One Classical Liberal that took liberties with Life, Liberty, and Happiness – J.S. Mill

One Classical Liberal that took liberties with Life, Liberty, and Happiness – J.S. Mill

If any of what was pointed out in the previous post on ‘Classical Liberalism‘ surprises you, you may be even more surprised to learn that the many quotable lines of the popular essay ‘On Liberty‘, that was written by the shining star of the ‘Classical Liberals’, J.S. Mill, was an early example of liberally employing words that were commonly used in our Founders’ era, in ways that shared little more in common with them than their spelling.

Those differences in meaning become less surprising once you note that J.S. Mill was not only a Utilitarian, whose founder, Jeremy Bentham, had infamously expressed the Utilitarian view that ‘rights are nonsense upon stilts‘, but that J.S. Mill was raised and educated as an experiment in applied Utilitarianism (which is presumed to have led to his youthful nervous breakdown) by Mill’s father, who was a friend and admirer of Jeremy Bentham.

“But Van! Now you’re labeling!”

No, I’m not labeling him, I’m identifying his ideas, with the difference being that where the one shields, the other reveals, and the latter is done by refusing to allow the trite answers we’re given, to abort those questions that are so important for us to consider, whenever we’re presented with an unquestionable answer, such as J.S. Mill being a meaningful proponent of ‘Liberty!’, as it was widely understood in our Founders’ era.

In growing up and developing his own understanding of Utilitarianism, Mill found it necessary to alter or repurpose the meanings of a number of common words from how they had been understood, to suit his beliefs as a materialist Utilitarian – a few of which that come to mind are ‘Life’, ‘Liberty’, and ‘Happiness’. One view he didn’t much change from Bentham’s views though, was that of ‘Rights’, which presents a problem for those who’re reading our Declaration of Independence, Constitution, and Bill of Rights, and J.S. Mill’s thoughts on Liberty.

Of course, Mill wasn’t the only one, or the first, involved in altering the meaning of the words we commonly use. Before going further into what key words Mill altered the meanings of, we should at least glance at what made it possible for those new meanings to be so easily spread, which was by way of Ideology.

The term ‘Ideology’ was coined in 1793 by Destutte deTracy, a Scottish born French noblemen, military man, philosophe (and possibly Freemason, and certainly influenced radicals like the Carbonari), as the name for what he intended to be a new ‘science of ideas’, as an empirical & very ‘Science!ish’ method of thinking that would pointedly avoid (reject) the use of metaphysical concepts & ethical judgement (which, BTW, has a lot in common with Utilitarianism) in order to make our thinking ‘more efficient’. For different reasons, both Napoleon & Marx hated it (while embracing key aspects of it), while Thomas Jefferson admired some aspects of it enough to personally translate & publish it in America, and it became exceedingly influential in his time.

Unfortunately the consequence of ignoring metaphysics & ethics in our thinking, is that the words and terms being used ‘more efficiently’, soon lose their depth, as their subsurface meanings become more assumed than actually understood, they are transformed from conveying substantial meaning, to becoming shallow labels that are loosely associated with multiple and often conflicting positions, most of which are not very well thought out. And so one practical problem with Ideological thinking, is that it leads people into believing that they’re in agreement with each other because they’re using the same words, without realizing that they aren’t in agreement on what they mean by them. That shallow sense of apparent agreement is a big part of what often propels an ideology to a rapid growth in popularity, until, that is, its followers attempt to put those ideas into practice, and begin discovering that they disagree on what it is that they actually mean by the words & terms they’re using. And because they begin from seemingly similar positions, rather than from a shared understanding, that leads to ‘purity tests’ and ‘_ In Name Only’ labels (for instance, ask a few lefties what they mean by ‘liberal’, or conservatives what they mean by ‘conservative’), which displays the other trait that Ideologies are well known for, their highly fractious nature.

It’s up to each of us to decline to be distracted from asking those metaphysical and ethical questions that we should all be asking, as it’s only from doing so that we can become able to see firsthand how easily our apparent agreement with a label’s positions, can mislead and divert us from the reasons behind the various positions that’ve become associated with them, much like how J.S. Mill, for instance, can appear to be supportive of a subject, such as a Free Market, when the two are essentially incompatible.

Those who read Mill’s ideas today, without being in the habit of asking those questions, are unlikely to realize that what they assume his words to mean, are unlikely to be what J.S. Mill had in mind when writing them, and so whether or not Mill meant to engage in verbal embezzlement or semantic deception, his alternate meanings have been gradually smuggled into popular assumptions & practices, which have become more and more confused and even destructive, without most people ever even realizing it. Such people are often filled with a zeal for their ‘new!’ ideas, and believing that their support for something – a Free Market for instance – would be helped by supporting what seems like just another name for seemingly similar positions – ‘Free Trade!’ for instance – actively voice their ‘principled!’ opposition on ‘economic’ grounds to political tactics like tariffs, declaring their support for engaging in ‘Free Trade!’ with the likes of the Communist Party of Red China, which is eager to subvert and destroy every aspect of what such trade and liberty depend upon. The shallow use of words progressively turns their well meaning efforts into contributing to destroying the very thing that they’d originally supported – which is how we came to wave goodby to what had once been a beacon of judicial, political, and economic liberty: Hong-Kong.

The more depth of meaning that’s lost to shallow understanding, the greater damage will be inflicted, and the more understanding that rests upon a word or term, the more widely the effects from undermining it will be felt. We only need to look at a handful of key words that Mill differed with our Founders on the meaning of, to get a glimpse of how far reaching the negative impact those differences have been, and perhaps the best one to start with, is: Principles.

Mill was very big about writing extensively about his ‘principles!’ of this, and ‘principles!’ of that, and of course we hear a great many fans of Mill’s ‘On Liberty’ today, shouting about what they will and won’t do because of their ‘principles!‘, but what do they understand that term to mean? In our Founders’ era, ‘Principles’ had been generally defined as:

” …one of the fundamental tenets or doctrines of a system, a law or truth on which others are founded” comes the sense of “a right rule of conduct” (1530s).”

, and were understood and used to convey wise and ethical truths, and standards of behavior as with principles of freedom of speech, and principles of an objective Rule of Law, and principles of virtuous and ethical conduct.

What Mill meant by Principles, OTOH, was not moral concepts of what is good, right, and true – as a utilitarian empiricist, he would not entertain such thoughts – but he instead intended them as quantitative ‘measures’ of behaviors in various scenarios to determine the degree of usefulness of something:

“I regard utility as the ultimate appeal on all ethical questions; but it must be utility in the largest sense, grounded on the permanent interests of man as a progressive being. “

IOW, what Mill meant by ‘principles’, had less to do with philosophic principles of behavior, than with devising formulas for generating rules derived from ‘scientific’ measurements, and tweaking the ingredients and measures as needed to maximize its utility.

However encouraging that might sound at first, the problem is that what he meant by ‘Science!‘, had more to do with the new ‘Social Sciences’, than with legitimate experimental sciences like chemistry, where rules & principles were derived from exactingly quantitative measures of factual physical characteristics, as observed under controlled experimental conditions, and based upon measurable consequences, were revised as needed by further observations.

One problem with equating one ‘science’ with the other, is that such quantitative measurements of physical attributes, cannot be made of qualitative concepts of human traits and interactions – you can’t put issues of Trust, Virtue, Friendship, etc., on a ruler to measure them by, or hold either despair or joy up against a scale to weigh them with.

The IEP (The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy) described Mill’s approach, this way:

“…suggesting that basic principles of logic and mathematics are generalizations from experience rather than known a priori. The principle of utility—that “actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness; wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness”—was the centerpiece of Mill’s ethical philosophy…”

And so when J.S. Mill speaks of ‘Principles’, he doesn’t mean ‘a priori’ fundamental truths for guiding our judgement of Right & Wrong, Good & Evil, etc., but something more like weighted averages of popular responses that’ve been associated with one ‘factor’ or another. So when Mill’s ‘social scientist’ claimed to have ‘measured’ something, that ‘measurement’ was typically the intensity of the measurer’s own feelings about an action, combined with their opinion of what brought it about (very much like today’s ‘lived experiences’), which were then artfully assembled along with numerous other such observations, into a statistical format to be presented and treated as if it were no different than the objectively measured ingredients and outcomes of repeatable laboratory experiments, as performed upon material substances.

Armed with that, as a chemist might tweak an ingredient here or there in his laboratory, Mill, in reference to various scenarios from trade to personal relationships, advised mitigating or deviating from his ‘principles’ as needed in his laboratory of society – your life and mine – to vary those ‘outcomes’ he sought to support or suppress, in reforming society closer to his heart’s desire (read him, it’s obvious).

What necessarily follows from following Mill’s idea of ‘principles!’, is routinely being led into advocating for what would have been recognized in our Founders’ era as being unprincipled behavior.

What also comes as a surprise to most casual fans of ‘On Liberty’, is that what Mill typically wanted, and vocally endorsed, was to use the power of the state to ‘manage the economy’ which transforms ‘economics’ into a euphemism for state involvement and control over any or all of the day-to-day decisions and actions of those in society, in every aspect of their lives. Key to his means of doing so, was the liberal use of those ‘principles’ and other words & terms that he’d repurposed through his Utilitarian philosophy, to convey very different meanings and purposes than had been understood or intended by them, just a short while earlier in our Founders’ era.

One fine example of that has to do with his attitude towards ‘Life‘.

Whether J.S. Mill thought human life was a value in and of itself, or just another material commodity whose value was to be measured by its usefulness to the economy (hello: ‘Utilitarian!‘), is something he made clear towards the end of his essay ‘On Liberty’, where he wrote of his concerns over the common people being permitted to have too many children all willy-nilly and unregulated like.

Mill, making very clear what the meaning of “I regard utility as the ultimate appeal on all ethical questions” actually is, expressed his desire for the state to intervene by writing laws to restrict how many babies people should(!) be allowed to have, so as to prevent an excess population from negatively impacting the economy by reducing workers’ wages:

“… in a country either over-peopled, or threatened with being so, to produce children, beyond a very small number,[Pg 206] with the effect of reducing the reward of labour by their competition, is a serious offence against all who live by the remuneration of their labour…”

Just think, Classical Liberal J.S. Mill was a century ahead of Communist China’s ‘One Child Policy’ – can’t ya just smell the liberty!?

Speaking of which, ‘Liberty‘ is another word that reveals real differences between what was understood during our founding era, and what J.S. Mill meant by it a half century later. Liberty had been defined as,

“state of being free from arbitrary, despotic, or autocratic rule or control”

, and so they understood that liberty was what resulted from living in a moral and law abiding community that respected the rights and property of each citizen.

J.S. Mill upended that understanding with his very different Utilitarian belief that liberty is little more than,

“…freedom from restraint…”

, which you should note is less a concept, than a physical condition that neither requires nor presumes qualities of character or responsibility. Say hello to Rousseau’s ‘noble savage’.

Mill of course goes on to say many very fine sound things about this liberty, that:

“This, then, is the appropriate region of human liberty. It comprises, first, the inward domain of consciousness; demanding liberty of conscience, in the most comprehensive sense; liberty of thought and feeling; absolute freedom of opinion and sentiment on all subjects, practical or speculative, scientific, moral, or theological. The liberty of expressing and publishing opinions may seem to fall under a different principle, since it belongs to that part of the conduct of an individual which concerns other people; but, being almost of as much importance as the liberty of thought itself, and resting in great part on the same reasons, is practically inseparable from it. Secondly, the principle requires liberty of tastes and pursuits; of framing the plan of our life to suit our own character; of doing as we like, subject to such consequences as may follow: without impediment from our fellow-creatures, so long as what we do does not harm them, even though they should think our conduct foolish, perverse, or wrong. Thirdly, from this liberty of[Pg 23] each individual, follows the liberty, within the same limits, of combination among individuals; freedom to unite, for any purpose not involving harm to others: the persons combining being supposed to be of full age, and not forced or deceived.”

, which does sound very fine indeed (though more resembling lists of ingredients, than guiding principles), until, that is, you recall to mind what Mill meant by ‘principles’, and what he said all such ‘principles’ are subordinate to:

“…I regard utility as the ultimate appeal on all ethical questions; but it must be utility in the largest sense… “

, and the question that ought to bring to mind, is what that might mean if your life & liberty aren’t thought to be of use to ‘Those who know best’, like Mill? Say hello to Rousseau’s ideal Legislator, who believed, like Mill, that the state ‘ought’ to have the power to enforce the ‘General Will’ and ‘force them to be free‘, as being the ideal of ‘Liberty’.

If you think I exaggerate, I have to ask if (or when) you’ve actually read ‘On Liberty’, or anything else that Mill has written? Because Mill’s use of the word ‘Principle’ is based upon his positions, rather than their being derived from a conceptual understanding of what is real, good, and true, he finds that he has to justify his preferred positions over and over again with words to the effect of: “Yes, our principles do say that something is evil, but… sometimes circumstances demand that society engage in a lil’ bit of evil, for the common good… because success is what matters…”, as Mill does here with what he considers to be the fundamental determiner of liberty, ‘restraint’:

“…all restraint, quâ restraint, is an evil: but the restraints in question affect only that part of conduct which society is competent to restrain, and are wrong solely because they do not really produce the results which it is desired to produce by them….”

The fact is that Utilitarianism entails the idea that the ends justify the means (‘principles’, doncha know), and his philosophy transforms ‘principles’ into a veritable blank check for authorizing society to trample over the lives and choices of individuals, for the greater good.

The problem with looking to J.S. Mill for advice on liberty, is that as a Utilitarian, he sees Liberty as nothing more than ‘the absence of restraint‘ (an opinion shared by Vladimir Lenin, BTW), and with that materialistic conception of ‘Liberty’ in mind, he finds that the next step that anyone must make is, as Mill did, that:

“…All that makes existence valuable to any one, depends on the enforcement of restraints upon the actions of other people. Some rules of conduct, therefore, must be imposed, by law in the first place, and by opinion on many things which are not fit subjects for the operation of law. What these rules should be, is the principal question in human affairs;…”

IOW Mill’s idea of what he calls ‘liberty’, begins with how force ‘should’ be imposed, either in forcibly restraining others so you can do whatever you want, or by submitting to some restraints so as to strike a bargain to ‘allow’ each other to do some of what each desires – not because it’s right and good, but because it’s useful in satisfying your desires, AKA: Utilitarianism.

In a nice irony for today’s Libertarians who wave copies of Mill’s ‘On Liberty’ about and claim to be all about liberty and ‘Free Trade!‘, Mill thought that:

“…the principle of individual liberty is not involved in the doctrine of Free Trade…”

, for you see, in Mill’s idea of ‘Liberty!’, “…trade is a social act…“, which means that ‘those who know best’ – experts like J.S. Mill – should be the ones who determine what rules would be most useful for society. You can almost hear a piratic “These Principles be more like suggestions, argh“.

SoOooo much liberty.

The fact is that in J.S. Mill’s effort to ‘define principles of Liberty‘, there are no principles as were recognized in our Founders’ era, to be found, no principles of individual rights nor any principled basis for liberty to justify defending the individual against tyranny, and in place of principles, Mill presents only varying technical formulas for dealing with the various complexities of issues of the moment, from moment to moment, in which Those Who Know Best must be empowered to pick and choose which particulars must be sacrificed (meaning you, and your concerns), so as to serve what they decide to be the ‘greater good’, in that particular scenario.

It’s not surprising that his idea of ‘liberty’, led him to lament:

“…When we compare the strange respect of mankind for liberty, with their strange want of respect for it, we might imagine that a man had an indispensable[Pg 207] right to do harm to others, and no right at all to please himself without giving pain to any one…”

Mill’s idea of Liberty did not begin with what a good life is, and how best to live it, or even with what is real and true, but with either how ‘best’ you can get away with doing some of what you most desire to do to yourself and others, or with stopping others from doing what they most desire to do to themselves or to you.

What’s a shame, is that his own low opinion of both man and liberty didn’t cause him to question his understanding of either, or how he came to them. As a result, that conception of Liberty that J.S. Mill had in mind, is, IMHO, one that is unfit for a life worth living, let alone for ‘… the pursuit of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness’.

And if you expected something different with his notions of Happiness, sorry, but no.

As was understood in our Founders’ era, Happiness was defined in Dr. Johnson’s dictionary:.

“…that estate whereby we attain, so far as possibly may be attained, the full possession of that which simply for itself is to be desired, and containeth in it after an eminent sort the contentation of our desires, the highest degree of all our perfection.”

, or as put by the Scottish philosopher Thomas Reid, the motive force behind SCSR (Scottish Common Sense Realism) put it:

“…The happy man, therefore, -is not he whose happiness is his only care, but he who, with perfect resignation, leaves the care of his happiness to Him who made him, while he pursues with ardour the road of his duty. This gives an elevation to his mind, which is real happiness. Instead of care, and fear, and anxiety, and disappointment, it brings joy and triumph. It gives a relish to every good we enjoy, and brings good out of evil…”

, so that ‘Happiness’ was understood in our Founders’ era, to be what could result from steadily adhering to a moral and virtuous compass, so as to live a life well lived.

But ‘Happiness’ meant something very different to J.S. Mill, as he put it in his essay on ‘Utilitarianism’, ‘happiness’ was concerned with the pleasing conditions and sensations of the immediate moment, in that:

“…By happiness is intended pleasure, and the absence of pain, by unhappiness, pain, and the privation of pleasure.”

IOW: an amoral ‘if it feels good, do it!‘ is what he advocated for which some at the time referred to as ‘social hedonism’ or ‘the maximizing of pleasure over pain’, as being the measure of the ‘Greater Good’.

How significantly & consequentially Mill’s interpretations of these words differed in all of their aspects, from what they were understood to mean in our Founders’ era, is perhaps most starkly demonstrated by the actions of the signers of the Declaration of Independence. The delegates well understood what might follow from signing a declaration against King & Country, and yet they adhered to their principles. With a principled understanding of what the words of the Declaration meant, and what they understood was right and good to do – which in their minds were not separable and could not be overridden by the ‘utility’ of the moment – they signed it,

“…with a firm Reliance on the Protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our fortunes, and our sacred Honor…”

, and did so in an exceedingly meaningful service to liberty and happiness for themselves and for their community.

“But Van, we don’t look to Mill for philosophy, but for sustaining a market economy!”

Right. About that. That brings us to another word that our Founders’ understood to be rather central to both markets and economy: Property, which was best expressed by James Madison, here, as with:

“…He has an equal property in the free use of his faculties and free choice of the objects on which to employ them.
In a word, as a man is said to have a right to his property, he may be equally said to have a property in his rights….”

In his Principles of Political Economy, vol 1., in his chapter on Property, Mill begins by noting that private property isn’t as bad of a thing if it’s earned by direct labor, but after much discussion of the noble ideals of various aspects of socialism and communism, he declares that he disapproves of the right to private property when it’s not produced by direct labor. He wasn’t just talking about inheritance, but about the property of investors, and of business owners, owning and profiting from their business, while the pitiful ‘workers’:

“…For example (it may be said) the operatives in a manufactory create, by their labour and skill, the whole produce; yet, instead of its belonging to them, the law gives them only their stipulated hire, and transfers the produce to some one who has merely supplied the funds, without perhaps contributing anything to the work itself, even in the form of superintendence….”

Mill then scolds that such a set of conditions:

“…does not promote, but conflicts with, the ends which render private property legitimate….”

, and he ends his chapter on Property after haven spoken throughout of his favorable feelings towards the French Socialist Fourier, whose Fourierism he thinks strikes an admirable balance between Socialism, Communism, and Private Property, to note in his closing paragraph:

“…It is for experience to determine how far or how soon any one or more of the possible systems of community of property will be fitted to substitute itself for the “organization of industry” based on private ownership of land and capital…”

If that’s not clear enough for you, in book 2, under “2. The case for Communism against private property presented“, while noting there could be problems with communism, still though,

“If, therefore, the choice were to be made between Communism with all its chances and the present state of society with all its sufferings and injustices, all the difficulties, great or small, of Communism, would be but as dust in the balance.”

And as frosting on the poop-brownie, J.S. Mill:

• championed the spread of ‘useful’ aspects of German Idealism,
• was a sympathetic friend and fan of August Comte, who founded Positivism with the intention of creating a secular and *scientifically* socialist religion of the state as a replacement for Christianity.
• used German Idealism to bolster his support for central banking and to oppose any limiting of a central banks’ ability to print money
• supported education reform aligned with a “National Education to imitate the “spirit of the Prussian government,“;
• led the squashing of Thomas Reid’s Scottish Common Sense Realism (SCSR – which arguably had as much or more influence on our Founders’ thinking than even John Locke);

Add to that the fact that J.S. Mill was always in sympathy with those socialist ideals that he only later in life openly declared himself to be in support of, is what, IMHO, puts both his ideas, and his notions of ‘Economics’, in the category of what I term to be Pro-Regressive – that which is for leading us back to a more primitive social & political framework as existed prior to our Founders’ era, so as to enable ‘those who know best’ to wield the power to do with ‘the people’ as they deemed to be best, for whichever ‘good’ (‘Greater’, ‘Common’, ‘The Nation’, etc. ) will seem easiest to sell to the public at the time.

It’s not too much to say that the sad state of Britain today, which in recent decades has gone from abandoning Hong Kong abroad, to jailing people at home for their comments and memes, is the fruition of J.S. Mill’s thoughts ‘On Liberty’, having been put into practice.

My concern with using “Classical Liberalism” as the go-to label for positions on principles of life, liberty, and happiness, is that too many of those who identify as ‘Classical Liberals’ today – especially those doing so in a pious openness to ‘other’ ideas – do so without regard for which sense of the term they are embodying (James Madison or J.S. Mill? Thomas Reid or David Hume?), seemingly unaware that equating J.S. Mill’s ideas on liberty and property, with James Madison’s brilliant and incredibly brief essay on Property, is like comparing vomit to a gourmet dinner, or worse, to recommend mixing them.

But what ‘those who know best’ seem to understand best, is that the utility of dialectally laundering how those principles that were understood by Thomas Reid’s SCSR and America’s Founding Fathers during their period, with those of the latter period in which J.S. Mill has the status of being the leading light of ‘Classical Liberalism’, transforms the term into a conceptual ‘skin suit’ for giving aid & comfort to rationalizing morality and reality away.

Those whose thinking most aligns with mine today tend to identify as being ‘Classical Liberals’ who also imagine ‘Capitalism’ to be a system that aligns with Free Markets and Free Minds (which is an excellent alignment to have), but many of them also tend to think of the likes of J.S. Mill as being a supporter of that ideal, and by doing so they are elevating what Mill actually intended to do, which was to subvert and squash the SCSR of Thomas Reid, and to subvert and corrupt Adam Smith’s concept of Natural Liberty and Free Markets.

That is what Mill intended to, do and that is what Marx repurposed the term ‘Capitalism’ to serve as – that being a label that is easily derided (‘Capital’ =’Money’='the root of all evil’='heartless & greedy rich people’), so as to portray ‘Capitalism’ and Capitalists as an assortment of low-minded people and positions who’re divorced from principle (just ignore the fact that both Mill & Marx had no use for Principles).

THAT is what should be kept in mind the next time you see any of J.S. Mill’s catchy quotes from ‘On Liberty’.

So now, having pushed the more obvious labels aside, we’re almost in a position to dig into the ‘Economic System’ itself, but to get the clearest perspective on that, and to be able to identify whatever ‘flaws in my economic theory‘ I might have, we need to take a closer look at what their system took the place of, and why, which is: Political Economy.

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Source: https://blogodidact.blogspot.com/2024/11/one-classical-liberal-that-took.html