John Stuart Mill's defense of freedom of discussion in On Liberty remains a major influence on philosophical and public debates about free speech. By highlighting underappreciated textual evidence and key distinctions, this introduction attempts to show how the contributions of the symposium authors – Melina Constantine Bell, Rafael Cejudo, Christopher Macleod, and Dale E. Miller – point toward a more complete account of Mill's views.

I consider whether Mill intends for us to see the arguments that constitute his defense of the “Liberty of Thought and Discussion” in chapter 2 of On Liberty as a part of his larger case for the “harm” or “liberty” principle (LP). Several commentators depict this chapter as a digression that interrupts the flow between his introduction of this principle in the first chapter and his exposition and defense of it in the final three. I will argue instead for a reading of On Liberty on which chapter 2 is well integrated with the rest of the essay and is in fact where Mill starts constructing his case for LP.

In this article, I offer a reading of On Liberty II which focuses on the structural features of the argument that Mill presents. Mill's argument, I suggest, is grounded on an appeal to the value of truth, and is divided into three sub-arguments, treating true, false and partially true opinion respectively. In section 1, I consider what constraints the teleological orientation of Mill's argument places on the case he makes, before examining in section 2 what the division of Mill's argument into three exhaustive sub-arguments tells us about the nature of ‘discussion’ as Mill uses the term. I go on, in section 3, to suggest that although On Liberty II does not offer a defence of free speech in the broad sense in which the term is often now used, we should be optimistic about the chances of finding such a defence in On Liberty III.

This article advocates employing John Stuart Mill's harm principle to set the boundary for unregulated free speech, and his Greatest Happiness Principle to regulate speech outside that boundary because it threatens unconsented-to harm. Supplementing the harm principle with an offense principle is unnecessary and undesirable if our conception of harm integrates recent empirical evidence unavailable to Mill. For example, current research uncovers the tangible harms individuals suffer directly from bigoted speech, as well as the indirect harms generated by the systemic oppression and epistemic injustice that bigoted speech constructs and reinforces. Using Mill's ethical framework with an updated notion of harm, we can conclude that social coercion is not justified to restrict any harmless speech, no matter how offensive. Yet certain forms of speech, such as bigoted insults, are both harmful and fail to express a genuine opinion, and so do not deserve free speech protection.

This article aims to reconstruct a Millian argument for protecting a broad artistic freedom, as well as to delineate the exceptional cases in which censorship of works of art might be justified. Mill's On Liberty offers two lines of reasoning that might be used to defend the widest possible artistic freedom. The first is Mill's defense of freedom of speech in chapter 2, although this would apparently still allow for censoring art that serves to instigate harm. The second is his defense of “experiments in living” in chapter 3, but this might allow for censoring the exhibition or publication of artworks that constitute “offences against decency.” While this Millian doctrine on artistic freedom provides guidelines for coping with difficult cases in arts management, its limitations highlight the peculiarities of the arts and literature in relation to freedom and censorship.

Many egalitarians incorporate a concern for interpersonal welfare inequality as part of their favored axiology – that is, they take it to be a bad-making feature of outcomes. It is natural to think that, if inequality is in this sense a bad, it is an impersonal bad (one that makes an outcome worse, while not in itself being worse for any person). This natural thought has been challenged. Some writers claim that egalitarian judgments can be accommodated by adopting an expanded view of a person's good, according to which being worse off than others is one of the factors that, in itself, makes one's life go worse. The putatively impersonal bad of inequality is thereby “dispersed” among individuals. I argue that this dispersion strategy fails. In a slogan: if you care about inequality, do not disperse it.

Several recent formulations of Rule Consequentialism (RC) have broken with the consensus that RC should be formulated in terms of code acceptance, claiming instead that RC should focus on the consequences of codes' being taught. I begin this article with an examination of the standard case for acceptance formulations. In addition to depending on the mistaken assumption that compliance and acceptance formulations are the only options, the standard case claims advantages for acceptance formulations that, upon closer examination, favor teaching formulations. In the remainder of the article, I defend this new teaching-centered approach against some recent criticisms. I argue that preoccupation with the somewhat technical problem of identifying the best criterion for making choices under conditions of uncertainty has distracted rule consequentialists from paying more careful attention to the advantages and disadvantages that result from decisions concerning where they locate RC's stipulated assumptions within the theory.

To consequentialize a deontological moral theory is to give a theory which issues the same moral verdicts, but explains those verdicts in terms of maximizing or satisficing value. There are many motivations for consequentializing: to reconcile plausible ideas behind deontology with plausible ideas behind consequentialism, to help us better understand deontological theories, or to extend deontological theories beyond what intuitions alone tell us. It has proven difficult to consequentialize theories that allow for moral dilemmas or that deny that “ought” implies “can.” This article argues that the problem is best solved by allowing impossible actions as inputs into consequentializations. It shows that all other approaches that have been advocated are inadequate. It also argues that progress in consequentialization, and in formal ethics more generally, requires thinking about more than just wrongness and permissibility; we should think about contrary-to-duty obligations and degrees of wrongness as well.

It is commonly thought that disability is a harm or “bad difference” because having a disability restricts valuable options in life. In his recent essay “Disability, Options and Well-Being,” Thomas Crawley offers a novel defense of this style of reasoning (formulated as the Options Argument) and argues that we and like-minded critics of this brand of argument are guilty of an inconsistency. Our aim in this article is to explain why our view avoids inconsistency, to challenge Crawley's positive defense of the Options Argument, and to suggest that this general line of reasoning employs a double standard.