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Mill, Indecency and the Liberty Principle
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 26 January 2009
Abstract
This paper attempts to do two things. One concerns Mill's attitude to public indecency. In On Liberty Mill expresses the conventional view that certain actions, if conducted in public, are an affront to good manners, and can properly be prohibited. This paper aims to come to an understanding of Mill's position so that it allows him to defend this part of conventional morality, but does not disrupt certain of his liberal convictions: principally the conviction that what consenting adults do in private is no-one's concern but their own. The difficulty is to find an argument that Mill could have used to defend the position that some things which, though acceptable in private, can rightly be stopped if attempted in public. The other thing the paper attempts is to consider the impact of Mill's view of indecency on the interpretation of the Liberty Principle. There remain difficulties here which have not been adequately explored. So the paper will examine a range of interpretative alternatives.
The first part of the paper will raise and explore the issue of the interpretative problems. The second part will look at some ways of trying to justify Mill's view of indecency on characteristically Millian grounds. The final part will explore the somewhat surprising consequences of the discussion of the second part for the interpretative questions raised in the first.
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References
1 Mill, John Stuart, On Liberty, Essays on Politics and Society, ed. Robson, J. M., Toronto, 1977Google Scholar, Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, xviii. 223.
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8 Indeed the argument given by Mill trades on an equivocation in the use of the term ‘offence’. The sense in which bad-mannered behaviour is ‘offensive’ is not the same as the sense of ‘offence against others’ sufficient to bring an action into the sphere of public regulation. The latter sense is illustrated by the legalistic phrase ‘offences against the person’.
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10 One way of defending the asymmetry is that public actions ‘impinge’ on us in ways that purely private actions do not. So if the objection to indecency is largely aesthetic then ‘impingement’ will produce an appropriate distinction. I owe this thought to Jerry Valberg. However as this does not seem to be a view one could attribute to Mill, I shall not consider it here any further.
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14 I'm grateful to Roger Crisp for illuminating correspondence on this point.
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24 Although it does raise a more general worry: how effective at communicating its message will a private experiment in living be? However, literature and direct exposure to volunteers may well be sufficient.
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