"ON LIBERTY, 'INDIRECT PRAGMATISM', ETC.
John Stuart Mill is usually considered the greatest of the Victorian Liberal thinkers. Utilitarianism was his creation. As a defender of individual liberty against the interference of both society and state, and as an early advocate of women's equality, Mill continues to be of major significance especially as we continue to wrestle with the ideals and the constraints of personal liberty versus government rights. In On Liberty, Mill develops the principle that only self-protection can justify either the state's tampering with the liberty of the individual or any personal interference with another's freedom รป He sees the struggle between liberty and Authority to be the most conspicuous one in history. It seems, in further reading On Liberty, that Mill is not in favor of unbridled liberty, but liberty with some control, particularly with respect to freedom of thought and discussion. He explains that the only part of the conduct of any one, for which he is amenable to society, is that which concerns others. In the part that merely concerns him, his independence is, of right, absolute. Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.
And yet, there are limits to that personal sovereignty. The U.S. Constitution developed the idea of a separation of powers, so that there can be no single "sovereign" to rule the government with the consent of the others. Still, Mill is concerned with what we call the "tyranny of the majority", in the sense that minority opinions should not be lost in the "victory" of the majority. "The highest aim and best result of improved intelligence, it has hitherto been thought, is to unite mankind more and more in the acknowledgment of all important truths: and does the intelligence only last as long as it has not achieved its object? Do the fruits of conquest perish by the very completeness of the victory?" (Mill 289) In other words, any society...