general question regarding On Liberty
Peter Yong
I had a quick question about On Liberty that I didn't feel was appropriate to ask during our last class b/c it's not very sophisticated. What are we supposed to do with Mill's racist looking comments? Can they be safely ignored or do they present problems for his theory as a whole since it was only meant to apply to specific sorts of people who meet some kind of external criterion?
One section that I found worrisome was in chapter 1: "Despotism is a legitimate mode of government in dealing with barbarians, provided the end be their improvement, and the means justified by actually effecting that end. Liberty, as a principle, has no application to any state of things anterior to the time when mankind have become capable of being improved by free and equal discussion. Until then, there is nothing for them but implicit obedience to an Akbar or a Charlemagne, if they are so fortunate as to find one."
Also worrisome was the section near the end of chapter 3 where he talks about how even Chinese thinkers "in some respects"… "under certain limitations" might be called wise.
Arneson, Richard
Your question seems perfectly appropriate to me. I wish you had raised it in class.
Whether a question is unsophisticated or not is usually hard to discern, especially as one is
formulating it. Simple and naive questions can cut very deep. Complicated, subtle, nuanced questions can be trivial.
Back to Mill.
I don't think Mill is racist, although it would be worth looking carefully at the troubling passages.
He does have strong, maybe false beliefs about the progress of civilization. He thinks that in hunter-gatherer
cultures, people have trouble deferring gratification and act on impulse. The remedy is a string of wise chieftains,
with political power, who force people to sacrifice their short-term interests for the sake of their larger long-term interests,
and also for the sake of the common good. Over time people come to internalize this coercion, develop a capacity for prudence and
self-sacrifice, and this is progress. Presumably one learns from one's parents as well; brutish parents are likely to raise brutish children. So a society progresses, becomes more civilized, with good luck, over time. This is a process that Europeans went through and others will have to go through.
There are further stages of progress, he thinks. The Liberty Principle is only an appropriate guide for society, under modern conditions. One condition
for the applicability of the Liberty Principle is mass literacy and some elementary understanding of history and of what causes what. In the Middle Ages, when peasants are illiterate and innumerate and swayed by superstition, the time is not yet ripe for conformrity by society to the Liberty Principle.
Mill's views on this score are surely naive and in some respects false (though one might try to defend a revised version of them), but not inherently racist, I think. He does not think Europeans are inherently more civilized, better people. He thinks it is a matter of historical contingency that Europeans first went through a process that others will follow or at least will follow if all goes well.
The above does not entirely account for the passages about the Chinese. (1) I doubt Mill knows much about the history of Chinese civilization. (2) I'm not sure what knowledge about the history of Chinese civilization would have been available to English speaking intellectuals in Mill's day. So if Mill is ignorant, I'm not sure this is culpable ignorance on his part.
Notice that Mill's associationist psychology has the resources to say that by processes of association (conditioning), people who are genetically the same can differ enormously in culture and dispositions. So there could be belief in national traits, broadly speaking, without commitment to the idea that these traits are carried "in the blood."
Is there a good book, or books, about Mill's views on the British empire and on European colonialism?
Dick Arneson
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From: phi...@googlegroups.com [phi...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Peter Yong [pierre....@gmail.com]
Sent: Sunday, February 01, 2009 10:52 PM
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Subject: general question regarding On Liberty