Alan Saunders: As we're always being reminded, 2009 sees the 150th anniversary of Darwin's Origin of Species. But what else hit the bookstands in 1859? Well, it wasn't the greatest year in the history of literature, but it wasn't bad. Dickens published A Tale of Two Cities, George Elliot published Adam Bede, and Samuel Smiles came up with his hugely successful, Self-Help, a book that has been called 'the bible of mid-Victorian liberalism.' It's all about getting on through hard work, sobriety and thrift. And that, of course, was what the Victorian middle classes were all about. But they were also about something else: respectability and weight of public opinion.

So where was the voice of the brave individualist? Well, here's one. It comes from another book published in 1859.

Reading: If a person possesses any tolerable amount of common sense and experience, his own mode of laying out his existence is the best, not because it is the best in itself, but because it is his own mode. Human beings are not like sheep; and even sheep are not undistinguishably alike. A man cannot get a coat or a pair of boots to fit him unless they are either made to his measure, or he has a whole warehouseful to choose from: and is it easier to fit him with a life than with a coat, or are human beings more like one another in their whole physical and spiritual conformation than in the shape of their feet?

Alan Saunders: From another great work of mid-Victorian liberalism: On Liberty by the British philosopher John Stuart Mill. So then, what does Mill say and what does he still have to say to us? Our guide is John Skorupski, Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of St Andrews, in Scotland.

Now Mill's book is a work of philosophy but it has about it the air of something written to address urgent contemporary issues. So why did Mill write it when he wrote it?

John Skorupski: Yes, I think that's right, it is a work of philosophy, but it's also eloquent polemic and I think he wrote it because he was worried about the way society might develop and in particular, worried about the way in which it might develop as it became more and more democratic. He was in favour of democracy, but he thought that it posed dangers which progressive people perhaps underestimated.

Alan Saunders: So you would see him as a modern thinker, wouldn't you? He's addressing aspects of the modern condition as they were emerging in his time or just before his time, political revolutions in France and America, the rise and fall of Napoleon, attempts at constitutional liberalism in Europe, the beginning of the Industrial Revolution and that sort of thing.

John Skorupski: That's right, all of that, yes. I think that his particular preoccupation, as I say, was about the dangers of tyranny in emerging democratic states, so he thought that radicals, progressive people, had well understood the dangers of tyranny under a despotism, but now that we'd gone through the French Revolution, other developments like that, now that we were going beyond despotism, what he thought we needed to worry about was a kind of conformist tyranny, a tyranny of the majority. Not his phrase, that, by the way, but the phrase used by Alexis de Tocqueville in his book called Democracy in America.

Alan Saunders: We might, before we get on to those issues, just mention on a biographical note, that the essay was expanded, re-written and sedulously (his word) corrected, not just by Mill but also by his wife, Harriet Taylor, and he states that On Liberty was 'more directly and literally our joint production than anything else which bears my name'. So what do you think her contribution was?

John Skorupski: Well that's a scholarly conundrum, to be honest. I mean it's fairly clear that his estimates of her contribution in general to this thinking were pretty hyperbolic, everybody at the time thought that at least. On the other hand, it's arguable that under her influence, he became much more of a democrat and a radical than before he met her, certainly before he met her, but also perhaps after she died. So if you apply a sort of measure by looking at what he wrote before he met her and what he wrote after he met her, some scholars claim that they can see a difference, which they explain in terms of Harriet Taylor's influence.

Alan Saunders: In his day already there was a tradition of political thought, which devoted its attention pretty much to the rights of the individual against the interference of the state, and what's striking is what you've already mentioned, that Mill gets down pretty early on in his book to the tyranny of the majority, which he actually thinks is worse, or potentially worse than the tyranny of government.

John Skorupski: Yes, that's right because it can exercise an even more total control, since it's coming from everybody around you.

Alan Saunders: And how then does he stand in relation to the tradition of classical liberalism? I mean there is a tradition of thought going back at least to the 17th century, probably before, to John Locke in the 17th century who's concerned with what the rights of the individual are, and a lot of this arises from thinking Well, supposing there were no societies or no governments, why would we form governments? And once we've come together in a society, and have in doing so given up some of our rights in order to enjoy the benefits of communal action, how do we justify any further erosion of those rights? What are the rights, the liberties of the individual under a government-to-be? That classical liberal issue doesn't seem to be one that's particularly concerning him.

John Skorupski: Yes, agreed. I think that's a very good question of course that you've asked, and we might start by widening out from the Anglo Saxon tradition, so the figures, or the figure, probably, who was most cited as a kind of ancestral liberal, within the Anglo Saxon world and particularly in the United States where his influence was great, is John Locke, who was associated with the glorious revolution of 1688, whose Second Treatise on Government puts forward a theory of natural rights to property and person, and argues that you have these rights in the state of nature and the way government comes into being is that you give up some of these rights. Everybody gives up some of these rights, in particular the right to punish, to try people and to punish them for infringements, to this day. So that's Locke.

There's also Thomas Hobbes, less clearly a liberal, but also someone who argues by reference to the state of nature, and tries to justify the State as an institution that will prevent the war of all against all, in his famous phrase. Those were the ancestral voices. But Mill is writing after the French Revolution and also in a way even more importantly, after German Romanticism. That's a movement in both philosophy and the arts, that's occurring about 25 years either way of 1800. In philosophy, the important philosophers are people like Friedrich Schiller, also a poet, Fichte, Hegel, and actually Mill was quite influenced by these people, and particularly influenced by their romantic conception of individuality. Now that is why the third chapter of On Liberty, which is really the heart of it, is an argument that in order to allow everybody's individuality to flourish in its separate ways, in their different ways, you have to have what he puts forward as his liberty principle. So there's not a lot, in fact there's nothing at all about going from the state of nature to the state of society in this essay on liberty.

Alan Saunders: Yes, he notably in an earlier essay, had talked about two influences on him, and he thinks that the two greatest Englishmen of his time, were Jeremy Bentham, the philosopher and legal thinker, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the poet, and he thinks of them as polar opposites, or the two directions in which he is being pulled. There's the utilitarian rationalism of Bentham, and the romanticism, heavily influenced by the German Romantic tradition, which you've mentioned, of Coleridge. And these are the two principles or the two ways of life really that are contending for him.

John Skorupski: Yes. That's right. And Coleridge stands for, as you say, that whole German influence. Coleridge spent some time in Germany, he worked under Schelling in particular, as a matter of fact I'm sorry to say he plagiarised quite a lot of Schelling in the Biograpie Literaria. But certainly Coleridge was hugely important for Mill and people like Mill because of his ideas about the role of a clerisy, what we would now call a group of state-funded intellectuals I suppose, and because as Mill put it, whereas Bentham always wanted to ask Is it true, Coleridge asked What does it mean? And Mill thought that that brought in sort of understanding of other people's institutions and ways, which Bentham was simply completely innocent of.

Alan Saunders: Well let's look at the principle of liberty. Mill holds, doesn't he, that there's only one legitimate reason for the exercise of power over individuals, and that is the prevention of harm to others.

John Skorupski: That's right.

Alan Saunders: How does that play out? What about the prevention of harm to themselves?

John Skorupski: Well that is what you might call the anti-paternalist side of this principle, and Mill is very unyielding about that, much more so than we are. A standard example here is safety belts, where we take it for granted that it's all right to make people wear safety belts, I don't think Mill would have done, because you shouldn't make people do things just to prevent harm to themselves. So he's quite unyielding about the anti-paternalist side of the liberty principle. There are other sides as well, but we're talking about that side at the moment.

Alan Saunders: So it is only the harm of others that is the legitimate reason for exercising power over individuals, but of course that then might cause us to ask what do we mean by harm to others? I mean these days we quite happily pass laws and regulations to prevent harm like being offended. We don't think that people should be offended because of things that are being said about their race or their religion. How would Mill have felt about that?

John Skorupski: Well that needs some distinctions between what people might be offended by simply because they know it's going on, and what people are offended by in public spaces. So Mill very clearly thinks that a law for example, to stop people from eating pork in a Muslim country, that's one of his examples, would be an infringement of liberty. He thinks that a law stopping people from practising religion other than Catholicism in a Catholic country, another of his examples would be an infringement of liberty. But then he has some brief passages about what you might call public nuisance. And I'm sure if he was alive now we'd have spent a lot more time on that.

You mention that people normally talk about the liberty principle as I call it, in terms of the notion of harm, and that's certainly one of the words Mill uses, but he actually puts it in a whole variety of ways, and he clarifies in various places, particularly in the last chapter, and one of clarifications is that what he calls 'offences against decency' can be stopped implicitly, even if they're not harmful to others. He puts this in a rather prudish way, after all, this is the Victorian era. But what he means is things like copulating in the park, let's say.

Now arguably if two people copulate in a park, they're not harming anybody else, but I think Mill would think that's OK, we can stop that because this is a public space, a shared space, and so people have to take into account what offends other people. In that sense he wouldn't be ruling out offence to others, but what he would be ruling out is for example a law that says that you mustn't make offensive statements about other religions in publications, or put out cartoons that are offensive to particular religions and so on.

Alan Saunders: Well this is rather curious though, isn't it, because he is very aware of the fact, he says as much in the book, he says well people have to realise that the traditions which make them churchmen in England, would equally make them Confucians or Buddhists if they just happened to have been born in China. So wouldn't an answer to his refusal to allow people to copulate in the park because it offends against public decency, wouldn't a similar argument, if applied in a Muslim country, say 'Well it's an offence against public decency for people to eat pork', that's equally offensive.

John Skorupski: Well I think one has to go beyond Mill here, because he doesn't explain these distinctions. But I think that what he would say is that there's a very important difference between public or shared space and what you do privately, that's one point. Obviously copulation in private is nobody's business other than that of the two people involved. So he'd need a distinction between private and shared space. And the other thing he needs is to bring in something he discusses in the second chapter of the essay On Liberty,, which is the liberty of thought and discussion. So you've actually got more than one issue in the air here, you've got a private public distinction, a question about what people can be allowed to do that isn't intruding on other people in a public space, but then you've also got to countervailing consideration about the freedom to put forward views in public. Mill doesn't tell you how to resolve those issues.

Alan Saunders: On The Philosopher's Zone, we're talking liberty, specifically John Stuart Mill's book On Liberty, 150 years old this year, with John Skorupski, Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of St Andrews. Now, Mill is famous for his belief in utilitarianism. So what's that, and what role does it play in his views on liberty?

John Skorupski: Utilitarianism is the view that there is just one basic ethical principle, and that principle says that you should take into account the wellbeing of every individual, impartially, and maximise the total sum of all those individuals' wellbeing. All of your policy, your principles of action, should be based on that.

Alan Saunders: And how does this play into Mill's views on liberty?

John Skorupski: That's a notorious crux. After all, if making people wear safety belts, to take that hackneyed example, if that makes people better off because they're less likely to kill themselves, then surely a utilitarian should be in favour of that. So the question arises whether Mill is not illicitly drawing on a natural rights tradition, as against a utilitarian foundation. The natural rights tradition, over which John Locke is I suppose the greatest Anglo Saxon example, says that individuals have rights, and there are things that people can't do to them without violating their rights. It's my right to decide whether or not I wear a safety belt, and who are you to tell me? That's the natural rights view.

Well Mill can't just, as it were, appeal to rights, full-stop. He's got to give them some kind of grounding in utility and that's what he tries to do, not so much in the essay On Liberty but elsewhere in a treatise called Utilitarianism. However, in On Liberty, he confronts this issue and he explicitly says that he doesn't want to be thought to be appealing to what he calls 'abstract right', I take it he's got someone like Locke in mind. He's appealing to utility, but, he says, he's appealing to utility in its largest sense, understood as the utility of man as a progressive being. And there again, you have that Romantic conception of what human beings are capable of, and what's required for them to realise their potential. So his argument would be that the way people realise their potential is by being left to get on with it, rather than being treated in a paternalistic manner.

Alan Saunders: One of Mill's most trenchant contemporary critics, James Fitzjames Stephen, has a number of things to say about On Liberty, one of which is that what he calls Mill's simple principle of liberty, depending on this distinction between self-regarding and other regarding actions, which he thinks it simply can't be articulated in the clear-cut fashion that he sees Mill trying to articulate it in.

John Skorupski: Yes. Mill actually doesn't place a lot of weight on that particular distinction. He uses the phrases and it's true I think that he needed to place some weight on it, so in that sense, Fitzjames Stephen probably had a point. I mentioned earlier that to get clear about what you're allowed to do in parks, you need some sort of distinction between private and public, for example. But still, I don't think he would say if pressed, Look, this is a terribly clear distinction, I can make it philosophically rigorous. He would say, My whole point in putting forward this principle in so many different ways, and giving so many illustrations of it and examples, is because this is an important political idea which you cannot state in some clear-cut fashion that as it were, philosophers can look at and try and find counter-examples in very great detail. It's an idea, it's an approach, we can try and make it clearer to people by putting it in different ways, and that's as far as we can go.

Alan Saunders: He also, Stephen also holds that Mill's principle of liberty requires an absence of restraint, but this will not lead to self-development, as Mills supposes, but to idleness and wretchedness.

John Skorupski: That's a very good point. It's a question of what do we find when the liberty principle is applied, as it roughly has been since Mill. I don't think we're anything like as inclined to defend individual liberty without any paternalism whatsoever, as he was, but we keep asking ourselves I think, to what extent we need more intervention to mend people's ways, that's an ongoing political discussion. Fitzjames Stephen was on one side of it, Mill was on the other.

Alan Saunders: Well I suppose that does relate to Fitzjames Stephen's other observation which is that morality without the sanction of public opinion, without public opinion giving you some idea of what you should do, isn't liberty, it's licence.

John Skorupski: Yes. Well there I think he's wrong. He's misunderstanding. Mill does not think, even though a lot of people have understood him to think, but Mill does not think that you should be free to do what you like, with no moral constraints. What he thinks is that the moral constraints refer to how you deal with other people. There is no moral imperative of any kind as to how you get on with your own life, there is no duty to live your own life this way, or to live your own life that way. But when it comes to your dealings with other people, then of course there are moral principles, and Mill was really rather fierce about them.

Alan Saunders: Just finally, John Skorupski, why should we read On Liberty today, 150 years after its publication?

John Skorupski: It's a great work for a start. I mean it's a literary masterpiece in English philosophical prose, so that's one good reason. But I also think actually that this worry that 19th century liberals had about to what extent is democracy atomising and conformist, remains a very important worry.

I could distinguish between liberalism versus authoritarianism on the one hand, and populism, let's say, versus some kind of elitist view, I don't use the word 'elitist' in a derogatory way, a view that says that there is such a thing as excellence and it should be protected. Now whereas Mill in that sense was an elitist and a liberal, what he worried about was authoritarianism of a populist kind. So the diametric opposite, as it were. And I think that's a worry that is still live, so On Liberty still has a job to do.

Alan Saunders: John Skorupski, thank you very much indeed for joining us.

John Skorupski: Thank you very much.

Alan Saunders: John Skorupski is Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of St Andrews; Kyla Slaven is the producer of The Philosopher's Zone; Charlie McCune is the sound engineer, and the voice of John Stuart Mill was Stephen Crittenden. I'm Alan Saunders, back next week.