The Essential John Stuart Mill (Essential Scholars)

A theme of what follows is that, while Mill’s education and experiences did “make” him, his struggle and rebellion against being “manufactured” (Autobiography, p. 163) via an education received at the hands of his father and Jeremy Bentham very likely formed the basis for Mill’s conviction that we all have agency to make and remake ourselves. Secondary to this theme, it will become evident that Mill’s remaking, which also followed his intense, prolonged relationship with Harriet Taylor, cost him dearly.

While the younger Mill developed a more nuanced view of improvement than what he believed was allowed by his father and Benthamism, he never lost his zeal for reform. It was all a question of how that reform should unfold.

in poetry, including Coleridge and Wordsworth (Autobiography, p. 151). This period of intense intellectual questioning, which he referred to as “remaking” himself, led Mill to embrace a more expansive form of utilitarianism that made room for people to make and improve themselves—and emphasized self-direction and the freedom required for such remaking.

These arrangements, so atypical for the time, generated strong reactions among Mill’s family and friends. His correspondence recounts a stark story of real or perceived hurt and rejection that followed.

Why is liberty so important to Mill? For one thing, the liberty to exercise choice is the means by which we develop our capacity to choose. By making choices we not only learn which ones are good and bad, but we also develop a range of abilities required to get along and succeed in life:

By making choices, we improve our decision-making skill:

More than this, only when individuals freely choose diverse ways to live, and to live with others, will they truly flourish.

What if we do not experience the liberty to choose, think, and develop ourselves? Mill worried that without a fulsome amount of liberty we become ape-like, less than fully human. Mill compares the absence of choice to slavery, forced uniformity. Those who do not choose are “yoked,” with “withered and starved” human capabilities:

Liberty is not only beneficial to the individuals who are free. Mill also foresaw significant social spillovers from an unyoked people since free people are better able to help one another. Society as a whole benefits from individual liberty: “each person becomes more valuable to himself, and is therefore capable of being more valuable to others” (On Liberty, p. 266).

In sum, for Mill, society has no business interfering with a person’s right to choose how to live, at least up to the point where those choices do not cause harm to others. This is the famous “no-harm” principle: Mill distinguished between choices that affect oneself and choices that affect others (what he called self- and other-regarding choices) and held that one should be free to make self-regarding choices. Before we examine Mill’s no-harm principle in more detail, we briefly consider his worry about threats to liberty and the question of liberty for whom.