Colloquium: Mill on Liberty
Alan Charles Kors
This colloquium will study John Stuart Mill’s foundational essay on political liberalism. On Liberty is the classical defense of personal liberty, and remains as fresh and relevant as it was in 1859.
On Mill’s “harm-to-others” principle, the state is not entitled to interfere with personal preferences except to prevent harm to others. The colloquium will examine the breadth and limits of this doctrine, and the many questions to which it gives rise. What counts as a harm? What is the role of social sanctions? Should people be asked to avoid temptations through self-control? Might this take the form of voting for laws that remove temptations from their path? Is there a “Mill Problem”? That is, is On Liberty inconsistent with Mill’s claim in Utilitarianism that some self-regarding pleasures are superior to others? And why does Mill think that “harm-to-others” should be restricted to physical harm? Why shouldn’t it include the “moral harms” people impose when they corrupt others through their bad example?
Alan Charles Kors is a professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania. He has published extensively on the conceptual revolutions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and is editor-in-chief of the four-volume Oxford Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment.