If society has to advance, that can be made possible with the help of creative individuals. Creativity could be effective only if allowed to function freely. The early liberals defended liberty for the sake of efficient government, whereas for Mill, liberty was good in itself, for it helped in the development of a humane, civilized, moral person. It was “beneficial both to society that permits them and to the individual that enjoys them”.
Mill emphasized the larger societal context within which political institutions and individuals worked. For Mill, the singular threat to individual liberty was from the tyranny and intolerance of the majority in its quest for extreme egalitarianism and social conformity. There is a limit to the legitimate interference of collective opinion with individual independence: and to find that limit, and maintain it against encroachment, is as indispensable to a good condition of human affairs, as protection against political despotism. The majority projected itself as the controller of social opinion, as the “moral police”. Social tyranny was exercised in subtle forms like customs, conventions and mass opinion, which did not make an individual stop and think where and how one had come to acquire these. There was an absence of “individuality”. Individuality, to Mill, was not mere non-conformism, but signified the act of questioning, the right to choose.
He encouraged eccentricity, “the mere refusal to bend the knee to custom” at a time when mass opinion was exceptionally assertive. On the contrary, when the pressure to conform socially was not so strong, then there was no need to encourage eccentricity. Individuality, to Mill, meant the power or capacity for critical enquiry and responsible thought. It meant self development and the expression of free will. He stressed absolute liberty of conscience, belief and expression, for they were crucial to human progress.
Mill offered two arguments for liberty of expression in the service of truth:
- The dissenting opinion could be true and its suppression would rob humankind of useful knowledge; and
- Even if the opinion was false, it would strengthen the correct view by challenging it. But the peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race, posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it.
If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error
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General Studies