john stuart mill

Happy 204th Birthday, John Stuart Mill

by Ryan Young on May 20, 2010

in Culture, Odds & Ends, Personal Liberty, Sanctimony, Zeitgeist

John Stuart Mill was born on this day in 1806. I wrote an appreciation of him last year, and told a bit of his unusual life story. This year, I’ll write a little bit on his philosophy of utilitarianism.

There are two kinds of utilitarianism: act utilitarianism, and rule utilitarianism. Act utilitarianism leads to absurd conclusions; rule utilitarianism, while more lenient, is one of the strongest philosophical underpinnings of liberalism (in the traditional European sense of the word). Many later liberals, including F.A. Hayek, were rule utilitarians.

Act utilitarians think that each individual act should be judged according to how much good it does. This leads to some problems, since most actions involve at least some small harm to others.

If I drive to work, I can save myself a lot of time. But by contributing to traffic congestion, I hurt each of my thousands of fellow drivers just a little bit. Maybe I cost them more total time than I save, so my driving causes a net loss in utility. So that’s not a good option. The subway, then? Same thing. Not only do I lose some time compared to driving, but I make the train more crowded, which causes disutility to every passenger on the train.

Better to just sit at home, then. But then I don’t get anything done. That’s bad for my career, not to mention my bank account. Act utilitarianism is a bit like Pareto optimality in economics: it leads to paralysis. It is an impossible standard.

That’s why I prefer rule utilitarianism. Instead of judging each act by its utility, put rules in place that give people incentives to act well. No law or institution is perfect. Even the best ones hurt somebody; a law against theft is bad for thieves. But good institutions beget good results, especially in the long run.

A property-rights-based system of government is an excellent example of rule utilitarianism. It will not be perfect. Laws against stealing obviously have not put end to stealing. Even within the law, people inevitably have honest disagreements about what belongs to who. Externalities such as pollution will hurt some peoples’ property. But the results are certainly better than a system without property rights. The whole of world history is proof. It’s also better than act utilitarianism, which lacks that overarching institutional-level standard.

Rule utilitarianism is one of the greatest gifts ever given to liberalism’s intellectual toolkit, and we have Mill to thank for it. Happy birthday to you, John Stuart Mill.

Krugman is No Liberal

by Iain Murray on January 6, 2009 · 12 comments

in Features, Personal Liberty, Sanctimony, Zeitgeist

Further to Cord’s post below, a real liberal, not a statist claiming to be one, would be familiar with John Stuart Mill’s argument that minorities need small government to protect them from the “tyranny of the majority“:

The “people” who exercise the power, are not always the same people with those over whom it is exercised, and the “self-government” spoken of, is not the government of each by himself, but of each by all the rest. The will of the people, moreover, practically means, the will of the most numerous or the most active part of the people; the majority, or those who succeed in making themselves accepted as the majority; the people, consequently, may desire to oppress a part of their number; and precautions are as much needed against this, as against any other abuse of power. The limitation, therefore, of the power of government over individuals, loses none of its importance when the holders of power are regularly accountable to the community, that is, to the strongest party therein. This view of things, recommending itself equally to the intelligence of thinkers and to the inclination of those important classes in European society to whose real or supposed interests democracy is adverse, has had no difficulty in establishing itself; and in political speculations “the tyranny of the majority” is now generally included among the evils against which society requires to be on its guard.

Mill goes on to warn that limits on government are not enough, for the tyranny of the majority can also operate through convention – and this is what distinguishes the liberal Mill from the conservative. However, in a world where the liberal victory over convention is well-nigh complete, it is the limitation of the power of government over individuals that is more important. That is where liberalism has failed, because people who presumptuously call themselves liberals have been seduced by the power of the state and seek to use it to impose their own view of the world on everyone. The fatal conceit that Hayek, another great liberal who despised the idea that he might be thought of as conservative, warned against as leading down the road to serfdom has so completely infected modern liberalism that it has become the establishment that Mill warned against (perhaps Nobel laureates form the new aristocracy of this establishment).

It is perhaps a jape by history that conservatives have become the prime guardians of real liberty, but once liberty becomes a tradition, conservatives are bound to uphold it. Mill would recognize this, and approve heartily. If he does not know this, Krugman is not only no liberal, but he is no intellectual either.