This paper scrutinizes the tension between individuals’ rights and paternalism. I will argue that no normative account that includes rights of individuals can justify hard paternalism since the infringement of a right can only be justified with the right or interest of another person, which is never the case in hard paternalism. Justifications of hard paternalistic actions generally include a deviation from the very idea of having rights. The paper first introduces Tom Beauchamp as the most famous contemporary hard paternalist (...) by outlining his moral theory (principlism) and showing why it, as it stands, has to allow for hard paternalism. Secondly, the paper focuses on the notion of rights within principlism. I will employ traditional theories of rights to make sense of rights in principlism. Unfortunately, this attempt fails. In the third part, then, I claim that rights can only be limited with reference to the rights or interests of others. This structure is the very point of rights, it is their bite. I will argue for this claim and show its implications. The most important implication is that not only principlism, but every normative theory that includes rights of individuals, has to abolish hard paternalism. (shrink)

. If one is committed to a “Rawlsian” conception of justice, is one not also necessarily committed to a “Christian” personal ethics? MOE explicitly, if one believes that social justice requires the maximinning of material conditions, should one not use one's time and resources as well as one can in order to assist the poorest? The paper offers a very partial answer to these questions by arguing for the following two claims: Contrary to what is implied by some egalitarian critics (...) of Rawls, the idea of a well‐ordered society does not require maximin‐guided choices at the individual level, and hence leaves room for legitimate incentive payments. Despite Rawls's own neglect of this fact, a limited form of patriotism does constitute an individual “natural duty” following from a commitment to maximin social justice. (shrink)

Mill argues that, apart from the principle of utility, his utilitarianism is incompatible with absolutes. Yet in On Liberty he introduces an exceptionless anti-paternalism principle—his liberty principle. In this paper I address ‘the absolutism problem,’ that is, whether Mill's utilitarianism can accommodate an exceptionless principle. Mill's absolute claim is not a mere bit of rhetoric. But the four main solutions to the absolutism problem are also not supported by the relevant texts. I defend a fifth solution—the competence view—that turns on (...) his attention to decision-making structures and, in particular, on the role of expertise considerations in his account. (shrink)

This article discusses John Stuart Mill's voluntary slavery argument in On Liberty. The author shows that standard interpretations of the argument rely on the assumption that part of Mill's objection to voluntary slavery is the permanent nature of the decision. However, in correspondence, Mill also objects to voluntary ‘coolie’ labour contracts, which he regards as a form of slavery. This produces difficulties for standard interpretations of the voluntary slavery argument. Finally, the author provides a revised interpretation of Mill's argument to (...) solve this problem. (shrink)

The Australian Productivity Commission and a Joint Select Committee on Gambling Reform have recommended implementation of a mandatory pre-commitment system for electronic gambling. Organizations associated with the gambling industry have protested that such interventions reduce individual rights, and will cause a reduction in revenue which will cost jobs and reduce gaming venue support for local communities. This article is not concerned with the design details or the evidence base of the proposed scheme, but rather with the fundamental criticism that a (...) mandatory pre-commitment policy is an unacceptable interference with the liberty of the individual, and of organizations. It is argued that the concept of paternalism is a useful lens with which to study the interactions between business and society on this issue. It is contended that the benefits of a pre-commitment system to problem gamblers and society are socially and economically significant, and the cost to recreational gamblers, particularly the cost in terms of interference with the liberty of the individual, is minimal. Pre-commitment also requires gambling businesses to act in a more socially responsible manner. It is concluded that the proposed legislation constitutes a paternalistic intervention by government on the interaction between business and society, and that this is justified. (shrink)

If one is committed to a “Rawlsian” conception of justice, is one not also necessarily committed to a “Christian” personal ethics? MOE explicitly, if one believes that social justice requires the maximinning of material conditions, should one not use one's time and resources as well as one can in order to assist the poorest? The paper offers a very partial answer to these questions by arguing for the following two claims: (1) Contrary to what is implied by some egalitarian critics (...) of Rawls, the idea of a well‐ordered society does not require maximin‐guided choices at the individual level, and hence leaves room for legitimate incentive payments.(2) Despite Rawls's own neglect of this fact, a limited form of patriotism does constitute an individual “natural duty” following from a commitment to maximin social justice. (shrink)

John Stuart Mill provides a classic defense of individual and group rights to liberty with respect to purely private or self-regarding matters: The only part of the conduct of any one, for which he is amenable to society, is that which concerns others. In the part which merely concerns himself … directly, and in the first instance, … his independence is, of right, absolute.… From this liberty of each individual, follows the liberty, within the same limits, of combination among individuals; (...) freedom to unite, for any purpose not involving harm to others: the persons combining being supposed to be of full age, and not forced or deceived. (shrink)

Baselines are commonly used to enable harm identification. The temporal, the counterfactual and the duty-based normative baselines are the most prominent. Each of these captures an aspect of common conceptions of what it is to harm and be harmed. However, each baseline also fails to deliver workable identifications of harm when presented with certain types of case. Problematic cases are found readily in childhood, a venue in which harm identification is often called for. Without a reliable means of identifying harm (...) in childhood, harm cannot properly play a central role in normative assessments of parental practices and state intervention. This paper presents childhood cases in which the prominent baselines fail and offers an alternative: the interest-based normative baseline. Should the interest-based normative baseline replace its rivals and reign supreme? I argue not, presenting a case for maintaining a suite of baselines for use in varying contexts. (shrink)

The article shows that Mill's ethical theory is intimately connected with his theory of human improvement. This can be discerned by analyzing how his utilitarianism differs from Bentham's version. Mill regards the received doctrine as inadequate and he defends it against its critics by making major changes. The article argues that Mill's introduction of qualitative distinctions among pleasures and his emphasis on the higher pleasures were designed to accommodate utilitarianism to his belief in self-cultivation and progress. It concludes that Mill's (...) revisions make utilitarianism more plausible, although problems remain. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to transcend the assumption that stakeholder engagement is necessarily a responsible practice. Stakeholder engagement is traditionally seen as corporate responsibility in action. Indeed, in some literatures there exists an assumption that the more an organisation engages with its stakeholders, the more it is responsible. This simple 'more is better' view of stakeholder engagement belies the true complexity of the relationship between engagement and corporate responsibility. Stakeholder engagement may be understood in a variety of different (...) ways and from a variety of different theoretical perspectives. Stakeholder engagement may or may not involve a moral dimension and, hence, is primarily a morally neutral practice. It is therefore argued that stakeholder engagement must be seen as separate from, but related to, corporate responsibility. A model that reflects the multifaceted relationship between the two constructs is proposed. This model not only allows the coincidence of stakeholder engagement with corporate responsibility, but also allows for the development of the notion of corporate irresponsibility. (shrink)

My discussion in this lecture is structured as follows. In section 1 I consider the nature of philosophical enquiry and its affinity to liberalism. In section 2 I lay out some of the basic components of liberal theory and explore their interrelations. In section 3 I discuss two challenges to liberalism: one concerning the conception of liberty which it involves and one concerning the way in which it introduces the idea of legitimate political authority. In section 4 I suggest that (...) these problems, to do with the values of liberalism, arise on the basis of a prior conception of individuals which is in need of modification. In a brief concluding section 5 I indicate the need for a post-liberal political theory. (shrink)

Two normative principles of toleration are offered, one individual-regarding, the other group-regarding. The first is John Stuart Mill’s harm principle; the other is “Principle T,” meant to be the harm principle writ large. It is argued that the state should tolerate autonomous sacrifices of autonomy, including instances where an individual rationally chooses to be enslaved, lobotomized, or killed. Consistent with that, it is argued that the state should tolerate internal restrictions within minority groups even where these prevent autonomy promotion of (...) members of the group. Finally, it is argued that toleration excludes external protections of minority groups. (shrink)

Despite the emphasis on the state in the history of political philosophy, the twentieth century has been characterized by a remarkable lack of philosophical reflection on the concept. Until recently analytical philosophy had eschewed those evaluative arguments about political obligation and the limits of state authority that were typical of political theory in the past in favour of the explication of the meaning of the concept. However, even here the results have been disappointing. Logical Positivist attempts to locate some unique (...) empirical phenomenon which the word state described proved unsuccessful, and indeed led to the odd conclusion that there was nothing about the state that distinguished it from some other social institutions. For example, its coercive power was said to be not unique: in some circumstances trade unions and Churches exercised similar power over their members. Ordinary language philosophers were far more interested in the complexities that surround words such as law, authority and power than in the state. In all this there was perhaps the fear that to concentrate attention on the state was implicitly to give credence to the discredited doctrine that it stood for some metaphysical entity; propositions about which could not be translated into propositions about the actions of individuals, and which represented higher values than those of ordinary human agents. (shrink)

The Racial and Religious Hatred Act 2006 represents a significant development in UK law. It extends the offence of incitement to racial hatred set out in the Public Order Act 1986 to make it also an offence to stir up hatred against persons on religious grounds. As the most celebrated liberal thinker of the nineteenth century, J.S. Mill might be expected to offer some lessons about the possible dangers of this sort of legislation. A Millian response to the 2006 Act (...) is developed here by first applying Mill’s famous defence of free speech to the Lords amendments to the Racial and Religious Hatred Bill 2005 and then by looking at potential cases in which even freedom of expression loses its immunity when this is necessary to prevent harm to others. Three versions of the harm‐prevention justification for liberty‐limiting restrictions are assessed and it is argued that the most promising version is the claim that it may be permissible to punish incitement to racial and religious hatred not so much because it is itself a kind of harm but by virtue of the acts of discrimination, violence and injustice that are more likely to occur within a climate of hatred. Ultimately, however, this rationale must be weighed against what is, for Mill, the special value of free speech and may in the end justify intervention in only the most acute cases. (shrink)

In his essay On Liberty, John Stuart Mill presents the famous harm principle in the following manner: “[…] the sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number, is self-protection. […] The only part of the conduct of anyone, for which he is amenable to society, is that which concerns others. […] Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.” Hence, there is a (...) distinction between self-regarding and other-regarding acts, and only the latter are subject to moral criticism. However, while all acts are in some way selfregarding, it is not clear if there are any which are exclusively so. There are two additional difficulties. First, the “individual” may not be an individual person; self-determining communities, at least when they have the ability to decide for themselves, are also “individuals” in this sense. Second, it is claimed that groups of acts (activities and practices) have a different kind of justification from single acts. So what are the limits which “others” have in order to protect themselves from what “individuals” (personal or not) do, and what are their rights to do and to protect? If, in the final analysis, protection or defense is a source of justification, what should or must be protected, and why? Where does the demarcation line between self-regarding and other-regarding acts lie? In our age, as in Mill’s, we encounter many situations where such a line is needed, yet is hard to determine or establish. One such example, the case of same-sex marriages, is further explored in this paper. (shrink)

J. S. Mill lays great emphasis on the importance of the notion of the individual as a progressive being. The idea that we need to conceive the self as an object of cultivation and perfection runs through Mill’s writings on various topics, and has played a certain role in recent interpretations. In this paper I propose a specific interpretation of Mill’s understanding of the self, along the lines of what Stanley Cavell identifies as a “perfectionist” concern for the self. Various (...) texts by Mill, ranging from the Logic to On Liberty, show an understanding of the self in which both the theoretical and the practical domain are presented as being internally connected to the transformation of the self. Mill elaborates a criticism of a notion of truth articulated by doctrines having a life independent of the self, as well as a notion of choice which is not the expression of one’s inner self. This internal relation of truth and choice to the self generates a special dialectic within the self, which Mill explores in On Liberty’s second and third chapters by means of several contrasts, such as passive vs. active knowledge, living vs. dead beliefs, or being oneself vs. liking and choosing in crowds. (shrink)

What and how should individuals resist in political situations? While this question, or versions of it, recurs regularly within Western political philosophy, answers to it have often relied on dyads founded upon dogmatically held ideals. In particular, there is a strain of idealist political philosophy, inaugurated by Plato and finding contemporary expression in the work of Alain Badiou, that employs dyads (such as the distinction between truth and doxa or the privilege of thought over sense) that tend to reduce the (...) complexities of practices of resistance to concepts of commitment. Although these dyads have been challenged by, amongst others, poststructuralist theorists, this has often been at the cost of losing their structuralist heritage. This thesis develops an ontology proper to structuralism that engenders non-idealist and non-dogmatic, yet ethical, practices of resistance against commitment orientated accounts of resistance and the return of classical ontological dyads. The thesis begins with an examination of the extent to which a dogmatic use of idealism grounds the work of a prominent contemporary theorist, Alain Badiou. In developing his neo-Maoist metapolitics, Badiou follows both Platonic ontology and the Marxist tradition of dialectics by claiming that political practice can only be carried out in truth by paying fidelity to an event that ruptures the presented order of things. Chapter one opens with an exploration of Badiou's mathematic meta-ontology to draw out its three foundational dyads (truth/doxa; sense/intelligibility; is/is not). It is argued that although Badiou makes important criticisms of the preponderant trends of political philosophy, he is unable to support his own account of politics due to his dogmatic reliance on idealist principles. Chapter two begins by developing two accounts: first, of the relations between Badiou's work and that of his former teacher Louis Althusser and, secondly, the relations between Althusser's thought and that of Gilles Deleuze, in particular his reading of David Hume. Discussion centres around the importance of the role that time plays within the works of all three authors, particularly in regard to the idea of the void. The chapter concludes with the argument that Hume's temporal idea of human nature is the key to a symptomatic reading of Althusser that accounts for the persistence of ideas in the latter's social theory. In chapter three, Deleuze's reading of Hume's idea of relations is developed to take into account Bergson's theory of time. Read in contrast to Quentin Meillassoux's speculative realism, the chapter argues that Deleuze's account of temporal relations informs Althusser's social theory to create the ontological grounds for non-dogmatic and non-idealist practices of resistance. These practices are developed in chapter four with an unlikely turn to John Stuart Mill's idea of genius, the metaphysical property of the individual that signifies the discovery of new truth. The chapter begins with an argument that there is an under-developed account of ethics in Deleuze's work. Distinguishing the idea of genius from both Mill's moral philosophy, as well as from utilitarian thought more generally, the idea of genius is sutured onto Deleuze's ontological account of individuation. Read alongside Althusser's social theory, which accounts for the non-idealist conceptualisation of situations, this suture creates an ethically oriented structuralist ontology. The thesis concludes with the argument that the idea of genius is the ethical imperative that motivates practices of resistance. When individuals are understood as embodied within situations, practices of resistance are conceptualised not against other components of a situation, but contra them, taking them into account in order to amplify, multiply and transform the individual's potential within a situation. (shrink)

This paper analyzes the inconsistency of Mill’s utilitarianism in moral philosophy and his liberalism in political philosophy, the efforts of Ten and Dworkin for their consistency and the distinction that Leob and Driver use for reconciling them‌. The distinction is between decision-procedure and criterion of evaluation or the metaphysics and epistemology of right‌. In the next step, it shows a new inconsistency between Mill’s moral and political philosophy‌. It seems that Mill cannot accept the non-consequentialist ‘doing/allowing harm’ distinction in moral (...) philosophy because he himself is a consequentialist‌. The rejection of this distinction makes it inconsistent with his harm principle and his main distinction in political philosophy: the distinction between ‘self-regarding’ and ‘other-regarding’ actions‌. These criticisms show the difficulty of reconciling Mill’s utilitarianism with his liberalism and his moral philosophy with his political philosophy in the framework of the classic triple in normative ethics‌. Therefore, in order to solve this problem, I combined the classic triple with the modern triple in normative ethics. In this way, we can regard Mill as a consistent utilitarian who regards liberty as the essential condition for personal development and maximization of the good, and tries to raise a moderate and sophisticated version of utilitarianism by decreasing its pervasiveness‌‌. (shrink)