, equality between husband and wife be-

fore the law was necessary if the family were not to be a school for despo-

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tism, “while the family, justly constituted, would be the real school of the

virtues of freedom,” as he put it in II: ¶12. So long as the family is a school

for despotism, the character of men is gravely corrupted and this weakens

the desirable tendencies to equality in all the institutions of society. So

while Mill’s feminism was certainly rooted in his conviction of the grave

wrong of women’s subordination, it was also supported in his mind by the

far-reaching social good of realizing equal justice for women.

§2. The Framework of Mill’s Doctrine

1. We now look at the framework of Mill’s doctrine—its basic moral

and psychological assumptions—in order to see how it is that his utilitarian-

ism, presented initially as that of Bentham and Mill’s father, should turn

out to lead to his principles of the modern world.

In approaching this question we ﬁrst examined his conception of utility

with its decided preference criterion. Next we discussed his idea of the

moral rights of justice and his apparent two-part criterion for identifying

the basic rights of individuals. Then we considered his principle of liberty

as a principle to govern public reason and its status as a principle subordi-

nate to that of utility. All this leads us to ask:

First, why is Mill so conﬁdent that his principles of the modern world,

his principles of justice and of liberty with the others listed above, are prin-

ciples that would, if realized in basic institutions, maximize utility in the

long run as deﬁned by the permanent interests of humankind as a progres-

sive being. Here, of course, utility is understood in the light of Utilitarian-

ism, II: ¶¶3–10, and the idea of the permanent interests of humankind is

from On Liberty, I: ¶11.

We need to know also how Mill’s doctrine deals with values other than

happiness and in what speciﬁc ways his doctrine relies on a psychological

account of human nature. This leads us to ask:

Second, whether Mill’s doctrine includes and gives weight to certain

perfectionist values and ideals, falling under the admirable and the excel-

lent, which are ideas he recognizes; or whether, once the conception of util-

ity as happiness is granted, his doctrine rests solely on psychological princi-

ples that describe human nature at its deepest level.

2. Without being fully conﬁdent that this latter alternative is correct, I

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conclude our study of Mill by sketching (I can’t do more than that) a psy-

chological reading of his utilitarianism as a whole formulated as a political

and social doctrine to apply to the basic structure. This still allows that in

other situations his view might take a different, though in general a subor-

dinate form. The political and social permanent interests would normally

override more particular and subordinate considerations.

This reading starts from the idea that happiness (as deﬁned in Utilitari-

anism, II: ¶¶3–10) alone is good, and that happiness is to be maximized by

political and social arrangements always looking to the long run. This gives

the principle of utility in one of its political and social meanings. It is, I sug-

gest, the supreme moral principle in Mill’s political doctrine. Or more

safely, it is the supreme principle of his account of moral right and wrong,

and of political and social justice.

3. As I have said, to get his more deﬁnite conclusions Mill relies on a

quite speciﬁc psychological conception of human nature. He thinks this

conception is determinate enough to yield his principles of basic justice and

essential liberties given his conception of utility as the permanent interests

of humankind (I abbreviate the phrase) and given the conditions of the

modern world with its present tendencies. Our problem, then, is to indicate

his psychological ﬁrst principles and sketch how Mill might have thought

they lead to that conclusion when combined with his other assumptions.

The main psychological principles seem to be these:

(a) The decided preference criterion: Utilitarianism, II: ¶¶5–8.

(b) The principle of dignity: ibid., II: ¶¶4, 6–7; Liberty, III: ¶6.

¶¶8–11.

(d) The Aristotelian principle: ibid., II: ¶8 (see TJ, sec. 65).

(e) The principle of individuality: On Liberty, III: ¶¶1–9.

(f ) The recognition of our natural good: Utilitarianism, III: ¶¶10–11.

The ﬁrst three we have discussed in lectures I and II.

The last principle is described as the capacity we have to recognize our

natural good and to distinguish it from our apparent good as a mere artifact

of social and associationist learning, often by some kind of reward and pun-

ishment. No doubt there are better ways to state these principles, but for

the moment this list sufﬁces.

My basic idea is that the role of these psychological principles in Mill’s

doctrine is this: along with the normative principle of utility and other con-

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