Mill On Liberty (I) : Free-ish Speech

Having recently managed to write a very short review of a very bad book, can I achieve the same concision for a very good one ? Let's find out !

John Stuart Mill's On Liberty is, needless to say, a thoroughly excellent essay. Though full of wonderful quotes, it's best read in its entirety. Frequently I wanted to say, "yeah, but" and then Mill would immediately clarify things such that it put the discussion in an altogether more watertight context. Not only is it commendably rigorous, but it also seeks to lay out general principles and conditions  - rather than saying, "fuck yeah, liberty ! machine guns for children ! racism on TV, woohoo !", Mill instead sets out the principles as to when we should expect extreme personal freedom and when we can't.

To me there are three main themes in the work : speech, government, and society. It's probably too ambitious for me to reduce the whole thing to one short post, so let me try and aim for three short posts instead.

Throughout the work, Mill makes an impassioned plea for freedom of speech. And there's very little I can find fault with his argument. True, I'm firmly against free speech as an absolute - but so was Mill. His most important point comes midway through :

No one pretends that actions should be as free as opinions. On the contrary, even opinions lose their immunity, when the circumstances in which they are expressed are such as to constitute their expression a positive instigation to some mischievous act. An opinion that corn-dealers are starvers of the poor, or that private property is robbery, ought to be unmolested when simply circulated in the press, but may justly incur punishment when delivered orally to an excited mob assembled before the house of a corn-dealer, or when handed out among the same mob in the form of a placard.

Mill says that there are indeed times when society must intervene even with the expression of opinions. These cases, though, are the exception rather than the rule. So long as an opinion only affects the mind of whomsoever holds it, so far must it be granted extreme toleration. It is only when that opinion ventures further, to incite action or else harms others by any means, that the rights of the individual are curtailed - precisely because they infringe on the rights of other individuals.

Alas Mill does not present a more detailed discussion as to how this applies to specifically to speech. What if the press were to constantly demonise corn-dealers, such that the presence of the mob could clearly be attributed to newspaper headlines ? Would this not then also constitute incitement ?

I believe such a discussion is urgently needed. We need not fall into the hellish trap of unbridled censorship, were we only to devise a clear set of principles for the circumstances and substance of permitted speech : the venues and the freedoms going hand in hand. No-one would sensibly suggest banning discussion of the Holocaust in a history class, but everyone ought to be entirely comfortable with the censorship of unsound social-media based medical advice like injecting oneself with bleach. Abject lies with intent to cause harm are surely different than unfounded but sincerely held assertions; a discussion in good faith between those of different perspectives is not the same as a propaganda war between idiots.

Overall, I would certainly describe myself as less liberal than Mill - but not all that much less. His core principles of freedom of discussion are utterly sound. So long as you do have genuine discussion and uncertainty, not promotion and conviction, so far do you have the prospect of benefitting from debate rather than be quashed by it. Mill summarises :

First, if any opinion is compelled to silence, that opinion may, for aught we can certainly know, be true. To deny this is to assume our own infallibility.

Second, though the silenced opinion be an error, it may, and very commonly does, contain a portion of truth; and since the general or prevailing opinion on any subject is rarely or never the whole truth, it is only by the collision of adverse opinions, that the remainder of the truth has nay chance of being supplied.

I particularly like this second one. By default we assume ourselves and our experiences to be normal, so while our opinions may be valid to ourselves, formed as a result of perfectly correct observations, there is no guarantee they apply more broadly. This is often forgotten when ideological values are at stake.

Thirdly, even if the received opinion be not only truth, but the whole truth; unless it is suffered to be, and actually is, vigorously and earnestly contested, it will, by most of those who receive it, be held in the manner of a prejudice, with little comprehension or feeling of its rational grounds... the meaning of the doctrine itself will be in danger of being lost, or enfeebled.

And I strongly agree. I just think that what's needed is a more... economic perspective, an attempt to understand the conditions which genuinely fosters the maximum diversity of legitimate ideas, that truly productive discussion rather than the case where everything is swamped under inescapable bullshit. As the saying goes, the energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude greater than that needed to produce it. It only takes a very little bad-faith attempts at persuasion or derailment for the whole prospect of an argument-based search for truth to slide into the mud. Surely Mill would not have approved of that, which would be so manifestly opposed to his goal.

If I had to construct a hierarchy of ideals for speech it would be as follows, in descending order from best to worst :

1. A society with universal high levels of critical and analytic thinking, such that outlandish nonsense couldn't propagate or was at least rendered impotent (e.g. the Daily Mail would be read largely for comedy value)
2. Business models enacted which would make the formulation of monopolies of opinions very difficult, and/or greatly reducing the level of clickbaity hyperbole and sensationalism, but without any explicit restrictions on particular content or authors (e.g. rebalancing media outlets to be more dominated by public bodies than private corporations) 
3. State censorship employed to a limited and carefully controlled degree, forbidding specific sorts of discussion (e.g. promoting racism or other unjustified discrimination) and specific people from specific platforms - explicitly only banning, to a very limited and transparent extent, and never promoting anything
4. A totally unregulated market with no oversight by any external entity at all
5. An entirely state-controlled market in which the state has unchecked powers to both promote and restrict material according to its own interests.

I believe 1 is impossible due to human nature, but 2 or 3 ought to be entirely achievable. As it is, at least on the internet we generally fall into the trap of 4, thinking ourselves free when actually we're largely imprisoned by nonsense.

Where it comes to 5, I'm in full agreement with Mill. I found his descriptions of the formation of dogma and the need to understand the counter-arguments the most interesting. The latter seems to be quite well-known, as exemplified by quote :

He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that. His reasons may be good, and no-one may be able to refute them. But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side; if he does not so much as know what they are, he has no grounds for preferring either opinion.

Which nicely links to the lesser-known idea that this is how dogma develops : through a lack of challenge. Even the truth can succumb to passivity and blind acceptance; that something is treated as doctrine has no bearing on whether it is true or not. What's more important to Mill is that we evaluate everything critically and carefully, and have as few dogmatic beliefs as possible - or at least, I suppose, when new evidence comes to light, we are fully prepared to wake from "the deep slumber of decided opinions". We can't very well get by with making no casual assumptions at all : it's the difference between being prepared to question anything and actually questioning everything. One of those is sensible, the other... isn't.

It's important to remember that Mill was writing very much from a perspective of there being, quite unambiguously, too much censorship :

In the year 1857, at the summer assizes of the county of Cornwall, an unfortunate man, said to be of unexceptionable conduct in all relations of life, was sentenced to twenty-one months' imprisonment, for uttering, and writing on a gate, some offensive words concerning Christianity. Within a month of the same time, at the Old Bailey, two persons, on two separate occasions, were rejected as jurymen, and one of them grossly insulted by the judge and by one of the counsel, because they honestly declared that they had no theological belief; and a third, a foreigner, for the same reason, was denied justice against a thief.

These kinds of actions are obviously gross infringements of civil liberties. He also notes that the suppression of ideas in itself carries dangers, beyond the crude case of physically harming those with whom the law disagrees :

With us, heretical opinions do not perceptibly gain, or even lose, ground in each decade or generation; they never blaze out far and wide, but continue to smoulder in the narrow circles of thinking and studious persons among whom they originate, without ever lighting up the general affairs of mankind with either a true or a deceptive light. And thus is kept up a state of things very satisfactory to some minds, because, without the unpleasant process of fining or imprisoning anybody, it maintains all prevailing opinions outwardly undisturbed, while it does not absolutely interdict the exercise of reason by dissentients afflicted with the malady of thought.

Which is another variant of "broken toaster syndrome", whereby society is not quite broken enough that it needs a full-blown revolution, and so is able to persist in its dysfunctionality. 

And yet, while not denying any of this, I'm not sure Mill had experienced the real effects of a fully unfettered arena of debate. He'd never even seen the comments section on a BBC article about incandescent light bulbs, much less ventured into the sewers of 4chan or the like. A totally free market of ideas is no better than a totally free market of products, because people like crap that isn't actually good for them. Mill makes an excellent point :

If either a public officer or any one else saw a person attempting to cross a bridge which had been ascertained to be unsafe, and there were no time to warn him of his danger, they might seize him and turn him back, without any real infringement of his liberty; for liberty consists in doing what one desires, and he does not desire to fall into the river. Nevertheless, when there is not a certainty, but only a danger of mischief, no one but the person himself can judge of the sufficiency of the motive which may prompt him to incur the risk: in this case, therefore... he ought, I conceive, to be only warned of the danger; not forcibly prevented from exposing himself to it.

This seems broadly fine. Where you risk only your own self and no other, you have the right to take that risk (though Mill does discuss that there can be grey areas wherein your own harm may indirectly affect others, and to his great credit admits that this is a difficulty). But on the specific example of the sale of poisonous materials, I'm less than convinced :

Such a precaution, for example, as that of labelling the drug with some word expressive of its dangerous character, may be enforced without violation of liberty: the buyer cannot wish not to know that the thing he possesses has poisonous qualities. But to require in all cases the certificate of a medical practitioner, would make it sometimes impossible, always expensive, to obtain the article for legitimate uses.

Certainly the material should be labelled, but Mill does not advocate any restrictions on who could obtain it (except for mad people and children), only that the sale should be registered and documented :

The seller, for example, might be required to enter into a register the exact time of the transaction, the name and address of the buyer, the precise quality and quantity sold; to ask the purpose for which it was wanted, and record the answer he received... Such regulations would in general be no material impediment to obtaining the article, but a very considerable one to making an improper use of it without detection.

This I think is highly inadequate. Now when we're talking "poison" as in "delicious but unhealthy burger", only a minimum degree of regulation is required, and none at all when it comes to recording who bought it and why. You can't poison someone with just a burger except in a very long-term and marginal sense. Likewise the situation is clear enough for cigarettes, since passive smoking infringes on the liberty of anyone nearby (or indeed, no-one desires to die of lung cancer, so they have the right to be both warned of and able to avoid the danger). So in both cases you provide a label and warning of some sort, and in the latter you also restrict where they may be consumed.

(I personally would go further and happily ban cigarettes entirely, just as it's mandatory to wear your seat belt in a car even though not wearing one doesn't risk anyone but yourself. This minor infringement of liberty is more than compensated for by the much greater overall gain in liberty as a result of decreasing the risk to life. While I think people can mainly be - and indeed actually should be - trusted to make their own judgements with regards to their own safety, I don't think this is such an absolute as Mill did. Often they complain bitterly about some new proposal and then immediately accept it as normal once it's enacted. When the restrictions are minor, such as wearing masks in public places, there is no great difficulty here.)

But things which you can use to murder other people, especially by a mechanism that may be difficult to detect... hang on, giving people that level of liberty is plainly silly*. Regulating information here is insufficient, slapping on a warning is not enough. Poisons in this sense are different to medication that may be dangerous in an overdose. No, we regulate different substances in very different ways. Some we sell freely, others carry warnings, others are released only under authorisation, and some are kept under the utmost safeguards. Personal liberty matters, a lot. But it is not the only factor to consider.

* Okay, knives and pillows we simply cannot do without. Guns ? No. Using a gun for self-defence is Flat Earth level of an absurdity, with the only possible justification for that peculiar American fetish being their utterly crappy social welfare and policing strategies.

Still, broadly I think Mill had the right of it. What affects only one person should by and large be left to his own judgement, so long as he is of sound mind and properly informed. Only, I think that this is no more than a good, sensible default position, not a complete instruction as Mill did : it is anyway difficult to decide when someone is indeed properly informed, or even if they're in full possession of their faculties. Conversely, when an individual acts to directly affect others, there society has the right to intervene. As Mill passionately believed in free speech but not absolutely, so he believed strongly in individualism but not unreservedly. And that I'll look at further next time.