>> So Mill was an utilitarian as I said, but there are four important differences between his utilitarianism and Jeremy Bentham's and I just wanna mention briefly what they were. So for one thing he says, yes. He thinks that utility is the ultimate appeal on all ethical questions, but only utility in the largest sense geared to the permanent interest of man as a progressive being. We'll come back to what he means by this idea that utility is a long run appeal, it's achieved indirectly by observing the harm principle. And just how he thinks that happens, we'll get to in a minute. The second difference is that he doesn't have any single category of pleasure. He's got a much more subtle view. He distinguishes happiness from the mere contentment and he rates, for example, intellectual and moral pleasures above the physical ones. He says in one of his most often quoted phrases, he says, it's better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied. Better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool or the pig is of a different opinion, it's because they know only their own side of the question. So here, you see Mill is making some kind of paternalistic, interpersonal judgments of utility. Because he's saying yes, there's certain respects in which we can see that intellectual and moral pleasures are more important than mere physical pleasures. And if you don't understand that, there's something wrong with you. So he's gonna have a more complicated view. A third thing is that he has a much richer view of freedom than we talked about with respect to earlier thinkers. And to make this point, I wanna introduce a 20th century political theorist now deceased by the name of Isaiah Berlin, who made a very important distinction between what he referred to as positive and negative liberty. What do you think he might have meant by negative liberty? >> By negative liberty, he would mean the freedom from. >> Freedom from being left alone. What we typically think of as the freedom to engage in market transactions. The state doesn't tell you what to do, doesn't tell you what to buy. Doesn't tell you what to pay for it, stops others who would interfere with your market transaction. But essentially, leaves you alone. So negative freedom is freedom from the oppression of others. That's what negative freedom is. Do you wanna take a stab at what positive freedom might be? >> The ability or the freedom, not necessarily the ability to do something. >> The freedom to do something, I think that's right, but I would just add to that proponents of positive freedom. Say that must include attention to things like the wherewithal to do it, the resources to do it. So if I say, you have the freedom to buy Microsoft Corporation tomorrow. It's obvious that you don't have the freedom to buy Microsoft Corporation tomorrow. So, or if we think about saying that the relationship between Trump and the street person to tell the street person he has the freedom to buy Donald Trump's assets is a meaningless freedom. So people who are proponents of positive freedom tend to put emphasis on having the resources to do things, that freedom is realizing something. And if you don't have the capacity or the wear to realize it, you're not in any important sense free. So, it's important to realize that Mill embraced both negative and positive freedom. He certainly, the harm principle is stated categorically in negative freedom terms. But then when we see him talk about these higher pleasures, intellectual pleasures, moral pleasures. If you notice that at the beginning of on liberty, he dedicates the book to somebody called Wilhelm von Humboldt, who was a very romantic German thinker. That tells you that this positive freedom is also going to be important to Mill. Finally, he has, this is really implicit in what we've already said. He has a more nuanced view of interpersonal comparisons of utility than Bentham. There are clearly some areas where he wants to rule them out completely with a strong negative libertarian view, but there are other areas where he's gonna make comparisons and we're gonna have to figure out what those areas are. He's also got a more nuanced view than anybody else we've spoken of of this distinction. So Pareto and Stevenson and others just say, absolutely no comparisons. And Mill's gonna say, there are some circumstances where not only is it a good idea, but it's inevitable that we're going to make interpersonal comparisons. So let's come back to my opening phrase. I said that Mill wants to synthesize freedom and utility. And this is his take on reconciling the commitment to individual rights on the one hand and the scientific theory of society on the other and it's really an invisible hand argument. An invisible hand argument is an argument about something coming about indirectly. If I say the phrase invisible hand, does anything come to mind? >> Invisible hand of market? >> Yeah, it really starts with people. Mostly, I think it starts with Adam Smith. But it really starts with a philosopher by the name of Mandeville in a famous book that's called, it's come down to us known as The Fable of the Bees, but Mandeville's original name for it was actually Grumbling Hive. And the notion there is Mandeville and Adam Smith use it is that when people act selfishly in a market to pursue there own individual interest and nothing else, the net effect is good for everyone. So the net effect is efficient outcomes and that's the notion of an invisible hand. Nobody's trying to bring about the efficient outcome, they're just trying to pursue their own interests. Well, Mill's argument here is a kind of analogy to that. It's an invisible hand argument in that he says, the way that freedom leads to utility is by promoting truth. Truth is important, because truth is at the heart of all science. And so this is why by far the longest chapter in that book on liberty is actually on freedom of speech, freedom of thought and so on. Mill's statement about this is that as follows. He wants to say, there are two ways in which this happens. If you think about self-regarding action, really it happens through the marketplace. That the way in which people figure out what the right prices for an exchange is by the sort of haggling, we were talking about earlier when we were talking about the Pareto system. That you get to the truth about what the right prices is for a transaction simply by engaging in market transactions. And one of the big defenses of markets for all of their infirmities is that they're the best generators of information ever devised. That central planners who try to run economies, just can't get at the truth of how people value things in the way that markets do. So in the realm of self-regarding action, what should be the price for any transaction is left to the market? In the realm of other regarding action though, it's more complicated. In the realm of other regarding action, we have government constrained by the harm principle. And I'm gonna explain more about what that means. But first, I wanna dig in to Mill's discussion of freedom of speech. He says in that famous chapter that I just mentioned, if any opinion is compelled to silence, for ought we know that opinion may be wrong. To deny this is to assume infallibility. Secondly he says, if the silenced opinion be in error, it may well be and very commonly does contain part of the truth. And since the general prevailing opinion on any subject is rarely or never the whole truth, it is only the collision of adverse opinions that the remainder of the truth has any chance of being supplied. So most of the time received opinion at best is partly right and it's only through argument, clashing opinions, debating, challenging one another that we can see that. Then he gives another case, he says thirdly, even if a received opinion is not only true, but the whole truth unless it's suffered to be actually vigorously and earnestly contested. It will not for most of those that receive it be held in the manner of anything other than a prejudice. So here's thinking of the sort of case where if you get the right answer to a math problem by copying somebody else's work, you've got the right answer, but you're not holding it for the right reasons. And unless you have to go through the motions of learning and talking about and debating and arguing it, you're not going to be able to hold the truth for the right reasons. So the first case is if we assume we're right, we're assuming infallibility that we aren't justified in doing. The second case is usually, received opinion's only partly right and the way you correct it is freedom of speech. Thirdly, even if you have the right answer, it's important to have it for the right reasons and you don't get that unless you have freedom of speech. And then fourthly, he says, the meaning of the doctrine itself will be put in danger if we don't vigorously defend the notion of free speech. So the ideas that freedom, apart from all its other benefits that we've already been discussing. Promotes truth by guaranteeing freedom of speech and this is a very important transition in enlightenment thinking. It's one of the first formulations of what I'm gonna refer to as a fallibilist conception of truth. Think back to where we started in this course when we were talking about the early enlightenment thinkers, like Hobbs and Locke. For them, the hallmark of genuine knowledge was certainty. Remember, the Descartes, the Cartesian idea. I think therefore, I am. He was looking for the things that couldn't be doubted and that was the sort of standard for scientific truth. Mill is saying no, scientific principles start from the notion that everything we think we know is fallible. And in that sense, he prefigures the famous 20th century Political and Philosophy of Science Karl Popper, who came up with the notion of falsificationism. Popper said in these two famous books, The Logic of Scientific Discovery and Conjectures and Refutations. That we never know that we have the truth, rather what scientists do is they come up with a conjecture, as he calls it. A hypothesis, a suggestion. They then tried to falsify it. They run an experiment geared to trying to falsify it. And if they fail to falsify it, that gives it some kind of provisional acceptability, but you never know that it's not gonna be overturned later. So this is the notion science proceeds simply by trying to falsify, we can't verify our opinions ever. And so Mill's defense of freedom of speech as generating truth, because of the fallibility of everything we think we know is the sort of transitional moment, if you like. From early to mature enlightenment conceptions of science, where instead of looking for certainty, a holy grail that doesn't exist. We recognize that all knowledge claims are fallible. So tremendously important for those reasons, but let's get back to Mill.
