John Skorupski on the relationship between the freedoms of thought and speech

Mill’s essay on Liberty asserts “one very simple principle, as entitled to govern absolutely the dealings of society with the individual in the way of compulsion and control, whether the means used be physical force in the form of legal penalties, or the moral coercion of public opinion.”

The main thrust of the principle (call it the Liberty Principle) is that legal penalty and moral coercion should not be used to make individuals do things for their own good. It does not forbid the use of coercion to prevent an action that will do harm to others; whether or not that is justified depends on other principles. Nor, as Mill makes clear later in the essay, does it forbid legal penalty or moral coercion to prevent offensive or distracting invasions of public places. In shared space one can be expected to behave in ways that show due consideration for others. If I insist on having a loud and obscene conversation with my friends in a railway carriage, or on copulating at high noon in a crowded park, it is not an infraction of Mill’s liberty principle to prevent me, whether by legal penalty or moral coercion. This is so even if my activity does not harm others, as against offending them, or merely distracting them from their own pursuits. In contrast, if I want to do the very same things with my friends in my own house Mill’s principle says that others have no right to stop me.

Famously, in chapter two of On Liberty Mill also provides an inspiring defence of liberty of thought and discussion. However he does not explore its limits in anything like the detail in which he explores the limits of the Liberty Principle. Nor, connectedly, does he answer at all clearly two important questions about it. Is liberty of thought and discussion just a special case of the Liberty Principle, or does it protect thought and discussion in a stronger way than the Liberty Principle alone would do? Does it derive from the same or from different bases to those on which the Liberty Principle rests? These questions have become especially important today, since the principles of free speech are once again in active political play.

On the one hand speech is a species of action, so one might think that interference with it by means of “compulsion and control” would be governed by general principles which determine when such interference in any action is legitimate – that is, by the Liberty Principle. On the other hand speech (including writing, etc.) is widely treated as a special case that requires a distinct degree of protection.

As Mill himself remarks at one point, “no-one pretends that actions should be as free as opinions.” That remark still speaks for our prevailing assumption. If, for example, we think that moral, political or religious demonstrations in streets or parks should not be interfered with, though they inconvenience, distract or positively offend others, then we take this view. For we do not class them as invasions of shared space, in the way we class other kinds of comparably distracting or offending behaviour. There will still be limits, of course, but the mere offence, let alone the inconvenience or distraction a demonstration may cause are not sufficient ground for stopping it.

Likewise, many would say that it is wrong to prevent dissemination of moral or philosophical views, or factual inquiries, just because they may cause harm to some people. Here too there are limits, turning on tricky issues about incitement, intimidation, defamation, privacy. Mill makes a stab in this direction: he accepts that speech can be controlled when it constitutes “a positive instigation to a mischievous act.” This pregnant phrase is clearly meant as a more stringent criterion than the general test of harm to others.

But why give a special protection to freedom of speech, as against freedom of action in general? If liberty of thought and discussion demands a special degree, or distinctive kind, of protection – as I think it does – why does it?

The answer lies in the fundamental commitment of a certain western tradition of liberalism: namely, commitment to free thought.

Free thought is thought ruled by its own principles and by nothing else; that is, by principles of thinking that it discovers, or makes explicit, simply by reflecting on its own activity. It acknowledges no external constraints placed on it by doctrines of faith, revelation or received authority: it scrutinises such teachings in the light of its own principles. The contrast is with apologetic thought, in the traditional sense of that word: thought which seeks to make intelligible, so far as possible, the ways of God to man, without claiming to know those ways by its own principles alone. Apologetics is fideistic. It holds that free thought alone cannot tell us what to believe: natural reason must be a servant of faith, or at most a co-sovereign with it.

Apologetic thought says that certain truths are known extra-rationally, by revelation or tradition; furthermore since these characteristically are, or give rise to, important moral truths, they should serve as the foundation of the social order. (I am using “moral” in the widest sense, to cover what is of value and how we should live, not just specific doctrines about moral obligation.) The apologetic task of philosophy is to expound and defend these truths against their detractors and misinterpreters. But the task need not be just a task for philosophy. It may also be a task for censors and book-burners.

Now the liberal tradition that I have in mind, to which Mill belongs, also holds that the social order must be founded on moral truth. But the important difference is that it at the same time holds that free thought is the only reliable guide to truth. The difference is not that this particular liberal tradition denies there is such a thing as moral truth. The difference is about the epistemology of moral truth: how we know it.

Under what conditions does free thought give us rational belief? There must be free cognitive spontaneity – people must be free to accept a claim only because they find it belief-worthy by their own lights, and not simply because someone tells them to believe it. At the same time, there must be free discussion: openness to what others find belief-worthy, a readiness to give respect to views that deserve respect, and critical readiness to revise one’s own assumptions in the light of what others sincerely say.

Hence the distinctive importance that this liberal tradition attaches to free speech. While free thought may lead, and liberals think it does lead, to all the other characteristic doctrines of political liberalism, liberty of thought and discussion itself has a certain “transcendental” status among these doctrines, in the sense that it is the precondition of knowing what a social order based on moral truth can be. “Complete liberty of contradicting and disproving our opinion,” wrote Mill, “is the very condition which justifies us in assuming its truth for purposes of action; and on no other terms can a being with human faculties have any rational assurance of being right.”

Plainly that applies to this opinion itself, as well as to any other moral doctrines a liberal may want to put forward. It therefore demands a serious response to the apologetic conception of philosophy, and the epistemology on which it is based. That, I believe, was the main motive behind a project on which Mill spent much time and energy: his System of Logic, which is a treatise of naturalistic and fallibilist epistemology. This work and the essay On Liberty were the two by which he thought he would be remembered.

In the 20th century the liberal tradition to which Mill belongs came to be mistrusted by many people who counted themselves liberal, mostly for bad reasons, such as the notion that there is no such thing as moral truth. Two rather more cogent worries about it are that the drive to base social order on moral truth will lead to authoritarianism, and that it will lead to intransigent conflict among partisans of conflicting moral doctrines, conflict that may itself disturb liberal order.

There is some psychological, as against philosophical, truth in the first of these; we know very well how authoritarianism, or unyielding partisanship, can grow psychologically from the claim that one has sole access to the truth. Yet that does not mean that the moral truth, if we could but grasp it, would justify an authoritarian social order. Why should a liberal believe that? And if she does, why is she a liberal? There is also truth in the second worry, as we are presently in a very good position to see. Suppose we accept that complete freedom of thought and discussion is the only reliable road to truth, and also that it can be socially destabilising. Which of these truths, in our actual circumstances, should we steer by? It seems to me that you have to be grossly pessimistic to steer by the second. That is the basic argument against (for example) laws that outlaw holocaust denial.

Dialogue, unconstrained truth-seeking discussion, is nothing but the social expression of free thought. Given the distortions and manipulations to which free thought is subject, only continued full exposure to free discussion can give us continued rational warrant for our beliefs. Socially possessed truth and disinterested, rational qualities of mind among citizens are public goods. Hence, protection of free dialogue can be based directly on its social benefit, rather than indirectly, by an argument going through the rights of the individual. We could say that free speech is a democratic right – but better, we should say that it is a democratic obligation: that we have an obligation to protect and promote it for the sake of maintaining a liberal order based on moral truth.

A common objection to this ideal of democratic intellect is that it assumes unrealistically high standards of integrity and disinterested rationality from too many people on too many subjects. The more we are struck by human irrationality and ignorance, and by its unequal distribution, the more inclined we shall be to restrict open dialogue on this or that important subject to an appropriate elite – at least initially, while the main principles are being worked out. We may do it openly, but we will still quietly do it.

Elites, however, are also made up of fallible and corruptible human beings. They acquire the interests and solidarity of a special-interest group, and uncriticisable ideological doctrines to sustain those interests. Dialogue must appeal to the common reason of all human beings; to leave it in the hands of one group is to provide no mechanism for eliminating the particular distorting perspectives of that group. Further, rationality and responsibility are qualities developed by education and practice. People who are shut out of free discussion are stunted and diminished – they are prone to the diseases of reason, to paranoia, to the defensive aggression that arises from ignorance and low self-esteem, to exploitation by demagogues.

Mill was not a thinker to whom the dangers of free controversy had never occurred. Society, he thought, needs beliefs and feelings which provide enduring rallying points of allegiance and inspiration. Can such sources of allegiance survive if there is total liberty to criticise all sources of allegiance? That is the danger of destabilisation. Then there is another danger, the danger of uncritical group thinking, hardening into “moral coercion”. In a democracy, does unrestricted open dialogue undermine mediocre conformism, or does it, on the contrary, accelerate democracy’s tendency to sell out to celebrity, the politics of simple-minded causes, the glamour of simplistic myths? Or rather, since both occur, which prevails? This was a question that deeply Mill worried throughout his life. In the end, however, the Millian doctrine of free speech places a very large bet that the former prevails. A main question for liberal policy is what can be done to make that bet safer.

John Skorupski is professor of moral philosophy at the University of St Andrews and author of Why Read Mill Today? (Routledge)