On Liberty and the Subjection of Women Book

Both JSM's essays are extremely important and remain highly relevant for the times we are in.

On Liberty

Mill's objective in the essay is to assert what he regards as a simple principle: society must not interfere with the liberty of action of any of its members, except to protect the rest of its members from harm.

The ideas in "On Liberty" remain highly relevant today. To take one example, consider the case of Transgender rights.

Mill would say that people - at least adults with the normal capacities - should be free to run experiments on their own lives without interference.

We cannot presume to know better than them their feelings and preferences and should not interfere with their freedom to self-identify as a woman or as a man. Some good reasons not to interfere are:
• We could be wrong - gender might be entirely socially constructed and not fixed by our natal sex
• It would be an infringement of that person's sovereignty over their own body
• We have a personal interest in our own well-being and unique access to our thoughts and preferences, so no one else is better positioned to know what's right for us
• When we interfere things often end badly due to a wrong approach or unintended consequences

Under Mill's utilitarian philosophy, actions are meritorious when they bring about good consequences, net of their harms. Legitimizing the rights of transgender people undoubtedly benefits some - those who feel trapped in the wrong body - but the analysis would be incomplete without considering the harms.

Children, believing themselves trans, may be given hormone blockers to delay the onset of puberty only to feel dismay and regret their eventual sterility. If predatory men self-identify as trans women to access women-only spaces, women are worse off.

The trans issue thus lies at the border of Mill's two principles. The first being that individuals are sovereign over their own bodies and minds, and the second that they must not cause harm to others.

Mill considers gambling houses and pimps as other examples where the two principles converge, and his assessment suggests he would likely err on the side of allowing such activities despite the social harms.

It's important to appreciate both sides of Mill's argument. He is granting great liberty to individuals to develop their own individuality in ways the rest of society dislike or deem harmful to oneself. But if things work out badly then the actor alone must bear the consequences.

Unsurprisingly, Mill is unsympathetic to charity, as revealed by his remarks on the poor:
"…if what they need is given to them unearned, they cannot be compelled to earn it: that everybody cannot be taken care of by everybody, but there must be some motive to induce people to take care of themselves; and that to be helped to help themselves, if they are physically capable of it, is the only charity which proves to be charity in the end."

The most important of Mill's arguments are those he advances in support of the free expression of opinions.

"the peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race... 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."

Mill has a dim view of custom, whether religious or secular, because customs are accepted unquestioningly and are grounded in beliefs we do not hold with conviction.

Because most religious people do not question their beliefs, the doctrines of their faith have no real sway over their lives. Often believers and non-believers are indistinguishable in how they live.

We can only believe deeply when we consider the other side of the argument, and contradiction is vital for the emergence of truth.

"there is always hope when people are forced to listen to both sides; it is when they attend only to one that errors harden into prejudices,"

Mill has a deep respect for Plato, because through his dialectics, he explored the foundations of our beliefs.

I find Mill's arguments highly resonant and relevant for the current environment in which we live.

We are witnessing a polarization of society in the U.S. and elsewhere, and a refusal by many people to consider opinions which oppose their beliefs and ideologies. Still more disconcerting is the accompanying surge of intolerance that we see in the rise of anti-immigration campaigns and calls for protectionism.

As the world's nations, led by the U.S., become more insular and homogeneous, we risk forgetting the reasons, so brilliantly articulated by John Stuart Mill, for why diversity should be so cherished and defended by a free society.

On the Subjection of Women

There are many layers to the subjection of women. Mill understood that their mental subjection - the enslavement of their minds by the social order - was more harmful than their inability to own property, hold public office, freely seek out a profession and so forth.

Men hold "women's [minds] in subjection, by representing to them meekness, submissiveness, and resignation of all individual will into the hands of a man, as an essential part of sexual attractiveness."

The harms from the unequal social relations between men and women, argues Mill, are manifold.

The obvious harm accrues to women who, outside of managing a household and raising children - a temporary occupation for most - have no opportunity to create a meaningful life by applying their talents to worthy goals and pursuits.

Society, too, is worse off because we lose out on the product of the talent and energy of one half of humanity. While Mill concedes that history's geniuses are overwhelming men, he makes the Black Swan argument; the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

The real reason women's achievements have not equaled those of the best men, argues Mill convincingly, is they have not had the opportunity. Their time is diverted to fulfilling their socially given role of attending to their looks and dress, making themselves charming, and being at the beck and call of everyone around them.

The subtlest and most surprising of the victim groups identified by Mill turns out to be the boys and men who wield power over women.

Plato wrote that it is better to suffer injustice than to commit it. Mill, no stranger of Plato, expresses a similar belief that oppressors are worse off than the oppressed.

"Think what it is to a boy, to grow up to manhood in the belief that without any merit or any exertion of his own, though he may be the most frivolous and empty or the most ignorant and stolid of mankind, by the mere fact of being born a male he is by right the superior of all and every one of an entire half of the human race"

It is no surprise that Mill, whose thinking was so influenced by an awareness of human fallibility, would regard the endowment of a false sense of superiority as such a pernicious evil.
For Mill, "conduct, and conduct alone, entitles to respect: that not what men are, but what they do, constitutes their claim to deference; that, above all, merit, and not birth, is the only rightful claim to power and authority."

Mill's essay on the subjection of women could hardly be more relevant in the time of #MeToo. It turns out that, more than a century and a half after Mill's publication, women have not been completely freed from the tyranny of men. There can be little doubt that Mill, though he would be dismayed by how long it took, would see progress in our holding the Harvey Weinstein's of this world accountable.