Mill On liberty

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pay his debts, the public servant who is drunk only while off duty and the
cocaine addict who is as kind and helpful to others as they may reasonably
expect under prevailing social conventions, should remain perfectly free from
legal or social penalties.
The question arises, however, whether those putatively self-regarding
acts are, like expression, really other-regarding ones which, when violations of
others rights and other interests are absent, may be treated as if they were self-
regarding because coercion is generally inexpedient. The answer, it seems, is
that these acts are not like the case of expression. Expression always carries a
risk of harm to others, by damaging their reputations, or misleading them, and
so on. It remains other-regarding even outside the special situations where its
suppression is held to be expedient. But drinking on duty, or drinking with a
known tendency to become violent toward others when drunk, is arguably a
different type of act than merely drinking with other consenting adults, of the
usual tendencies, on a free evening. Merely consuming alcohol does not pose
any risk of harm to others beyond their mere dislike. To be removed from the
self-regarding class, drinking, it seems, must, unlike expression, be conjoined
with some additional factor from which the drinking itself is logically separable.
The drinker must have some pre-existing tendency to harm others, for example,
or he must have voluntarily incurred certain duties of employment, marriage,
loan repayment and so on, none of which are necessarily associated with
drinking.
What about the damage to society occasioned when self-indulgent behavior
eventually leads to a complete dependence on the taxpayer? In Mill s view,
that merely contingent, or, as it may be called, constructive injury which a
101
THE ARGUMENT OF ON LI BERTY
person causes to society . . . is one which society can afford to bear, for the sake
of the greater good of human freedom (IV.11, p. 282). He argues that society
has better means than coercion to influence its members to be prudent and
temperate workers:
Armed not only with all the powers of education, but with the ascendency
which the authority of a received opinion always exercises over the
minds who are least fitted to judge for themselves; and aided by the
natural penalties which cannot be prevented from falling on those who
incur the distaste or the contempt of those who know them; let not
society pretend that it needs, besides all this, the power to issue commands
and enforce obedience in the personal concerns of individuals.
(ibid.)
He apparently assumes that, in general, an ordinary person, capable of being
acted on by rational consideration of distant motives , will not voluntarily
become dependent on others for his subsistence (ibid.). If society fails to
educate any considerable number of its members up to this threshold level of
rationality, then it has only itself to blame for the consequences (ibid.).
That assumption is also implicit in his responses to the other two
objections.
Bad examples (IV.11)
Mill admits that a bad example may have a pernicious effect, especially the
example of doing wrong to others with impunity to the wrong-doer (IV.11, p.
283). But he emphasizes that we are now speaking of conduct which, while it
does no wrong to others, is supposed to do great harm to the agent himself
(ibid.). Such self-regarding misconduct must generally set a more salutary than
hurtful example to other people capable of self-improvement (ibid.). For if
[the example] displays the misconduct, it displays also the painful or degrading
consequences which, if the conduct is justly censured, must be supposed to be
in all or most cases attendant on it (ibid.).
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LI MI TS TO SOCI AL AUTHORI TY
Paternalism (IV.12)
As for the third objection, Mill argues in effect that the majority is far more
likely than the individual to be wrong about what is useful or suitable to him in
his self-regarding concerns. The lessons drawn from experience by the majority
are more likely to be right when it comes to other-regarding concerns:
On questions of social morality, of duty to others, the opinion of the
public, that is, of an overruling majority, though often wrong, is likely to
be still oftener right; because on such questions they are only required to
judge of their own interests; of the manner in which some mode of
conduct, if allowed to be practised [by everyone], would affect
themselves.
(IV.12, p. 283) [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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