Luke Morris
12/5/2003
Liberty and John Stuart Mill – Utilitarianism vs. Natural Law
Many important philosophers base their ethical systems upon the principle of utility, but few do it as elegantly or employ it as well as John Stuart Mill does, particularly as that principle relates to political ideas. In his book On Liberty, specifically, Mill applies the utilitarian ideal to man’s social relations, developing a theory of government that clearly dictates the separate roles of society and of the individual. But a problem arises here. Mill wants to use utilitarianism to justify the Harm Principle, which states that one must be free to do whatever he so chooses, so long as he does not violate the rights of others in doing so. Since, for Mill, the highest form of utility or happiness is individual self-development, freedom becomes a necessary component to utility. But Mill places the principle of total social utility above the freedom and self-worth of the individual. This application, unfortunately, gives us no guarantee for man’s rights on a principled basis. On the contrary, the only reason that Mill gives us to respect individuals at all results from a pragmatic consideration of utility. Utilitarianism, then, provides an insufficient ethical system for protecting man’s liberties; we can only base a belief in freedom on the principled morality that grows from a firm foundation of justice and Natural Law.
When human endeavor takes it upon itself to found or change a country’s political system, it must take several important questions into account. It must ask for us, for one, how much liberty should we allow our citizens? Where should we place restrictions on the people’s liberties? To what degree should we restrict them? Even more fundamentally, what is the government’s proper role? What actions should the government take, and what should it leave up to private individuals? We cannot find the answers to these questions in the field of politics alone. We must instead look deeper into human nature, to discover an applicable system of ethics to guide us in our decisions regarding political issues.
The search for an ethical basis for politics requires us to set priorities, to return our thought to first principles, and to determine that maxim upon which we must base our law, such as the principle of utility or that of personal liberty. Mill, for one, stakes everything on utilitarian grounds. Other philosophers, such as John Locke and Robert Nozick, reject such consequentialist fundamentals, and base their political theories instead on Natural Law and personal entitlement. These latter ideas, we see, place the individual first, as a being of intrinsic worth, possessing rights beyond what society “gives” him. They thus provide a stronger foundation upon which to build a political system that respects individual rights and liberties.
The flaw in John Stuart Mill’s political theory rests in his fundamental utilitarian premise, from which all other considerations stem. As he states, “I regard utility as the ultimate appeal on all ethical questions; but it must be utility in the largest sense, grounded on the permanent interests of man as a progressive being” (Mill 10). Utility, then, refers to the happiness of man in a collective rather than an individual sense. But, for Mill, the highest form of happiness is individual self-development, which involves one making a plan for his own life and following it to his maximum personal betterment. We see this as justified on social grounds only if we accept Mill’s claim that, “In proportion to the development of his individuality, each person becomes more valuable to himself, and is, therefore, capable of being more valuable to others” (60). Improving oneself, therefore, brings about the greatest good to all of society. And, of course, “What more or better can be said of any condition of human affairs than that it brings human beings themselves nearer to the best thing they can be?” (61). While this is a sound theory of the makeup of personal happiness, it still seeks to justify individual achievement only if that achievement benefits everyone else, not as a necessary condition of the respect for inherent personal value.
Mill’s theory of political life, then, begins with an attempt to maximize the utility of individual self-development. He posits that the only way to do this is to allow the individual the maximum possible control over his own life. “Over himself,” he states, “over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign” (Mill 9). The principle of utility, therefore, leads to that of personal liberty. Mill then lays out three types of liberties that fall under this principle: the liberty of conscience, of thought and discussion; the liberty to act upon our opinions, “of tastes and pursuits, of framing the plan of our life to suit our own character, of doing as we like, subject to such consequences as may follow” (12); and the “Liberty . . . of combination among individuals” (12), or liberty to interact with others as we and they choose. He explains, first, “It is the privilege and proper condition of a human being, arrived at the maturity of his faculties, to use and interpret experience in his own way” (55). The second type of liberty, then, will lead to individual self-development, since “The only unfailing and permanent source of improvement is liberty, since by it there are as many possible independent centers of improvement as there are individuals” (67). Indeed, it might seem that Mill sees liberty as all encompassing.
A caveat applies to the principle of liberty, though, and we might term this the “Harm Principle,” which states, generally, that an individual is free to do whatever he so chooses, as long as he does not violate the rights of another in doing so. Since one’s happiness results from his own free action, “All that makes existence valuable to anyone depends on the enforcement of restraints upon the actions of other people” (Mill 5). To allow for maximal self-development, then, no one may use force against another except to prevent the object of that force from directly causing harm to others. In other words, “The sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of any of their number is self-protection” (9). Far from placing a restriction on personal freedom, though, this principle will in fact allow more liberty to all individuals, since it protects each of those individuals from others who may try to affront his liberties unjustly. Mill’s problem, then, lies not in the Harm Principle itself, but in his claim that he may justify that principle on completely utilitarian grounds.
The difficulty with utilitarianism becomes manifest when Mill attempts to apply it to economic issues. The economic system of a country, he argues, does not find its ethical foundation in the Harm Principle, as one might think, but instead stems directly from the principle of utility, since “trade is a social act” (Mill 94). The system of exchange that a country allows those within its borders to use, then, should not be that which necessarily respects an individual’s right to dispose of his own property, but that which will produce the greatest amount of total social happiness in the end, regardless of the means. The means to happiness, in truth, matter very little to a consequentialist whose only real concern is the end goal of total utility. Hence, Mill asserts, “The principle of individual liberty is not involved in the doctrine of free trade” (94). While Mill himself supports free trade, he does so on the grounds that it provides the best environment for maximizing individual self-development, and not because the individual has any intrinsic “right” to the benefits of his property. “Restrictions on trade,” he states, “are wrong solely because they do not really produce the results which it is desired to produce by them” (94). In other words, if they did happen to produce the highest total utility, such restraints would be perfectly justified.
We can now see the problem in tying economic liberties and restrictions to the principle of utility. If society has moral justification for imposing its will on the “social act” of trade, this justification can extend to any process of social interaction. “For such actions as are prejudicial to the interests of others,” Mill writes, “the individual is accountable and may be subjected either to social or to legal punishment if society is of opinion that the one or the other is requisite for its protection” (93). The only defense that a person can offer for any action he takes that affects any other person in any way is an appeal to its practicality in maximizing overall utility. If other pragmatic considerations may increase utility to a greater extent, though, society has valid reason to violate the individual’s rights for its own “greater good.” And in a democratic system, the “society” that makes such decisions will be the popular majority. How, then, can the application of such a principle protect individuals? It seems that the only freedoms that utilitarianism guarantees in principle involve the inner workings of one’s mind, and those few actions that he might take in complete autonomy; and even these are subject to the rule of the majority if they might be detrimental to total utility.
Mill claims that the greatest happiness any person can aim for is his own self-development, and that society must arrange itself so as to support this utility to the greatest extent possible. But if the principle of liberty does not even theoretically apply to the doctrine of free trade – that is, if trade is merely a pragmatic concern – then this violates the possibility for achieving maximum utility. Genius, Mill claims, is the utmost extension of human achievement; and “Genius can only breathe freely in an atmosphere of freedom” (62). Free trade, though, is a necessary component of an atmosphere of freedom – any restriction on trade necessarily abridges individual self-development, by removing individual free action entirely from the sphere of social interaction. While it is true that “The initiation of all wise or noble things comes and must come from individuals” (63), it is also true that a person can produce still greater things if he can collaborate freely with other people of intelligence. (Bill Gates, for instance, could not have formed the entire Microsoft Corporation on his own.)
In addition to the liberty of thought and of acting on one’s opinions, Mill’s freedom “of combination among individuals,” in conjunction with the Harm Principle, must involve the liberty to freely and voluntarily trade with others, provided that no one’s rights suffer violation in the process. Mill himself claims that the principle of liberty extends to “The liberty of the individual, in things wherein the individual is alone concerned,” and that this “implies a corresponding liberty in any number of individuals to regulate by mutual agreement such things as regard them jointly, and regard no persons but themselves” (101). How, then, could the government, or “society,” possibly justify infringing upon such liberty?
Mill offers three types of objections to such government interference, or government action in the socio-economic realm (Mill 107-8). Government, for one, should not do something if individuals would do it better; nor should the government involve itself, even if it would do things more efficiently, in cases where individuals would improve themselves by the mental education they receive and would bring to the field of action a greater diversity of experience; and, lastly, Mill strongly objects to the “great evil” of adding unnecessarily to governmental powers. While we might agree to all of these objections, they face an obvious shortcoming in that none of them takes personal liberty into account. The cases of social action, rather, find their solutions in the pragmatic consideration of their ends. Mill simply assumes that, since interactions between persons are social events, they must fall under the government of society. We should ask, though, not whether individual action is pragmatically better than government action, but whether the government has moral justification to partake in any type of economic activity at all. The failure to take this question into consideration shows a flaw in Mill’s theory that could allow utilitarianism to bring the whole edifice of personal liberty crumbling down.
To solve the problems with personal liberty that utilitarianism presents us, we must discover an ethical system that consistently defends the rights of man as an individual, regardless of any consequentialist considerations. Otherwise, utilitarianism, as a theory, could easily lead us into despotism instead of personal liberty, if such a government seemed to maximize total utility. When Mill derives the Harm Principle from the principle of utility, for instance, he bases the former on practical considerations of the latter, rather than on any value inherent in personal liberty itself. Someone who presents a different set of practical conditions, such as Marx or Nietzsche, could easily use utilitarian principles to justify unjust means, such as the violent theft of property or the complete centralization of political power, if they happened to lead to a higher degree of happiness throughout society. Simply because such means do not lead to their stated ends in everyday life does not prove them wrong in principle, but only in practice. Man’s liberty, in truth, has no intrinsic worth, since no individual himself has intrinsic worth – his value, rather, lies in his contribution to the total happiness of all the individuals in society. It is the sum total of utility, not individual utility, that matters to Mill.
If we believe that the lives of individuals are intrinsically important in themselves, however, we must adopt a morality steeped in principles of justice and Natural Law, over and above the principle of utility. Such a morality must produce a political system that allows freedom to the individual not only as regards his personal thoughts and actions, but also the entire scope of his actions relating to others, as long as he does not encroach upon anyone else’s right to do the same. Mill is correct in asserting that happiness is the end goal of human life, and that self-development is one of the highest forms of happiness. We cannot determine the rightness of an action, though, on the basis of the total social happiness in which it results, since any one individual can know only his own level of happiness, and can only completely control his own actions. No man, nor any group of men, has the right to restrain the voluntary actions and interactions of others, because those others, as Kant says, are ends in themselves. We must thus justify personal liberty in accordance with the nature of man. In other words: a) man’s nature leads him to seek his own fulfillment; b) the law of men must accord with this law of man’s nature; therefore, c) the societal law must protect each man’s right to pursue his own happiness, as long as he does not encroach upon another’s right to do the same.
Mill is correct in positing the Harm Principle as an ethical foundation for political society, but he errs in attributing it to mere utility. We must apply the Harm Principle, not for the sake of utility, but for the respect of Natural Law, which points to man’s nature as an individual and a social being. (If man does not hold this dual nature, then he is no better than an animal, devoid of any necessary moral agency, to whom we need not apply any ethical rule. Locke and Nozick cover this distinction in more detail.) At this point, Mill might ask us why the human law and Natural Law must accord. To this we would answer that, when a man can function both by himself and in society, he is a rational being and a moral agent, possessing an intrinsic worth in his self; indeed, even a human being who has not yet attained this independent status still possesses individual worth in his self through his potential for rationality. We must therefore treat every man as an end in himself, and not merely a means to maximizing utility. It follows that society must restrain the role of government to the protection of each man’s right to use his faculties as he sees fit, free from the threat of harm from any other man or group of men.
While the principle of Natural Law as the basis of politics finds defenders as far back as Aristotle, no one formulates it more eloquently than John Locke. Locke, like many modern philosophers, posits man in a “state of nature,” or “What state all men are naturally in . . . a state of perfect freedom to order their actions and dispose of their possessions and persons as they think fit, within the bounds of the law of nature, without asking leave or depending upon the will of any other man” (CFD 387). This state of nature, though, is hardly a nihilistic form of existence, since it requires that, to further his existence, every man must act according to right reason. In other words, “The state of nature has a law of nature to govern it, which obliges everyone; and reason, which is that law, teaches all mankind who will but consult it that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions” (387). We can see here that Locke presents a much stronger support for individual liberty than Mill’s pragmatic defense.
But if man possesses this freedom and must live by this law in the state of nature, what reason would he have for joining political society? As Locke answers, “The great and chief end, therefore, of men’s uniting into commonwealths and putting themselves under government is the preservation of their property” (CFD 396). In giving up some of their liberties in exchange for the protection a government provides, the people have a right to demand certain guarantees, including “An established, settled, known law, received and allowed by common consent to be the standard of right and wrong” (396). But the only such standard that Mill’s principle of utility could produce would say, “Do what maximizes total happiness.” This type of law would give one insufficient motivation to join such a society, since he would have no guarantee that the law would respect his rights. If one joins society to protect his property, then, his action implies that he has a natural right to his property that the law of society must respect. He may therefore dispose of his property as he chooses because he has that right, not because such a system of free trade provides more utility to society.
The most important aspect of Locke’s theory is that the individual comes first, before and above “society.” Man is by nature free, and he only joins society to protect his property, which is the responsibility he places in government. He allows government no power beyond this protective assignment. The end of man is not society’s happiness, but his own, and to attain this and keep it he must respect other people’s rights to seek their own. Freedom, therefore, does not exist to serve social utility; it exists independently of and prior to utility, as part of man’s essential nature.
While Locke makes a strong case for political and economic freedom, his theory of Natural Law does have one crucial shortcoming: Locke argues that people obtain property rights by mixing their labor with natural resources (Nozick 174), but he does not extend this concept to show a man’s right to property through trade or capital investment. Locke’s principle of natural liberty therefore does not fully serve to justify a man’s right to ownership – he gives us a system that is incomplete in that it does not take economic consideration of human interaction into account. We have here a solid ethical foundation for liberty, but we do not have a complete definition of what liberty is.
For a more complete theory of liberty, one that fully takes property rights and trade into account, we turn to Robert Nozick, who takes Locke’s theory of property rights and expands it to cover the realm of human interaction. Nozick’s adaptation, the “entitlement theory” of justice in holdings, allows people two sets of rights in the ownership of property. The first, “rights in acquisition” (Nozick 150), gives us a Lockean-based principle of initial property rights, showing us how un-held things come to be held. “Things,” Nozick writes, “come into the world already attached to people having entitlements over them” (160). He then extends the concept of entitlement to cover “rights in transfer,” involving trade, gifts, employment of capital, or any other voluntary transfer of holdings, since “There is a purpose or point to someone’s transferring a holding to one person rather than to another” (159). These are the only rights one can have to the ownership of property – anything held by some other means, such as forcible expropriation, that does not apply one of the two principles of justice in holdings, is unjust (besides the fact that it violates Locke’s “law of nature”).
As an alternative to utilitarianism, Nozick offers us an ethical theory that relies on historical principles of justice rather than on end-state principles. “Historical principles of justice,” Nozick states, “hold that past circumstances or actions of people can create differential entitlements or differential deserts to things” (155). End-state or consequentialist principles, by contrast, determine the justice of a distribution of goods by the structure in which we see that distribution arranged. This type of system forms the belief of “A utilitarian who judges between any two distributions [of holdings] by seeing which has the greater sum of utility and, if the sums tie, applies some fixed equality criterion to choose the more equal distribution” (153-54). While such an egalitarian notion directly conflicts with Mill’s belief in individuality and personal liberty, it starts from the same grounding in the principle of utility.
As Mill equates happiness with individual self-development, Nozick finds the meaning of life within a similar framework. He begins, though, with a very different belief – the belief that the individual’s life is something worthy of meaning. He then goes on to claim that “A person shaping his life in accordance with some overall plan is his way of giving meaning to his life; only a being with the capacity to so shape a life can have or strive for meaningful life” (Nozick 50). While Mill might agree with this assessment, he would say that its importance rests in the effect that such an action produces upon the total happiness in society. Nozick, Locke, and other principled individualists would counter that such societal effects are merely secondary consequences that do not inhere in the meaning of a single person’s life. A man’s life, liberty, property, his right to use and dispose of such as he pleases, and his right to interact and exchange with others as he pleases, all belong to him as an absolute, regardless of secondary social effects, until such time as he forfeits these rights by directly violating the rights of others.
The real problem with utilitarianism and other such pragmatic ideas rises from the use of ethical “patterns,” or systematic formulas we must apply to every single event to determine exactly what the right and wrong answers are. In applying this concept to the concept of justice in holdings, Nozick says, “Let us call a principle of distribution patterned if it specifies that a distribution is to vary along with some natural dimension” (156). Utilitarianism, as a consequentialist or “end-state” principle, attempts to fit the entire scope of human action into such a pattern, based on a calculus for total human happiness that one must apply to any undertaking. Yet Mill himself argues that “There is no reason that all human existence should be constructed on some one or some small number of patterns” (Mill 64). The end-state towards which utilitarianism aims, however, would require the pattern obtained from applying its own formula. It thus becomes impossible to build a principled ethics, or one that would not give two different answers to the same type of problem in different situations, on utilitarian grounds, since “any pattern will have some morally arbitrary facts as part of the explanation of how it arises,” and, “any moral arbitrariness that underlies a pattern infects the pattern and makes it too morally arbitrary” (Nozick 218).
We must conclude, then, that Mill’s main problem stems from his attempt to place the principle of total utility higher than that of individual liberty, while at the same time holding individual self-development as the highest good. This mode of thinking, of course, leads him to a contradiction if personal utility and total utility do not always match. In this case, if total social utility is the rule, society must suppress the individual’s utility. But how could a utilitarian society justify this, when it promotes individual self-development as the greatest form of happiness? The only answers it could give would sound contrived, along the lines of “we must reduce the self-development of one to allow for greater self-development in others;” an idea that rather supports conformity to a social norm than the diversity that Mill seeks.
To achieve Mill’s goal of a free and diverse society, in which each person strives to properly develop himself according to his own plan, we must base its political, economic, and social systems on a stronger ethical foundation than utilitarianism. The principle of personal liberty must apply to all man’s actions, whether private or social, to allow for individual self-development as a man’s natural right and his highest goal. This type of civil society requires above all a shared belief in justice, Natural Law, and the accompanying intrinsic value of personal liberty.
Works Cited
Locke, John. Second Treatise of Government. From Communism, Fascism, and Democracy. Ed. Carl Cohen. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1997. 387-412.
Mill, John Stuart. On Liberty. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1978.
Nozick, Robert. Anarchy, State, and Utopia. United States: Basic, 1974.