On Mill's feast day

...If the rule is that I am free to do whatever I please so long as I don't pick your pocket or break your leg, then I'm free to engage in unlimited getting and spending, free to join members of my interest group in singlemi ndedly pursuing our collective interests, free to ignore the needs of other citizens, and free to generally disregard all positive duties of citizenship...

...The revival of Mill's notion of selfregarding actions dates to the 1960s, when it was used, especially among the young, to justify certain modes of then unconventional conduct, e.g., drug use, novel fashions in dress and hairstyle, and that complex of behaviors traveling under the name of the sexual revolution...

...that would be a very different and entirely defensible proposition...

...When liberals lament that Americans don't seem very interested in the liberal social justice agenda, they largely have themselves to blame...

...he has also taught sociology and written frequently for Commonweal and other publications...

...but such a policy can hardly be justified in terms of non-existent distinctions between self-regarding and otherregarding conduct...

...You contradict yourself if you attempt to be both a Darwinian and a Millite at the same time, if, that is, you try to be both an ecologist and an individualist...

...The crucial theoretical shortcoming of On Liberty is the distinction Mill makes between "self-regarding" and "otherregarding" conduct...

...This is pure Millism...

...With this issue he begins a regular column in these pages...

...Though it is many years now since I concluded that the sociological and ethical theories informing On Liberty are flawed beyond repair, I still can't help getting a feeling of uplift, a feeling I'm being done good to, whenever I re-read sentences like these: "Mankind are greater gainers by suffering each other to live as seems good to themselves than by compelling each to live as seems good to the rest," or "The beliefs which we have most warrant for have no safeguard to rest on but a standing invitation to the whole world to prove them unfounded," or "Mankind can hardly be too often reminded that there was once a man named Socrates, between whom and the legal authorities and public opinion of his time there took place a memorable collision," or "He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that," or "As it is useful that while mankind are imperfect there should be different opinions, so it is that there should be different experiments in living," or "Human nature is not a machine to be built after a model and set to do exactly the work prescribed for it, but a tree, which requires to grow and develop itself on all sides...

...The only part of the conduct of anyone for which he is amenable to society is that which concerns others," Mill says...

...As in the physical world, so in the social and moral world: everything is connected with everything else...

...In the part which merely concerns himself, his independence is, of right, absolute...

...The same person who insists on the dangers of pesticides and second-hand smoke will tell you that there exists a realm of conduct which is purely private and therefore not subject to interference by others...

...For reasons which seemed clear enough at the time but appear obscure in retrospect, these outcomes were somehow deemed to be liberal and progressive...

...Darwin wasn't the first biologist to teach the doctrine of the right fit between organism and environment...

...no one is an island...

...DAVID R. CARLIN, JR...

...Maritain was fond of making a distinction between the intuitive insights of philosophers and their attempts to conceptualize these insights, saying that the former might be sound even if the latter are defective...

...Despite all this, I still love Mill and his On Liberty...

...JOHN THE LIBERAL- DESPITE HIS THEORY ACCORDING TO Gladstone, John Stuart Mill was a saint — "the saint of rationalism," he called him...

...John the Liberal, who died May 7, 1873, in Avignon, where he was buried with his wife, the formidable Harriet Taylor Mill...

...I say "curiously" since the tendency of Darwin's book, quite the opposite of Mill's, was to put the notion of self-regarding behavior out of court forever...

...To my pious mind, there is no better way to celebrate Mill's feast day than by opening On Liberty and reading a few passages at random...

...and what I do with or to my own mind or body certainly has an impact on the interests of others...

...So well has the public learned the liberal doctrine about selfregarding actions that it realized this doctrine largely absolves them from social justice obligations...

...Since the proper day for commemorating a saint is, of course, the anniversary of his or her death, I recently observed the feast of St...

...But never before Darwin had anyone put the doctrine to such effective use or made the educated public so thoroughly familiar with it...

...The year of his beloved Harriet's death, 1859, Mill published the book which remains his most celebrated and influential work, On Liberty...

...If ever there were a need for this distinction, it is in the case of On Liberty...

...Note, this individual is not saying that there ought to be a realm of conduct that we agree to treat as private...

...It is also pure nonsense...

...Yet it is precisely this contradiction which constitutes the political faith of the typical contemporary American liberal, who is (whether recognizing it in these terms or not) a disciple of both Darwin the ecologist and Mill the individualist, that is, an ecologist when talking about biological questions, but an individualist when talking about moral questions...

...In the longer run, however, Mill's distinction has simply served to justify respectable forms of egoism, and these have been anything but liberalprogressive in nature...

...No, he or she says rather that there is, as a matter of fact, a realm of conduct which affects no one but the actor alone and any voluntary associates...

...Curiously enough, the other great English theoretical work published in 1859 was Charles Darwin's Origin of Species...

...David R. Carlin.Jr., is a senator and deputy majority leader in the Rhode Island state legislature...

...Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign...

...that had been current since late in the eighteenth century...

...In the short run, the revival of Mill's distinction had the effect of getting more people stoned and into bed with one another...

...Commonweal: 328...

...The trouble with this distinction of course is that there is no sphere of conduct which is purely self-regarding, no part which merely concerns oneself...

...It may be advisable to grant people large drafts of personal freedom...