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J.S. Mill's Boundaries of Freedom of Expression: A Critique

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 June 2017

Abstract

The essay opens with some background information about the period in which J.S. Mill wrote. The discussion revolves around the concept of blasphemy which Mill considered to be highly problematic. Tagging unpopular views as ‘blasphemous’ amounted to abuse of governmental powers and infringed on the basic liberties of the out-of-favour speakers. The discussion on blasphemy sets the scene to the understanding of Mill's concerns, his priorities and consequently his emphasis on the widest possible liberty of expression. Section 2 presents the Millian principles that are pertinent to his philosophy of free speech: liberty and truth. Section 3 analyzes Mill's very limited boundaries to freedom of expression, asserting that the consequentialist reasoning had led Mill to ignore present tangible harm. It is argued that democracy is required to develop protective mechanisms against harm-facilitating speech.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 2017 

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References

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17 Max Roser, ‘Literacy’, in Our World in Data (2014), http://www.ourworldindata.org/data/education-knowledge/literacy/ [Online Resource]. Radical activists and movements surmounted this problem in working class communities by reading out aloud radical newspapers to 'illiterate’ working class audiences. Radical activists would hold large open air meetings and practice their brand of free speech through these meetings.

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20 A bond by which a person undertakes before a court or magistrate to observe some condition, especially to appear when summoned.

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26 The Blasphemy Act 1697 (9 Will 3 c 35) was an Act of Parliament that made it an offence for any person, educated in or having made profession of the Christian religion, by writing, preaching, teaching or advised speaking, to deny the Holy Trinity, to claim there is more than one God, to deny the truth of Christianity and to deny the Bible as divine authority. See http://community.worldheritage.org/articles/Blasphemy_Act_1697

27 David Nash, Blasphemy in Modern Britain, 92–93.

28 Joss Marsh, Word Crimes, 117.

29 Ibid., 118.

30 The Chartist movement was comprised of working-class people who campaigned for parliamentary reform. The name came from the People's Charter, a bill drafted by William Lovett in May 1838. It contained six demands: universal manhood suffrage, equal electoral districts, vote by ballot, annually elected Parliaments, payment of members of Parliament, and abolition of the property qualifications for membership. Chartism grew out of the protest against the injustices of the new industrial and political order in Britain. See Stephen Roberts, ‘The Chartist Movement 1838–1848’, BBC (20 June 2011), http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/victorians/chartist_01.shtml, and UK Parliament, http://www.parliament.uk/about/living-heritage/transformingsociety/electionsvoting/chartists/overview/chartistmovement/

31 Henry Hetherington was indicted for publishing Haslam's Letters to the Clergy of all Denominations, whose arguments were directed against passages in the Old Testament which were deemed cruel and immoral. For this crime, Hetherington was imprisoned for four months. See Stephen, Lesley and Lee, Sidney (eds), ‘Henry Hetherington (1792–1849), in Dictionary of National Biography (London: Oxford University Press, 1949)Google Scholar, http://www.historyhome.co.uk/people/hetherin.htm. Hetherington was out of favour and targeted by the English elite because he refused to pay the press tax. At that time, every copy of a newspaper was required to be impressed with a four penny stamp. Hetherington believed that the working people needed knowledge and news, and he refused to pay for a tax that prevented them from acquiring information. For publishing The Poor Man's Guardian without a stamp, Hetherington was imprisoned twice, each time for six months. See Literary Anecdotes, ‘Henry Hetherington (1792–1849)’, http://www.ourcivilisation.com/smartboard/shop/anecdtes/c19/hthrngtn.htm

32 In Principles of Political Economy (New York: D. Appleton And Company, 1885)Google Scholar, http://www.gutenberg.org/files/30107/30107-pdf.pdf, esp. Book 2, Chapter 1, Mill advocated abolition of all exceptional laws, especially those relating to the press, public meetings, and associations; in short, of all laws which hinder the free expression of ideas and thought. At the same time, Mill did not believe that freedom of expression can be used as a justification or excuse for committing crimes. For further discussion of the period, see Riley, Jonathan, Mill on Liberty (London: Routledge, 1998), 2953 Google Scholar.

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35 Holyoake (The Co-operative Movement Today) explained that the original object of co-operation was to establish self-supporting communities distinguished by common labour, common property, common means of intelligence and recreation. The aim was to create an ethical communal life for the working people.

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39 Ibid.

40 The United Kingdom abolished its laws against blasphemy in England and Wales in 2008 with the passage of the Criminal Justice and Immigration Act. Section 79 abolished the common law offences of blasphemy and blasphemous libel in England and Wales. See http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2008/4/section/79

41 Surely the crime itself did not have as an element of the offense one's membership in one class or another, whatever the biases of the government officials might be. If Darwin, who was not, I believe, poor, had publicly, in Trafalgar Square, asserted that belief in a personal God was an infantile and an unwarranted belief, and that the idea of an everlasting life was unintelligible and merely offered as an opiate for the deluded poor of the world, then he could have faced blasphemy charges. Astute people were careful when formulating such ideas in public, not wishing to provoke the attention of the authorities or to test their tolerance. The point that I am making is that, in practice, blasphemy charges were made against people of a certain economic class and against journalists who identified with them. For further discussion, see Cabantous, Alan, Blasphemy – Impious Speech in the West from the Seventeenth to the Nineteenth Century (NY: Columbia University Press, 1998)Google Scholar.

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44 J.S. Mill, Utilitarianism, Liberty, and Representative Government, 6, 11, 36.

45 Ibid., 90.

46 Ibid., 114.

47 Ibid., 132, 152.

48 Mill, J.S., ‘Law and Libel and Liberty of the Press’, in Williams, Geraint L. (ed.), John Stuart Mill on Politics and Society (Glasgow: Fontana, 1976)Google Scholar; Williams, G.L., ‘Mill's Principle of Liberty’, Political Studies XXIV (1976), 132–40Google Scholar.

49 J.S. Mill, Utilitarianism, Liberty, and Representative Government, 73.

50 Ibid.

51 Ibid., especially chapter 2.

52 Ibid., 79.

53 Ibid., 83. For discussion and critique of the Truth Principle, see Cowling, Maurice, Mill and Liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963)Google Scholar; Marshall, Geoffrey, Constitutional Theory (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971)Google Scholar; Schauer, Frederick, Free Speech: A Philosophical Enquiry (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982: 2734)Google Scholar; Greenawalt, Kent, Speech, Crime and the Uses of Language (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989: 1626)Google Scholar; Cate, Irene M. Ten, ‘Speech, Truth, and Freedom: An Examination of John Stuart Mill's and Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes's Free Speech Defenses’, Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities 22 (1), Article 2 (2010)Google Scholar, http://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/yjlh/vol22/iss1/2; Barendt, Eric, Freedom of Speech (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005: 814)Google Scholar, and Barendt ‘Thoughts on A Thinker-based Approach to Freedom of Speech’ (in writing).

54 Mill, ‘Law and Libel and Liberty of the Press’, 150. See also Cohen-Almagor, R., ‘Why Tolerate? Reflections on the Millian Truth Principle’, Philosophia 25 (1–4) (1997), 131152 Google Scholar.

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56 J.S. Mill, Utilitarianism, Liberty, and Representative Government, 83.

57 Ibid., 79.

58 Ibid.

59 Ibid., 95.

60 Ibid., 89.

61 Ibid., 97–98.

62 Ibid., 103.

63 Geoffrey Marshall, Constitutional Theory; Cohen-Almagor, R., ‘John Stuart Mill’, in Christians, Clifford G. and Merrill, John C. (eds), Ethical Communication: Five Moral Stances in Human Dialogue (Columbia, MO.: University of Missouri Press, 2009), 2532 Google Scholar.

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65 Ibid., 96. For further discussion, see Gray, Mill on Liberty; Ten, C.L., Mill on Liberty (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), 124143 Google Scholar; McCloskey, H.J., John Stuart Mill: A Critical Study (London: Macmillan, 1971), 118–30Google Scholar; Thompson, Manley H., ‘J.S. Mill's Theory of Truth: A Study in Metaphysics and Logic’, The Philosophical Review LVI (3) (May 1947), 273–92Google Scholar.

66 In his 1832 essay ‘On Genius’, 1832 (in John M. Robson [ed.], John Stuart Mill, The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Volume I – Autobiography and Literary Essays, http://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/mill-the-collected-works-of-john-stuart-mill-volume-i-autobiography-and-literary-essays), Mill asserted that it is the duty of all people to seek to know the truth and that they should not be satisfied with accepting it on trust: ‘Let each person be made to feel that in other things he may believe upon trust – if he find a trustworthy authority – but that in the line of his peculiar duty, and in the line of the duties common to all men, it is his business to know’. For further discussion, see Schneewind, J.B. (ed.), Mill's Essays on Literature and Society (New York and London: Collier, 1965): 101 Google Scholar.

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68 Mill, J.S., ‘The Letters of J.S. Mill’, in Mineka, Francis E. (ed.), The Earlier Letters of J.S. Mill, 1812–1848, in Collected Works XII (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1963)Google Scholar, http://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/mill-the-collected-works-of-john-stuart-mill-volume-xii-the-earlier-letters-1812-1848-part-i

69 In various writings, Mill randomly proposed various limitations on freedom of expression. In ‘Mr. O'Connell's Bill for the Liberty of the Press’, in The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, VI – Essays on England, Ireland, and the Empire, http://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/mill-the-collected-works-of-john-stuart-mill-volume-vi-essays-on-england-ireland-and-the-empire/simple#lf0223-06_head_045, Mill (1824) wrote that ‘we would not permit the press to impute, even truly, acts, however discreditable, which are in their nature private. We would not allow the truth of such imputation to be even pleaded in mitigation’.  In Law and Libel and Liberty of the Press’, in Williams, Geraint L., (ed.) John Stuart Mill on Politics and Society (Glasgow: Fontana, 1976), 143169, at 160–161Google Scholar, Mill wrote ‘[T]here is one case, and only one, in which there might appear to be some doubts of the propriety of permitting the truth to be told with reserve.’ This case involves the situation ‘when the truth, without being of any advantage to the public, is calculated to give annoyance to private individuals’. This statement cannot be easily reconciled with Mill's On Liberty. Annoyance in On Liberty cannot and should not serve as a yardstick for prohibiting speech. It is far too light justification for restricting speech. Mill reiterated time and again the Harm Principle which is much more weighty and severe yardstick than mere annoyance. For further discussion, see Feinberg, Joel, Freedom and Fulfillment: philosophical essays (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992)Google Scholar.

70 J.S. Mill, Utilitarianism, Liberty, and Representative Government, 65.

71 Ibid., 140.

72 Ibid., 68.

73 Mill explained that that there should be a great social support for opinions different from those of the mass. See M. de Tocqueville on Democracy in America’, in Dissertations and Discussions (NY: Haskell House, 1973), II, 183, at 73Google Scholar. Mill further elucidated that whenever the multitude are alive to the necessity of ‘superior intellect’, they rarely fail to distinguish those who possess it. See Appendix’, in Dissertations and Discussions (NY: Haskell House, 1973), I, 467474, at 470 Google Scholar.

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75 J.S. Mill, Utilitarianism, Liberty, and Representative Government, 75.

76 Riley, ‘J.S. Mill's Doctrine of Freedom of Expression’, 149.

77 J.S. Mill, Utilitarianism, Liberty, and Representative Government, 151.

78 Ibid., 78.

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81 Jewish Virtual Library, Resistance in World War II: Operation Valkyrie – The ‘July Plot’ to Assassinate Hitler, Jewish Virtual Library, http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/julyplot.html

82 During the summer of 1944, the estimated daily number of persons gassed and burned in Auschwitz-Birkenau was over 9,000. Holocaust Timeline, http://www.historyplace.com/worldwar2/holocaust/timeline.html

83 J.S. Mill, Utilitarianism, Liberty, and Representative Government, 114.

84 My view is close to that of Riley, ‘J.S. Mill's Doctrine of Freedom of Expression’. A different interpretation is offered by Morgan who argues that the Millian corn dealer example falls short of direct, unambiguous incitement to commit a violent crime; this is because an opinion that ‘corn-dealers are starvers of the poor’ is different from a direct call to murder the corn dealer. Notwithstanding the exact wording, the consequences might be similarly harmful. See Glyn Morgan, ‘Mill's Liberalism, Security and Group Defamation’, in Glen Newey (ed.), Freedom of Expression: Counting the Costs, 121–143, at 137. One may offer a contrary interpretation insisting that Mill thought that ‘some mischievous act’ must follow for expressed opinions to lose their immunity. Thus O'Rourke regards Mill as a free speech absolutist, arguing that the right to free expression is absolute according to Mill and that even speech which can be regarded as incitement should not be prohibited unless violence occur. See O'Rourke, K.C., John Stuart Mill and Freedom of Expression: The genesis of a theory (London: Routledge, 2001), 127 Google Scholar.

85 Cohen-Almagor, Raphael, The Boundaries of Liberty and Tolerance (Gainesville, FL: The University Press of Florida, 1994)Google Scholar.

86 J.S. Mill, Utilitarianism, Liberty, and Representative Government, 114.

87 Joel Feinberg, Freedom and Fulfillment, 144.

88 For further discussion, see Marshall, Constitutional Theory, 156–157; Feinberg, Freedom and Fulfillment, 141–144; Gray, Mill on Liberty,  103–10; Jacobsen, Daniel, ‘Mill on Liberty, Speech and Free Society’, Philosophy and Public Affairs 29 (3) (2000): 276309, at 286Google Scholar; Eric Barendt, Freedom of Speech, 269–270;  Brink, Mill's Progressive Principles, 156–172.

89 In ‘The French Law Against the Press’, Spectator (19 August 1848), page 800, in The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill XXV – Newspaper Writings December 1847 – July 1873 Part IV [1847], http://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/mill-the-collected-works-of-john-stuart-mill-volume-xxv-newspaper-writings-part-iv, Mill protested against the decree against the press passed by the French National Assembly of France, saying it ‘is one of the most monstrous outrages on the idea of freedom of discussion ever committed by the legislature of a country pretending to be free’. If only one set of opinions is to be permitted on any significant matter, Mill asked rhetorically, what is the essence of political discussion?

90 Herb Morris suggests in his remarks on a draft of this paper that Mill ‘surely would have believed that incitement to an act of fraud, where fraud was criminalized, could also be prohibited’.

91 Mill, Utilitarianism, Liberty, and Representative Government, 114.

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