Reading John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty in the Age of "Cancel Culture" and "Fake News"

We live in a time when critics deride “cancel culture” as narrowing the range of acceptable opinions. When others contend that what is called “cancel culture” is merely a justified reaction to hate speech and bigoted views that for too long went unchallenged. When social media is flooded with trolling, such that many cannot separate fact from fiction. When politicians denounce factual reporting as fake news, further muddying the waters. When tech companies try to strike a balance between supporting free speech and stifling incitements to violence, all the while trying to maximize their profits.

How do we navigate such issues?

One is tempted to turn back to one of the definitive statements about free expression, the British philosopher John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, which was published in 1859. 

It is a fool’s errand to try to determine what some figure from the past would think about today’s issues. And there is a danger of simply using the authority of a great historical figure to give voice to one’s own views. Here, however, I want to read Mill’s On Liberty with an eye to our own twenty-first-century dilemmas. What answers might he have, and what things did he overlook?

Mill (1806–1873) was educated by his father, the historian and philosopher James Mill, in an experiment to validate his theories about maximizing human potential. As such, John Stuart underwent a rigorous upbringing in which he learned Latin and Greek by the time he was eight and read works by Plato, Herodotus, Aristotle, and Euclid, among others, in the original languages. Despite Mill’s seemingly impressive achievements, Mill considered his own mental capabilities to be below average, and thought that his results could be replicated by most children if given a similar education. 

Mill grew up in the milieu of utilitarians and free traders like his father and Jeremy Bentham, who sought reforms to the British state. Yet Mill fell into a depression by the time he was 20, when he realized that even if his desired reforms all came into effect, he still would not be happy. Gradually, he came out of his depression, in large part by reading the poetry of William Wordsworth which taught him that “there was real, permanent happiness in tranquil contemplation.”

Mill earned his living as a colonial administrator for the East India Company, which governed British India. This allowed him to write many philosophical works for which he became famous, including A System of Logic in 1843. Mill was elected as a Member of Parliament in 1865 and became the first MP to propose granting women the vote—although his proposal was unsuccessful.

On Liberty was written near the end of Mill’s career, and was co-written, although not officially so, with his wife Harriet Taylor Mill, who died in 1858.

The book was a defense of individual freedoms, both from government intervention, but also from the dictates of society, tradition, and custom, which Mill feared would stifle individuality. For Mill, the importance of protection from the tyranny of the majority was just as important, if not more so, as protection from the tyranny of government.

A key part of On Liberty was to defend freedom of speech. For Mill, freedom was a central value, and he justified it on the grounds of its usefulness for human flourishing and the improvement of society. Prohibiting a view from being heard, Mill reasoned, did not just punish the person who was being silenced, but it punished all of society which was deprived of learning about the person’s view. For Mill, it mattered not whether the view was right or wrong: “If the opinion is right, they [society] 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.”

Even if one could be sure that the view was an error, it would still be unjustified, according to Mill, to suppress it. True ideas, he thought, should still be questioned. For one thing, hearing false ideas helps us to refine our arguments against them, and also helps us understand our own position better. As Mill wrote, “he who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that.” Without hearing objections, true ideas could deteriorate into simple prejudices.

For Mill, however, it was less common to come across unambiguously true or false beliefs. More common was that differing views each contained a portion of the truth. It was therefore necessary, in order to arrive at a full understanding of the truth, to hear all views and combine what was best between them.

There is undoubtedly wisdom in Mill’s arguments. But let us take a relevant case from today: that of white supremacists. What is the value of rebutting their arguments? Mill might say that by arguing against them, we reaffirm our commitment to racial equality and perhaps even understand the principle at a deeper level.

At the same time, however, there are diminishing returns on this, something Mill does not directly discuss. How often must we rebut the arguments of white supremacists? Are we really meant to spend an indefinite amount of time arguing against them every time they rear their heads? Perhaps in a perfect world, yes, but our time, not to mention our patience, is finite. What is more, white supremacists don’t often desire honest discussion, but merely attempt to gain legitimacy by presenting their own views as equally plausible and worthy of debate.

A related question is what to do when people knowingly produce and disseminate false information. Did Mill anticipate bad faith actors? As we’ve seen, countering false ideas was beneficial from Mill’s perspective, but it is not clear if he would take the same approach to misinformation spread as with the deliberate intention to deceive. In other words, do we gain the same benefits by arguing against knowingly false information as we do from arguing against false ideas which are honestly held?

Again, Mill did not seem to consider this issue explicitly. However, he did say that certain ways of asserting an argument—even if the argument were true—nonetheless “may justly incur severe censure.” Among these were “to suppress facts or arguments, to misstate the elements of the case, or misrepresent the opposite opinion.” Cynical arguments by white supremacists and deliberate false information might fall under these categories. However, Mill said, perhaps naively, these methods of argument—for example, someone misrepresenting the other side—were so often “done in perfect good faith” and presumably by people who thought they possessed the truth, such that it was difficult to legitimately interfere with these ways of arguing. While Mill did not rule out censuring bad faith actors, he cautioned that it was often difficult to determine who truly was a bad faith actor. 

For Mill, social restrictions on speech had to be handled delicately since these were perhaps more impactful than government restrictions. In Victorian Britain, even though the country lacked some of the judicial penalties for speech of its neighbors in Europe, Mill thought that the dictates of public opinion perhaps stifled speech more than if there had only been government bans.

As with today, those of independent means, Mill said, had little to fear from risking the opprobrium of the public and were therefore free to express themselves as they saw fit. But for the majority of people who needed to work to earn a living, they needed to be careful not to offend public opinion, lest they threaten their very means of survival. This seems true today as well, although the scope of acceptable opinion is greater now than in Mill’s day. Some contend that so-called “cancellation” affects only those with truly repugnant views, and no doubt that is true in some cases, but there are also cases where individuals suffered consequences for speech or actions that were—often wrongly—presumed to violate social norms. 

Such a situation cannot but have a chilling effect on speech. For Mill, this was a great evil, and again, not just for the person whose opinion was being stifled. When “a large portion of the most active and inquiring intellects find it advisable to keep the general principles and grounds of their convictions within their own breasts,” this created a society which “cannot send forth the open, fearless characters, and logical, consistent intellects who once adorned the thinking world.” For Mill, therefore, to have a truly intellectually flourishing society required a willingness to allow a wide latitude of things which could be said, so that people were not afraid to express themselves. Again, Mill’s primary concern was not government censorship, but the dangers of social censorship. 

Interestingly, when Mill put his theories to the test and tried to come up with the most controversial cases, he went to religion. Mill was deeply concerned about protecting unorthodox religious opinions—and really any minority opinions—even if others found them offensive. For him, it was worse to stigmatize people who held minority positions than for the minority to be offensive to the majority. “If it were necessary to choose,” he wrote, “there would be much more need to discourage offensive attacks on infidelity, than on religion.” In other words, we should protect the minority views from attacks first and foremost before being concerned about the minority’s attacks on the majority (although Mill thought both should be protected).

Again, this was justified on the grounds of utility since it allowed truth to be discovered and fortified through discussion. Mill believed that in an arena of free discussion, “wrong opinions and practices gradually yield to fact and argument.” That said, Mill recognized that persecution could stamp out true ideas. As he wrote, “the dictum that truth always triumphs over persecution, is one of those pleasant falsehoods which men repeat after one another till they pass into commonplaces, but which all experience refutes.” If an idea were true, however, Mill said there was a chance that it might in time be re-discovered.

Mill was not, therefore, naive about the ability of truth to triumph in all conditions. And he recognized that the powerful classes would inevitably try to impose their views upon the masses. How much faith should we have in speech in these situations to help us reach the best outcome? What about cases of odious views, such as defenses of slavery? Could we really be confident that, for example, slaveowners could be argued out of their position? 

Mill himself was passionately opposed to slavery and racism. During the American Civil War, he supported the North’s cause from across the Atlantic. In the lead-up to the war, Mill was pleased with anti-slavery agitation and the ways in which it forced slaveowners to put forth defenses of slavery. This, Mill thought, would inevitably reveal how hollow the arguments were and would then galvanize people against slavery. 

Some questioned whether Mill’s support of the war on the South was not coercive, and therefore a violation of his liberal principles. But, since the war was about protecting others from the harm of enslavement, Mill argued there was no contradiction.  

This follows from Mill’s view that “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.” Under this principle—dubbed the “harm principle”—Mill justified government interventions to end slavery. On the same grounds, Mill left room for censoring certain kinds of speech, if they could be construed as being directly harmful to someone else.

Mill made the argument like this: 

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 through 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 about among the same mob in the form of a placard.

Here, therefore, Mill was willing to curtail liberty in select cases, particularly incitement to violence.

But Mill was not very precise in how to determine whether something instigated a “mischievous act.” One can think of various cases that might straddle the line. What if, for example, someone read a newspaper article about corn-dealers starving the poor, and then decided to take matters into their own hands? Would the initial author be responsible, and should their speech be suppressed?

The question of where to draw the line is a difficult one and not everyone will even agree with Mill’s examples. Of course we confront similar questions today about the limits of expression. Recently, we have seen Donald Trump’s removal from Twitter, and the removal of Parler, an alternative platform to Twitter, from various app-hosting sites, justified on the grounds that they incited violence, even as some questioned whether this was not censorship.

Many have defended these removals by noting that it was private companies (Twitter, Google, etc.) who made these decisions, not the government. That is true, but as Mill warned, social prohibitions on speech were just as dangerous. But this also raises the question of the obligation of society to provide individuals a platform for their speech.

Mill recognized that there was a difference between the freedom of holding beliefs and the freedom to publish them, since the publishing of views “belongs to that part of the conduct of an individual which concerns other people.” However, Mill hastened to add, this is “almost of as much importance as the liberty of thought itself, and resting in great part on the same reasons, is practically inseparable from it.”

If freedom of expression is bound up with the ability to actually express oneself, what happens when, as in the case of Parler, no one will host their app? Or take a case of someone who has written a book but cannot find a publisher. Can the person really be said to have freedom of expression? 

Mill did not think people were obligated to listen to certain kinds of speech. But he followed the general principle of allowing openness in discussion—insofar as it was useful for society in its pursuit of truth and preserving individuality. And Mill even thought that if there were no one who held a particular view, we would need to invent an adversary to give voice to that view. Obviously, this would only be possible if there were platforms for such views. Yet as we have seen, even Mill set limits, however ill-defined, where society or government might restrict or denounce certain kinds of speech.

Ultimately, Mill was writing about nineteenth-century concerns, not twenty-first-century ones, and we should not expect his concerns to match up perfectly with our own. Nor should we be obliged to agree with Mill just because of his historical stature. 

On Liberty, while providing insights that we can use to think through today’s problems, nonetheless is rooted in nineteenth-century issues. And how could it be otherwise? Mill could not foresee the issues that would haunt us in the twenty-first century—and we can hardly fault him for that. 

Each generation, it seems, grapples with unique challenges of how to balance freedoms. Our issues are our own, and if past writings do not necessarily serve as straightforward guides about how to navigate these issues, we can at least take comfort in the fact that these issues are not new and we are not facing them alone.

Featured Image is a cover of The Subjection of Women by John Stuart Mill