¹ See Gray, John, Mill on Liberty: A Defence (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ten, C. L., Mill on Liberty (London: Oxford University Press, 1980), particularly Preface, p. viiGoogle Scholar; and Ryan, Alan, John Stuart Mill (New York: Pantheon Books, 1970), chap. 13.Google Scholar

² For example, see Dworkin, Ronald, Taking Rights Seriously (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977), pp. 198–99 and 272–73.Google Scholar

³ Utilitarianism, On Liberty and Considerations on Representative Government (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1951), pp. 95–96Google Scholar. All subsequent references to On Liberty, Utilitarianism and Considerations on Representative Government are to this edition.

⁴ This rather stringent formulation is supported by the most prominent examples On Liberty provides of conduct “harmful to others.” While Mill deviates from it when he allows society to prohibit certain public acts as “offences against decency” (On Liberty, p. 206Google Scholar), his argument cannot afford many such deviations.

⁵ On Liberty, p. 186Google Scholar. Mill is sometimes accused of unrealistically assuming that a person's activity can be sharply divided into two spheres: that which affects and concerns only himself and that which affects and concerns others. To this it is replied that “no man is an island.” This criticism is not entirely fair to Mill. Mill's awareness that no man is an island is evidenced in his acknowledgement of indirect or contingent injuries to others resulting from conduct in the “self-regarding” sphere. The controversial question is whether Mill unduly minimizes the significance of such effects.

⁶ Ibid., p. 97.

⁷ Ten, , Mill on Liberty, p. 14.Google Scholar

⁸ The reader is referred to Mill's discussion of indirect or contingent effects at pp. 183–86.

⁹ Miller v. California, 413 U.S. 15, 63 (1973).Google Scholar

¹⁰ Ryan, , John Stuart Mill, p. 240.Google Scholar

¹¹ Mill was asked by a Royal Commission whether state licensing and medical examination of prostitutes would be likely to promote “moral injury.” He responded: “I do think so, because I hardly think it possible for thoughtless persons not to infer, when special precautions are taken to make a course which is generally considered worthy of disapprobation safer than it would naturally be, that it cannot be considered very bad by the law, and possibly may be considered not bad at all, or at any rate a necessary evil” (quoted in Arkes, Hadley, The Philosopher in the City Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981, p. 440).Google Scholar

¹² On Liberty, p. 199.Google Scholar

¹³ According to Rolf E. Sartorius, even “act utilitarianism” is capable of providing such norms. See Sartorius, , Individual Conduct and Social Norms (Encino, California: Dickenson Publishing Co., 1975).Google Scholar

¹⁴ Gray, , Mill on Liberty: A Defence, p. 14.Google Scholar

¹⁵ Ibid p. 52.

¹⁶ Utilitarianism, p. 32.Google Scholar

¹⁷ A System of Logic (London: Longmans, Green, 1949), p. 621.Google Scholar

¹⁸ On Liberty, p. 153.Google Scholar

¹⁹ “[I]ndividuality is the same thing with development, and … it is only the cultivation of individuality which produces or can produce well developed human beings” (On Liberty, p. 162Google Scholar). This is just what classical philosophy said about areté (usually translated as virtue or human excellence).

²⁰ Utilitarianism, p. 14Google Scholar. We are not concerned here with the validity of Mill's effort to derive the good and the noble from the pleasant. Our interest is in the fact that high ethical standards emerge from Mill's argument.

²¹ Gray, , Mill on Liberty: A Defence, p. 73.Google Scholar

²² Utilitarianism, p. 13.Google Scholar

²³ Ten, , Mill on Liberty, pp. 82–83.Google Scholar

²⁴ Devlin, Patrick, The Enforcement of Morals (London: Oxford University Press, 1965), p. 108.Google Scholar

²⁵ See particularly Considerations on Representative Government, pp. 334–40.Google Scholar

²⁶ Utilitarianism, p. 38.Google Scholar

²⁷ Ibid., p. 41–2.

²⁸ Stephen, James Fitzjames, Liberty, Equality, Fraternity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), p. 81.Google Scholar

²⁹ Gray, , Mill on Liberty: A Defence, p. 85.Google Scholar

³⁰ Ibid.

³¹ On Liberty, pp. 186–87.Google Scholar

³² Ibid., 164.

³³ That recent movement calling itself the “Moral Majority” is a case in point. It hardly represents a majority capable of making significant inroads upon our liberal dispensation.

³⁴ On Liberty, p. 171.Google Scholar

³⁵ Ibid., p. 156.

³⁶ See Ten, , Mill on Liberty, p. 70.Google Scholar

³⁷ On Liberty, p. 155.Google Scholar

³⁸ See Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, bk. 2.Google Scholar

³⁹ See Burke, Edmund, Reflections on the Revolution in France (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1961), particularly pp. 43–48.Google Scholar

⁴⁰ Gray, , Mill on Liberty: A Defence, p. 119.Google Scholar

⁴¹ A System of Logic, p. 620.Google Scholar

⁴² See Gray, , Mill on Liberty: A Defence, p. 99.Google Scholar

⁴³ Supra, pp. 6–7.Google Scholar

⁴⁴ Unfortunately, the limits of space do not allow for discussion of one of Mill's important practical arguments against public intervention in “personal conduct.” This is the argument that, when the public interferes with such conduct, “the odds are that it interferes wrongly, and in the wrong place” (On Liberty, p. 188Google Scholar). Mill seems to suppose here that the public and the law are wholly intractable and uneducable in this regard. At any rate, how can a consistent utilitarianism derive from this consideration anything more than a presumption in favor of liberty? For an example of a relentless effort to derive considerably more, see Sartorius, , Individual Conduct and Social Norms, pp. 154–58.Google Scholar

⁴⁵ Ryan, , John Stuart Mill, p. 255.Google Scholar

⁴⁶ On Liberty, p. 125.Google Scholar

⁴⁷ Ibid., pp. 108–09.

⁴⁸ “It is not too much to require that what the wisest of mankind, those who are best entitled to trust their own judgment, find necessary to warrant their relying on it, should be submitted to by that miscellaneous collection of a few wise and many foolish individuals, called the public” (ibid., p. 109). My point in the following paragraphs above is that this is indeed too much to require.

⁴⁹ For example, contrast book 3 which ends with the “noble lie” with book 7 which begins with the philosopher's transcendence of the opinions in “the cave” of society.

⁵⁰ “[U]nder no circumstances will dogmatic belief cease to exist, or, in other words, men will never cease to entertain some opinions on trust and without discussion. If everyone undertook to form all his own opinions and to seek for truth by isolated paths struck out by himself alone, it would follow that no considerable number of men would ever unite in any common belief. … But obviously without such common belief no society can prosper; say, rather, no society can exist” (de Tocqueville, Alexis, Democracy in America [New York, 1945], 2:9Google Scholar). It is of some scholarly interest why Mill, who so much admired Tocqueville's ideas of liberty, did not come more to grips with Tocqueville's ideas of its limiting conditions. See also Democracy in America, vol. 2, chap. 5.Google Scholar

⁵¹ On Liberty, p. 153Google Scholar. See also Autobiography of John Stuart Mill (New York: Columbia University Press, 1924), pp. 167–68 and 177–78Google Scholar; comparison of these two passages raises perplexing questions as to Mill's final attitude toward communal consensus. It is not easy to determine whether Mill welcomed an eventual consensus as desirable or thought of it as historically inevitable but inevita bly dangerous.

⁵² Ten, , Mill on Liberty, p. 127.Google Scholar