2) Describe a topic, idea, or concept you find so engaging that it makes you lose all track of time. Why does it captivate you? What or who do you turn to when you want to learn more?
The idea of classical liberalism and its adjudication between the public and private sphere can captivate me to the point of losing track of all time. I am particularly interested in the work of John Stuart Mill because of the role that his legacy plays in contemporary debates on these issues. There is something of a fetishization of his ideas that occurs amongst those who use him to criticise opponents of maximalist conceptions of free speech. The words of On Liberty are recalled as if they were scriptural to guide the lost souls of leftist youths protesting a campus speaker, for instance. Mill is particularly interesting because his conception of self and other-regarding actions that underpins the general principles of On Liberty is much broader than the perennial schismatic arguments over free speech would have us believe. Without fully understanding the historical and ideological context of Mill’s thoughts, utilising cherry-picked quotations does little to help public discussions regarding these important questions. For one thing, the principle of ‘utility,’ centred within the text as the ‘ultimate appeal on all ethical questions,’ is seldom mentioned in public discussions that reference Mill’s name to polemicize about free speech and individual rights. It is the contrast between vapid public debate and sophisticated original texts that led to my fascination with Mill’s philosophy. A good example of this contrast is apparent in his famous harm principle: ‘the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.’ This is sometimes used in accordance with the idea of the selfregarding and other-regarding actions to justify a libertarian conception of society; any person is radically free to act as they like unto themselves so long as they do not harm others. What is often missed, however, in this interpretation of Mill is the fact that he clearly acknowledges the mythical nature of the truly self-regarding harmful action. He writes ‘No person is an entirely isolated being; it is impossible for a person to do anything seriously or permanently hurtful to himself, without mischief reaching at least his near connexions.’ Beyond this, he extensively considers the nature of boundary cases where the distinction between the individual freedom and public responsibility is not intuitively clear. There are passages of On Liberty that are in fact outright rhetorical: ‘Fornication […] must be tolerated, and so must gambling; but should a person be free to be a pimp, or to keep a gambling-house?’ The decision not to impose a forceful conclusion on such a point of nuance is fitting with the generally thoughtful pluralism of Mill, diametrically contrasting the simplistic use of his principles in public debates today. A further significance of this ambiguity is the power that it gives to the cultural and social assumptions that we bring to bear upon liberal principles. Mill’s cultural assumptions lead him to believe that gambling must at some level be tolerated, and yet one could reasonably argue that gambling can be prohibited under the harm principle. In the not uncommon scenario of the father gambling away his family’s savings, the mother and children will certainly be harmed by his ability to engage in this habit. A more striking example of this cultural bias occurs when Mill defends the legitimacy of ‘the laws which […] forbid marriage unless the parties can show that they have the means of supporting a family.’ He contends that these laws ‘do not exceed the
legitimate powers of the State’ and that ‘they are not objectionable violations of liberty.’ This is justified as a reasonable intervention because it seeks to avoid the ‘consequences of their [the hypothetical parents’] indulgence’ in the form of ‘lives of wretchedness and depravity’ that they may procreate. By Mill’s own standards, this is only reasonable if a child being born into a state of poverty is a harm in and of itself, an extreme position that is akin to modern anti-natalism. If the birth of the impoverished child is not a harm in and of itself then the regulation of the poor’s marriages cannot be defined as an other-regarding act. As a Muslim, I believe in Allah’s conjunction in the Quran ‘Do not kill for fear of poverty. We will provide for you and for them’ (17:31), and so I fundamentally disagree with the idea of prohibiting reproduction out of a fear of poverty and I would also reject the idea that the child being born into poverty is worse than their not existing; life is sacrosanct and each life has an inherent value as Allah’s creation. However, many in the modern world may refute this appeal to the sanctity of life. Peter Singer, for instance, regards this concept as ‘medieval’ (intended pejoratively) and feels that society would be far better off without it. Without expanding upon the distinction between Singer’s perspective and my own, the crucial point here is that Mill’s theory cannot be pluralistically applied from a purely objective standpoint. One must commit to certain ideological positions on disputed moral questions if the theory is to be operable. The entailments of this truth and the extent to which it has been underappreciated in modern western debates is what interests me about Mill’s philosophy. In order to learn more about this topic, I consult academic literature or lectures in the absence of a philosopher with whom I can study. Nevertheless, I have found that my broader education within the humanities, from my literature degree and my wider reading, has provided several points of productive convergence between Mill’s theories and broader philosophical concepts. Two of the most impactful examples are Oscar Wilde’s dialogue ‘The Critic as Artist’ and Jonathan AC Brown’s Slavery and Islam that allowed to me reflect upon the problem of subjective liberal presumptions in the spheres of both morality and art.