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Utilitarianism and Toleration

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 January 2009

Jonathan Harrison
Jonathan Harrison
Affiliation:
University of Nottingham
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Extract

I shall (stipulatively) define a free action as one a man is able to do. Various things limit a man's freedom. The most unpopular is the government, or other people who have the power of preventing us from doing what we want. But our freedom is also circumscribed by lack of physical and mental strength or skill, including that of knowing how to manage other human beings. Other factors limiting our freedom are our ignorance, our passions and our habits. Some men say they value their freedom from these things, especially their freedom from passion, so much that they would prefer to be in prison or on the rack rather than be a slave to them, but one suspects they exaggerate.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy , Volume 62 , Issue 242 , October 1987 , pp. 421 - 434
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1987

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References

1 See my article ‘Rule Utilitarianism, and Cumulative-Effect Utilitarianism’, in the Canadian Journal of Philosophy's supplementary volume New Essays on j.S. Mill and Utilitarianism (1980).Google Scholar

2 John Stuart Mill is customarily regarded as having maintained that there was a class of wrong acts that men ought not to be prevented from performing. He thought no such thing. He held that wrong acts were by definition inexpedient acts which a man ought to be prevented from performing. Inexpedient acts which men ought not to be prevented from performing, he thought, belonged to a species of inexpediency which falls outside the sphere of morality, and were not wrong. (He was therefore not a conventional utilitarian, because he did not think that all actions that produced good consequences were right.) See my article, ‘The Right, the Just and the Expedient in Mill's Utilitarianism’, in the Canadian Journal of Philosophy's supplementary volume, New Essays on the History of Philosophy.