John Stuart Mill on Free Speech

Stephen Watt writes that Catholics in Scotland should argue for the promotion of spiritual exploration, not free speech as a means of defending Catholic views in a secularly hostile society.

John Stuart Mill on Free Speech

The question of free speech appears again and again in the modern world. But is free speech clearly a good thing and should Catholics in Scotland be unproblematic advocates of it?

The classic text of liberalism on freedom of speech and action is John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty (1859). I shall concentrate on his views on freedom of speech, and here the main lines of his argument are clear. Freedom or liberty of speech is threatened not only by the State, but primarily in modernity by the ‘tyranny of the majority’: the suppression of speech not just by legal means but by the means of social disapproval and power. To prevent this threat, Mill argues that the only rightful basis on which freedom of speech may be restricted is to prevent harm -and specifically not offence- to others. The establishment of a wide-ranging freedom of speech is a good because it produces the best consequences, those consequences being ‘utility in the largest sense, grounded on the permanent interests of man as a progressive being’.  

In short, therefore, following his general utilitarian approach to right action, his claim appears to be the factual one that a society which promotes freedom of speech is, in the long run, a society of happier individuals than a society which doesn’t. Assuming, for the sake of argument, that such a utilitarian test is the right test, particularly if happiness is here given a rather wide and vague interpretation in Mill’s words as ‘the permanent interests of man as a progressive being’, is the claim that such a happiness is in fact promoted by freedom of speech at all plausible?

Although Mill’s On Liberty is widely known (even if one may doubt that it is so widely read), James Fitzjames Stephen’s critical response in Liberty, Equality Fraternity (1873) is certainly less well known, except as an occasional Aunt Sally brought out to be ceremonially demolished in undergraduate courses. That’s a pity as its bracing realism, if not cynicism, deserves closer attention:

It is one of the commonest beliefs of the day that the human race collectively has before it splendid destinies of various kinds, and that the road to them is to be found in the removal of all restraints on human conduct, in the recognition of a substantial equality between all human creatures, and in fraternity or general love. These doctrines are in very many cases held as a religious faith… I do not believe [this faith] for the following, amongst other reasons…[I]n the present day even those who use those words most rationally…have a great disposition to exaggerate their advantages and to deny the existence, or at any rate to underrate the importance, of their disadvantages.

Stephen’s views are not ones that Catholics can embrace in their entirety, any more than Mill’s are.  But Stephen’s questioning of, firstly, whether the aims of liberty, equality and fraternity are always good ones, and, secondly, whether, to the extent they are good, Mill’s emphasis on freedom of speech will always promote them, remains a strong challenge to what Stephen sneeringly describes as the ‘Religion of Humanity’.

What might all this mean for Catholics in modern Scotland? Firstly, it’s worth noting that there is a tendency in modern, Western Catholicism to appeal to absolute freedom of speech as a defence against restrictions. Particularly in a country such as Scotland where views have become common which are at odds with Catholic teaching, and which increasingly seem to be enforced against the public advocacy of this teaching -whether this enforcement is by the state or by activist groups- the attraction of Mill’s views on the importance of maximising free speech, unrestricted by any causing of offence, can seem extremely attractive. But whatever the tactical advantages of such an appeal in current political circumstances, in principle, it rests on shaky ground. There is a right to restrict speech, not just for the direct harm that Mill envisages, but for other reasons of the common good. Catholics and progressive opinion will agree in principle that such restrictions will exist, but disagree on what the substantive content of that common good is on the basis of which restrictions may be imposed. That’s not something that’s easily resolved, particularly in the sort of superficial, irritable debate that increasingly passes for public discussion in our democracies, but it can’t simply be ignored for immediate tactical advantage.

It is relatively easy, particularly since Vatican II and the declaration Dignitatis humanae, within Catholicism to make the case for the importance of freedom of belief and speech in the area of religion and spirituality:

A sense of the dignity of the human person has been impressing itself more and more deeply on the consciousness of contemporary man, and the demand is increasingly made that men should act on their own judgment, enjoying and making use of a responsible freedom, not driven by coercion but motivated by a sense of duty…This demand for freedom in human society chiefly regards the quest for the values proper to the human spirit. It regards, in the first place, the free exercise of religion in society.

For Catholics, this area is of central importance to human beings; it requires an existential commitment that is hard to create without freedom of exploration, particularly in highly educated populations typical of modernity; and in the diverse conditions of large, modern, multi-cultural states, the imposition of any one religious view by coercion is both impractical and liable to undermine the civic peace necessary for successful religious commitment. But none of these reasons is easily accepted by the secular mind: religion for the secular is at best a trivial matter and at worst something to be discouraged. To the extent that spiritual exploration is a good thing, it is a thing best done in private without any social organisation. And to the extent that religion does manage to leak out into the wider society, it is itself antithetical to civic peace. So while it is plausible for Catholicism to argue in modernity for the importance of religious freedom, it is more and more difficult for highly secularised societies such as Scotland to accept this importance. And if this importance is underrated, any appeal to the good of free religious speech is liable to outweighed by other goods supposed by secularism to be a greater import.

To sum up, the debate between Mill and Stephen reminds us of the importance of the question of freedom of speech. Both Mill -in his emphasis on the importance of robust debate- and Stephen -in his distrust both of Mill’s values and of his means of achieving them- remind us of important aspects the issue which tend to be lost in modern public discussion. For the Catholic, particularly in Scotland, the temptation is to argue for maximising freedom of speech on Mill’s lines simply to resist the pressures on Catholic views in an increasingly hostile society. Whatever the tactical merits of this approach, by failing to engage with some of the strengths of the case for restriction of speech, it produces unconvincing arguments which fail to acknowledge underlying Catholic and more general principles. Perhaps most fundamentally, unless Catholicism is willing to argue for the importance of spiritual exploration and for the Catholic Church’s expertise (without expecting this to be acknowledged as a unique expertise) in this area, it is unlikely to produce arguments that will remain publicly effective in the long run.

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Online versions of the works referred to above:

Dignitatis humanae https://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_decl_19651207_dignitatis-humanae_en.html

Mill, J. S. (1859) On Liberty. https://archive.org/details/onliberty00inmill

Stephen, J. F. (1873) Liberty, Equality, Fraternity. https://archive.org/details/libertyequality00stepgoog

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By Stephen Watt