Keynote Address by Prof. Mark Philp

Emeritus Professor, University of Warwick & Emeritus Fellow, Oriel College, University of Oxford

24th October 2025

How should we read On Liberty?   This is not easy: it is written in often dense 19th C prose. Very few sentences  short enough! And the ideas can be expressed in ways that are somewhat convoluted. 

There are a number of questions you could ask while reading the tex. And its good to be clear on hat question you want to answer. 

1.        Perhaps the first obvious question is: What does it say/argue – and I come back to this.

2.        But we might also ask: WHY is he making this argument? – 

Is it a  response to a specific historical context;  a response to Biographical context – autobiography – his own individuality defended against ‘cram’ – his mental breakdown. Mill, in the Autobiography, for example, defends himself against the charge that he's just been crammed with knowledge by his father, who did slightly strange things, like teaching him ancient Greek at the age of three!  Making him teach his sister Latin (and so learning it himself) at the age of 6.  Taking him on long walks during which James Mill set out his ideas on Political Economy, which JS Mill was then expected to distil into prose when they returned home.  So there are a range of issues for Mill himself about how he defends himself against charges of simply doing what his father trained him to do. He also had a series of mental crises, as he called them, which involved real doubts about the beliefs that he held. He had a very complicated relationship with Harriet Taylor, whom he eventually married. His own relationships with his family broke down in many cases. He's not an easy man to warm to.

He's clearly a very elitist character. He talks, for example, about his essays being a form of mental pemmican -which is a kind of hard biscuit that they used on nineteenth-century ships to keep people alive—for future intelligentsia to chew on. So he’s not immediately approachable or accessible. Why he’s making this argument then becomes quite an important question. Another important question is who he’s in conversation with. It’s clear that he’s very influenced by Tocqueville and by a range of other European thinkers, and at the same time, resists the idea that he might be a disciple of Comte and the Saint-Simonians. He resists their view of a kind of controlling, centralised technocracy, but he’s really interested in lots of their emerging ideas about social psychology and the sociology of individuality.

Another question to ask is: should this essay be read just as a response to a very particular mid-century context? He refers to things like societies for the promotion of morals of the working classes, temperance societies which are trying to abolish the selling of alcohol, and Sabbatarianism—the desire to keep the Sabbath sacred. Throughout the essay, he is dealing with a set of concerns about how to respond to this increasing set of demands by a do-gooder community that thinks it knows best for other people.

We also need to ask a further question about how this essay fits with other essays, such as the essay on utilitarianism, but also The System of Logic—particularly the final section of Book 6 on the Art of Life, which is an extremely important document for understanding about what he thinks about the relationship between principles (like liberty) and utility. And as well as The System of Logic, there’s also the Autobiography. And, we can also ask: who’s he making the argument for? Who’s the intended audience? What was their response? How was it read?

How you answer those questions will inevitably influence how you read exactly what he’s saying. The trouble with that is that it means, to understand anything, you need to understand everything. And since that’s not possible, what I’m going to do is to follow what I think is the main line of argument: to examine some apparent weaknesses in it, and to suggest a slightly different reading of what he’s saying in the text.

What he says at the beginning about what the text is doing is pretty clear. In the opening section, he sets out in brief compass an account of the challenges, in a way that disposes with a set of concerns. He’s fundamentally not concerned with tyrannical government. He thinks that, for the most part, it is no longer a concern in most Western societies, largely thanks to the rise of constitutionalism, the adoption of principles of representation, and the parliamentary character of most European regimes. We might, in retrospect, think he was being wildly over-optimistic in many of those respects, but that’s another issue.

However, a second issue arises if we’re no longer concerned with that. In those states, they’ve moved from a distrust of ruling power to seeing the ruling power as an expression of the will of the people. And if you think that the ruling power is an expression of the will of the people, then you don’t need to be protected against that will, because it is an expression of your will. It’s a kind of Rousseauian picture. For Mill, this perspective leads to the tyranny of the majority—the rule of the most powerful—and then he expands that claim into one about the rule of the most powerful people in society. He’s increasingly worried about the likings and dislikings of society, and the generation of legal, but equally unacceptably, moral and opinionated interventions that impose costs on individuals who think differently from the majority of the population.

So there are a range of concerns being raised here, and the most basic one seems to be that society imposes its majoritarian beliefs on its members—that it resists distinctive and rival views and experiments in living. At its heart, this essay is really concerned with tolerating ideas and ways of living that we don’t like. As such, it stands in a long line of toleration literature. For Mill, law, custom, social convention, and moral beliefs have to respect individuals’ decisions about how to live their lives and should avoid interfering with those decisions. On Liberty aims to justify and to meet that concern. It aims to justify the principle that ‘the sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering in the liberty of any of its number is self-protection’—later defined in terms of the avoidance of harm. I’ll turn to that shortly.

He adds what we might call a historical condition to the principle: it’s applicable, he says, only to human beings in the maturity of their faculties—so not to young children, and not to backward states of society in which the race itself may be considered in its knowledge. Not barbarian states, or any people in the condition anterior to the time when mankind have attained the capacity of being guided to their own improvement by free and equal discussion, conviction, and persuasion. There is a whole set of questions raised by that point, and I don’t have the time to deal with them all. I find it the least persuasive, and in many respects the most troubling, aspect of Mill’s work. But I think it’s something that you can set aside and still think about the essay, even if you don’t accept that part.

Fundamentally, his claim is that after a suitably defined—but very ill-defined—point in the development of any society, the members of that society can make decisions about their own interests. From that point, they should be left to make those decisions, except where their behaviour harms others. So the central task he has is to justify that principle and its component claims, to show that it’s coherent as a guide, and to demonstrate that it has a clear set of cases of application.

An additional issue arises because he’s absolutely clear that he wants to make the case for that principle not on the ground of natural rights, but on the grounds of the utility of respecting the principle. That has raised a huge academic controversy, since utilitarianism is traditionally thought to be—if not directly opposed to doctrines of right—at least an insecure basis for something like a natural right. People are then unsure about what kind of utilitarianism Mill is arguing for here.

Mill’s introduction sets the focus on the defence of the freedom of individuals in advanced societies to think, speak, and act as they see fit, so long as their doing so doesn’t harm others. He allows harm to include actions and inactions—so failing to act in certain kinds of ways can count as harming others. He thinks this is an area of considerable scope in individual conduct, and he refers to the following: Liberty of conscience, in the most comprehensive sense; liberty of thought and feeling; absolute freedom of opinion and sentiment on all subjects—practical, speculative, scientific, moral, or theological—including the liberty of expressing and publishing opinions; liberty of tastes and pursuits, and of framing a plan of life for ourselves; liberty of combination and association, so you can organize collectively as well.

So what is Mill’s utilitarian case for this set of liberties? He doesn’t invoke a hedonistic sense of utility—it’s not about maximizing pleasure in any simple way. His understanding of utility, as he puts it, is “utility in the largest sense,” grounded in the permanent interests of man as a progressive being. He’s not claiming that every self-regarding act will promote utility (let alone pleasure or happiness), since it’s absolutely clear that some of us will make a mess of our lives—but we should be free to do that, he believes. We might think this is a form of rule utilitarianism, but that’s not how Mill defends it. Rule utilitarianism (with a hedonistic bent) is problematic because it seems unable to account for the fastidiousness about sticking to the rule when following it produces unhappiness.

So how does he reconcile utility and liberty? Mill is committed to happiness, but in a very expanded sense. He thinks a central component of happiness is individual development and the cultivation of individuality. That’s not something that you can impose on people. It’s about the cultivation of virtues and talents, and it presumes the agency of the individual. You can’t be a virtuous person without being an agent. We can help by providing conditions for the development of individuality, and non-interference is a key condition. It blocks intervention on direct utilitarian grounds—interfering just because I think you’d be happier if you did this rather than that. It blocks that, but it enables, in the long run and in the broadest terms, people to pursue their best lives by promoting their individuality. As Mill says, “If a person possesses any tolerable amount of common sense and experience, his own mode of laying out his existence is the best—not because it is the best in itself, but because it is his own mode.”

The other thing worth bearing in mind is that Mill is a value pluralist. That is, he thinks there are many different ways in which individuals can rationally choose to live their lives, because there are many potentially competing objective values, and we are each best able to judge how we wish to live and which values we wish to pursue. People with basic sense and experience in choosing their own path should be left alone to do that. The result is that he’s operating with a mix of what looks like a utilitarian logic—benefit, contribution to society, and so on—together with a more ancient Greek conception of the nature of a well-lived life and how to achieve that for individuals. He then tries to set out a number of arguments for each step of his case.

With respect to freedom of opinion, he believes that individual flourishing is undercut or distorted if people aren’t rationally self-directing—and they cannot be that if they can’t explore ideas. We can’t simply rule out some ideas as wrong or impermissible, because:

1.     Opinions that are compelled to silence might turn out to be true.

2.     The repressed opinion might be wrong, but it might contain some element of truth.

3.     To understand and appreciate the significance of a true opinion, it needs to be regularly examined and defended—so true opinions must be challenged.

4.     If they cease to be contested, the truth faces the danger of becoming dead dogma, and the ground for its acceptance and understanding becomes lost.

His position is therefore strongly against custom and habitual deference to received opinion. For individuals and societies, we need a lively and engaged sense of the value and pursuit of truth if we’re to be self-directing and achieve independent-mindedness. He acknowledges that there is an issue about how beliefs may be appropriately contested—how you express your beliefs can be problematic. His response is that since most of those who are most offensive are those who are in the minority, we can take a more tolerant view of that. It shouldn’t be a matter for legal prohibition; you can express disapproval for how people behave, but without imposing sanctions on them. He doesn’t really make a case for that, and contemporary theorists like Rawls and Habermas worry more about what it is to have a civil form of engagement with the ideas and conduct of other people.

In the third chapter, he provides a further layer of arguments concerning what the individual gains from living most fully under their own direction and in accordance with their own principles. He begins by admitting restrictions to the principle. For example, he says if someone points to a corn dealer in a crowd of starving and angry people and shouts that the man is hoarding corn and that people should lynch him—that’s an act of free speech, but it’s not one that Mill is prepared to accept. He also says you shouldn’t be a nuisance to people—but this is a very good example of how, when reading nineteenth-century texts, you need to use nineteenth-century dictionaries. The term “nuisance” then had the older meaning of being harmful or obnoxious, and “obnoxious” meant causing injury or harm. What we now regard as a nuisance is just a fact of everyday life, but in the nineteenth century it had a much stronger sense of involving harm to others.

Throughout, Mill argues for the presumption that in things that don’t concern others, the principle of individuality should assert itself. He sees the free development of individuality as one of the leading essentials of well-being, and an essential part of civilization. He cites Wilhelm von Humboldt on several occasions throughout the essay, and Humboldt has a very strong line about the importance of individuality. It’s interesting that he cites him as an authority. It doesn’t really set out the details of Humboldt’s case, nor does he give us that much in detail of his own.

Mill’s case for choice and self-direction as central to the development of character and judgment, as against the rote-like performance of custom, is set out in the following way. He refers to custom as “ape-like imitation.” (You have to recognize this is not a good argument—it’s a piece of rhetoric. No one wants to be ape-like). But he moves very quickly into quite a complex set of territories. One, in particular, is about the idea of strong and weak impulses, and strong and weak consciences. What Mill’s doing in this discussion is beginning to work out for himself, in many respects, his response to some Saint-Simonian thinking about active and passive character. He himself, in The System of Logic, makes it clear that he’s what we would call a necessarian. He believes that our behaviour is largely determined. He includes in that the possibility of a degree of emancipation from our education and from our social upbringing, and achieving a degree of self-determination within that.

He invents a discipline called ethology, which he sets out in The System of Logic, which is basically an early form of social psychology and political sociology—thinking about the way in which an individual’s psychological structure interacts with societal and political structures in the shaping of character and behaviour. So he sees society and history as profoundly shaping how we develop as individuals—but not fully determining it.

Part of what he’s doing is defending the value of individuality for people. And he thinks that society needs to create spaces in which individuals can develop and flourish within a system that would otherwise be determinist and simply reproduce them as automatons. He does this because individuality is seen as enriching the individual’s life, but by doing so it is also enriching the life of society. It’s enriching for the person because it makes his or her life his or hers. We can think of it as a coming into possession of oneself.  It is enriching society’s life because it avoids rote conformity and opens up new possibilities for living and experimentation which enable us to explore new potentialities within human life. We can see being able to act on the basis of reason and judgment, which are inevitably influenced by our upbringing and the society we live in, but where we’ve emancipated ourselves from tutelage to it—as a way of understanding Mill’s objectives in his  Autobiography . It’s really an account of his own emancipation from his education.

And the same kind of argument underlies On Liberty. Enabling this emancipation enriches society, basically, and—in crude terms—by ensuring that the best ideas and the best minds can flourish. When they flourish, they become dominant, as against the current system in which the dominant class makes sure that their views are ascendant even if they have no merit. He’s not worried about there being stronger specimens of human nature, because if they encroach on others or cause harm to others, then there’s a ground for intervention. But where they don’t, we need to allow it, and that will allow the flourishing and self-development of genius and idiosyncrasy. That mix of genius and idiosyncrasy is really central to Mill’s case.

Given the way in which people treated him as a child, there are some autobiographical elements coming into that. He does think that the despotism of custom is everywhere, and that it’s a standing hindrance to human advancement. He makes some pretty sweeping comments about the East in relation to customs being dominant and ensuring that societies make no progress. So he’s, in effect, drawing a line between European cultures and other kinds of cultures, in terms of the development of this relatively unique culture of self-determination and self-direction. So he’s made a case for the value of liberty of opinion, and he’s trying to defend the value of individuality that he sees European/Western society as having enabled.

Can he show that the harm principle is coherent? His basic claim can be reformulated as: wherever some harm is caused to another, society has jurisdiction in the matter. However, he also admits that every action may have some impact on another. That would empty his principle of all content. He deals with this by restricting his focus to intended effects that are reasonably foreseeable, direct, and harmful. So, an act is self-regarding when it doesn’t directly, intentionally, or foreseeably harm another—even if it has effects on them. But this begins to make the very simple principle look much less simple, since its criteria are being expanded by intentionality, foreseeability, and so on.

Moreover, he admits acts of omission can be as harmful as acts of commission, which adds to the complexity. There’s also an issue about how far we’re allowed to stick our noses into other people’s affairs. At the start of the essay, it looks as if Mill wants to stop people from poking into our business where it doesn’t concern them. But it seems we can criticize, we can reprove them, we can advise, we can do what we think it’s our duty to do—but not so as to impose extraneous costs on somebody for their action, for example, by collectively mobilizing against it. You can’t act to punish him, even if you act to avoid him. Mill relies quite a lot on the distinction between direct and indirect consequences of people’s actions. He uses the case of the man about to cross a bridge that’s in danger of falling down, where he says we can warn him—but at some point, he accepts that if the man chooses to do it, he should be allowed to do it. Allowing that kind of discussion doesn’t look as though it’s something he wants to endorse at the beginning of the book, but by the end of the book, it’s pretty clear that he does.

Another problem is that he says that acts that are violations of good manners may be rightly prohibited, such as offences against decency. That case needs filling out. He makes no attempt whatsoever to fill it out. Joel Feinberg, in the volume on Offense to Others in his four-volume book The Moral Limits of the Criminal Law, gives a very entertaining set of accounts of how you might fill that out. One example is engaging in indecent acts in public. The indecent acts don’t harm anybody—so why are you allowed to interfere with them?

One way of thinking about it is that it’s not a harm to interests; it’s an invasive privatization of public space. But Mill doesn’t make that argument, and it’s odd that he thinks you can just walk away from the issue he raises without making an argument. What’s clear is that he thinks his own society has become more and more concerned to interfere with what it regards as repugnant beliefs and actions—religious diversity, the use of alcohol or stimulants, doing things on the Sabbath, polygamy, and so on.

The way he makes his arguments, especially in the final chapter, is worth noting, because they’re often complex and heavily dependent on claims about utility—and sometimes about equality of impact. Requiring a medical certificate for dangerous drugs is partly objected to on the grounds of adding complexity and cost, where those costs are not evenly borne. Another example is his discussion of what he sees as a British habit of allowing people to act for others with the same freedom they are able to act for themselves. Fathers being able to determine how their children live—and also how their wives live.

Mill challenges that presumption, seeing the state as rightly having the power to supervise a person’s exercise of any power he has over another. So he challenges husbands’ power over their wives, and that comes back in his essay The Subjection of Women. He also challenges fathers’ powers over their children—for example, making the case for the responsibilities of parenthood, including a duty of parents to give their child an education fitting the child to perform his part well in life towards others and towards himself. So Mill says the state has a right to require a good education for every child.

But his expectation is that in requiring it, that would largely render it unnecessary for the state to provide such an education. In this, as elsewhere, he thinks multiple competing provisions are better than imposing a single view or dogma. What becomes clear is that Mill has a pretty capacious view of harm. It’s what we call an interest-affecting principle. If we’re both in for the same job and I get it, your interests have been harmed—but this seems to admit an extraordinarily wide range of cases into the “harm to others” category. And it severely narrows what can be left to individual judgment. That seems dramatically to undermine what he is trying to sell to us as a very simple principle.

In conclusion, I just want to suggest he might be making a slightly different argument. With respect to any harm, there remains a question in each case of how we should respond. We can subject it to legal prohibition, censorship, social opprobrium, or social sanctions—or we can choose to ignore it. But our reaction should be based on the utility of that reaction. The ground for any legitimate intervention is that it causes harm to some people, but the criterion for deciding how to react to that harm should be the utility of the reaction. If the first part of the essay puts most of the emphasis on the ground—that is, the harm—the second part puts most of the emphasis on the judgments of utility in responding to harms.

These enter in, firstly, because he links utility to self-development and attaches great weight to non-interference, because it facilitates self-development. In considering when and how to intervene in cases of harm, utility turns out largely to favour the case for non-interference. For example, towards the end of the essay, he turns to questions of government intervention to promote particular goods or values. He’s got a clear antipathy to government (In a period where government was not extensive. He thinks things are better done by individuals—by those most closely concerned with an issue. And he believes leaving people to do things as they see fit promotes their mental education, and that it’s always dangerous to increase the power of government.

He makes clear that the discussion he has of this set of concerns isn’t directly connected to his central theme, so there’s a puzzle about why he includes it. My sense is that he’s including it partly because it raises the question of the importance of utility in determining when interference should be involved. His view is that utility should be understood largely in relation to self-development. It’s integral to it, and it depends on the active development of individual character. That means bolting together utility and self-development in a way that creates a presumption in favour of liberty—particularly after the historical point where people become capable of self-direction. It militates strongly in favour of individual freedom, even when there has been harm.

The harm principle, then, is necessary but not sufficient for any intervention. And sufficiency, in most cases, will not be forthcoming because of the utility of allowing self-development and self-government. When he is strongly in favour of intervention—as in restricting the power of husbands over wives, and parents over children—he advocates intervention to enable self-direction on the part of the dependent. Similarly, in discussing prostitution and pimps, gambling and keepers of gambling houses, while he doesn’t come to a clear verdict, he clearly wants to avoid intervention on moralistic grounds. But he is alert to the strength of the case—for ensuring that those involved are not acting under duress or being stimulated to act for the interests and purposes of another, so that their interests are harmed.

So the harm principle is there, but the harm he’s principally concerned with protecting people from is harm that prevents and damages their self-development. The boundary between self-regarding and other-regarding is clearly fragile in Mill’s essay. The presumption in favour of self-development helps to shore it up. It serves to militate against intervention, even when there is some harm.

Now—and I’ve worked on Mill’s essay for a long time—it was only you asking me to do a lecture that made me think about this. But I am increasingly persuaded that what I once thought were objections—his worries about whether you can draw a clear line between self-regarding and other—are much less important than recognizing that what Mill’s doing here is turning the argument of utility into a principle for promoting individual self-development.

There’s a final question we might ask: is he right? What should we think about what he argues? I’ve no time to answer that.

I do think it’s a perfectly good question, and I think some approaches to the study of texts forget it. It’s a perfectly good question once we’ve made sure we understand his position. On Liberty is a difficult text, but most of the texts in the canon of political thought are difficult. They repay re-reading—and they repay re-reading often. In doing so, we build a repertoire of responses and interpretations. By reading them alongside other texts and arguing about the interpretations of others, we get better at it—better at the discipline of political theory, but also better at thinking about how we should organize society.

I said at the beginning: in order to know anything, we need to know everything—but we never know everything. I say this not to counsel despair, but to remind us ( of the fundamental Millian principle) that thinking, like living, is a work in progress.

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Questions that cropped up during the session but could not be addressed due to the paucity of time have been responded to here by Prof Philp in writing: 

From Monica 

Insofar as Mill takes into account psychological and social factors in determining one’s individuality, is Mill’s conception of liberty one that gives primacy to autonomy?

If this is the case, how does Mill’s thought differ from Kantian liberalism, which also emphasizes self-determination and the flourishing of human reason and rationality?

Relatedly, is there no conception of moral good and moral action in Mill’s idea of self-development?

Response: 

It’s a very good question – the short answer is that my sense is that he thinks more about individual self-development than he does about autonomy – and that’s because of a determinism that he inherited from his father and that he never abandoned, and which was re-enforced by his engagement with French sociology.  He does engage with Herman thought but I don’t see him as having much sense of a noumenal realm or an ideal of autonomy. In a strong sense he’s committed to a view of individuals as both embedded in and reacting to their environments and working out their characters and commitments in that process. Reason is a tool within that process, but there are Socratic echoes in his thinking about rationality, as a tool to criticise, more than as guiding light to follow.

The question about morality is also interesting.  And its worth asking what you think of as distinctly moral.  My sense is that Mill thinks of morality as a set of customs and conventions which will vary dramatically over history and even within social orders.  The good is thought of as rooted in self-development rather than in a set of external injunctions of codes. Weare in part made by the moral universe we inhabit, but we also remake it – and it is not a sphere of absolutes. 

From Kajol:

If every opinion, even false ones, has utility and therefore shouldn’t be silenced, how does that lead to the end goal of individual self-development?

In the present context of social media and the internet — where opinions proliferate and navigating truth becomes increasingly difficult — does Mill’s framework risk enabling a retardation rather than advancement of self-development and public discourse?

Response: 

Maybe the metaphor of learning a game like chess would help. When you first play, you develop certain strategies and moves that can look like a good idea, but also open you up to consequences you didn’t intend.  Do you abandon those ideas when you get more deeply familiar with the game – not really, you have to be aware that they might have some value in some case – even if you would now start and develop a game in a very different way.   You may learn to appreciate new dimensions to the game – to one’s beliefs, to one’s life – but those dimensions may also allow you to appreciate aspects of views that you have set aside in the past.

As to social media.  The proliferation of ‘alternative truths’ is a threat when people do not examine the material critically – and there is a lot of evidence that people get stuck into patterns of beliefs that operate in very restricted and restricting silos.  That’s not good for self-development.  Is the answer to shut them down?  Milll’s would be to emphasise critical education and the development of individual thinking - just as we don’t clear out of libraries all the ephemera that has been accumulated over the lifetime of the library but rely on the critical judgment of those using the library.  But its also worth asking : on whose say so should we consign certain ideas to the bin? 

From Sonali Kale:

When Mill defends individuality against social tyranny, his main foil seems to be the Victorian morality represented both by the aristocratic classes and the rising middle classes.

What exactly is Mill referring to when he talks about the “collective morality” developed by the middle classes?

Response:

He’s not very precise but he clearly thinks that the aristocratic order has had its day, and that the working classes are not in a position to enforce their claims. And that the society that is developing at his own time has a strongly conventional and intolerant character which takes its principles from a very morally conservative train of religious thinking and seeks to impose that more widely both on members of its own class and on the (rising) working class.  But many different elements and experiences feed into Mill’s sense of what he is up against – with his own personal life being among them.  The result is a rather broad brush attack on what he sees as ‘do-gooding’ interference!