‘One Very Simple Principle’*

Jonathan Riley

Utilitas, 1991, vol. 3, issue 1, 1-35

Abstract: John Gray, much influenced by Isaiah Berlin and building on work by the late John Rees and the late Fred Berger, has recently stated three ‘fatal’ objections which virtually all analysts seem to find persuasive against John Stuart Mill's classic doctrine of liberty. First, Gray thinks it ‘an obvious objection to Mill's project that conceptions of harm vary with competing moral outlooks, so that no Principle of Liberty whose application turns on judgements about harm can expect to resolve disputes between exponents of opposed moral perspectives’. Even if we overlook Mill's strange silence in the matter and supply him with a reasonable definition of harm (such as damage to certain vital human interests or rights), it remains clear that the liberty principle ‘is not, and cannot be, the very simple principle Mill sought’. For ‘Mill's principle is in its very nature radically incomplete. It tells us what we may not do, but not what we ought to do.’ To know when liberty should in fact be restrained, ‘we must look to other principles—chiefly the Principle of Utility itself’. But if general utility alone can ‘tell us how much liberty may be given up for how much harm-prevention’, then ‘there can be no question of adherence to [an] exceptionless principle such as Mill's Principle of Liberty’. Thus, even if we believe that Mill's version of utilitarianism is coherent, his judgements about the regulation of conduct must depend on a highly complex and controversial moral doctrine.

Date: 1991
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/ ... type/journal_article link to article abstract page (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cup:utilit:v:3:y:1991:i:01:p:1-35_00

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Utilitas from Cambridge University Press Cambridge University Press, UPH, Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge CB2 8BS UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Kirk Stebbing ().