Mill’s principle of utilityīefore jumping into the three arguments, it is important to make clear how Mill understands the principle of utility. And while I do not believe all of these arguments are as strong as Mill hoped, I do think they are generally suggestive of the right approach to justifying liberalism from a utilitarian perspective. Although making the full case for my view will require a lot of work, I want to focus here on establishing what I take to be the three main arguments Mill provides in On Liberty for deriving a liberal political theory from the principle of utility. Utilitarianism, especially the sort of utilitarianism actually advocated by Mill, not only provides sufficient grounds for liberalism but also provides a particularly attractive approach to justifying liberalism, an approach preferable to the deontological and contractarian approaches that dominate contemporary liberalism. We should reject this pessimistic reading of Mill’s argument. Some even suggest that On Liberty represents Mill’s shift away from utilitarianism, or that the philosophy contained in that book is more properly attributed to Harriet Taylor Mill, perhaps even being actually authored by her and only published under Mill’s name because of the prejudices of the Victorian era. And it is now quite common to suggest that the principle of utility cannot ground the sort of strong commitment to individual liberty and political rights that define liberalism as a political philosophy. This is because Mill makes clear, from the outset, that he will not appeal to any “abstract right” of individual liberty (as a natural rights libertarian may) but rather ground the entire case for liberty on the principle of utility. He also takes as his primary target not the authority of government but rather social authority, an issue libertarians are wont to ignore.Īnd yet, despite the canonical status of On Liberty, it is quite common to suggest that Mill’s explicit argument for the primacy of individual liberty and the harm principle is a failure. Often left out of libertarian discussions of On Liberty, Mill is explicit that his conception of “harm” that guides the harm principle includes a failure to provide assistance to those in need. But there is also much in there for the progressive liberal. It is embraced by libertarians and classical liberals for its elaboration of the “harm principle,” a seemingly significant constraint on government action. John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty stands as one of the pillars of modern liberal thought.
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