Mill examines the freedom of man in relation first to the tyranny of rulers and then society, arriving at three liberties he considers necessary for a truly free society. Kant’s moral law, the categorical imperative, complements the freedom Mill envisions. It is not derived from nature, society or god but from reason, which allows man the freedom to act morally, though as rational beings, they may seem to only be able to choose the ‘right’ path. With freedom as the foundation, man can then pursue his individuality and exercise his agency. Mill argues that freedom comes with responsibility and argues for diversity in people’s ways of life, while Kierkegaard’s ethical man exercises his agency through making choices and taking responsibilities. The Kantian notion of duty is criticised by Kierkegaard, though both will agree that we need to internalise our morality. Mill asserts that human individuality, when free to manifest, is not antagonistic to society but elevates it.
Freedom
Mill’s On Liberty analyses “the nature and limits of the power which can be legitimately exercised by society over the individual.”[1] In olden times, the struggle “between liberty and authority” was between the people and their government. The rulers’ power came from “inheritance or conquest”, and they were not to be trusted since they could use their power against their own subjects in the same way power is expected to be used against foreign enemies. The people hence aimed to protect themselves against the oppression and tyranny of their rulers. Limits to the rulers’ power were needed, and was done in two ways, according to Mill. The first was to establish “political liberties or rights”. Any breach by the rulers of such rights would lead to a just resistance or rebellion. The second was to develop “constitutional checks”. A body representing the interests of the people would need to approve or check the laws proposed by the government.[2]
Why did man even consent to such rule? It is because they need the rulers and their armies to defend against external enemies, to “combat one enemy by another”.[3] Hence, to keep their own rulers, the ‘internal enemy’, in check, the people needed rights and constitutional checks. To better guarantee that the powers of the rulers cannot be used against the people, the political struggle later shifted away from trying to limit the powers of the rulers to having only elected and temporary rulers where the leaders should be the “tenants or delegates” of the people, with the leaders’ powers “revocable at their [the people’s] pleasure.”[4] The electoral process was supposed to ensure this new type of rulers will have the “interest and will” of the people, since “their power was but the nation’s own power, concentrated, and in a form convenient for exercise,” explains Mill.[5]
However, Mill points out how it would be a mistake to think that limitations to the powers of the government are hence no longer needed. The people with the power are not the same people who are governed. If the will of more active groups or the majority is the primary concern of the government, the government’s policies may then not reflect the will of the individual, whose will might be smothered by these more active groups or the majority. Mill asserts that people need to remain on guard against such tyrannies. He questions if tyranny was simply the condition of man when living together in a group.
In addition, such tyranny comes not only from the rulers but from society itself. “Society can and does execute its own mandates,” he writes.[6] Should its mandates be incorrect or interfere inappropriately in the lives of the people, this oppression is even worse than the oppression by the government since “it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself.”[7] Hence, people also need protection from this “tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling; […] [society’s] own ideas and practices as rules of conduct.”[8] While there may be no laws mandating obedience to such customs or norms, a man cannot disobey them without facing the consequences. He cannot even appeal to the courts of laws, since there is no body to appeal to against such tyranny. Hence, Mill argues that there needs to be “a limit to the legitimate interference of collective opinion with individual independence: and to find that limit and maintain it against encroachment, is as indispensable to a good condition of human affairs, as protection against political despotism.”[9]
Such a limit is warranted, in Mill’s opinion, in the case of self-protection or the prevention of harm to others. However, even if it was ‘for his own good,’ society should not force a man to act in a certain way, unless he would otherwise cause harm to others. “Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign,” asserts Mill.[10] He outlines three liberties he considers necessary for a truly free society: liberty of conscience, liberty of tastes and pursuits, and the freedom to unite. “The only freedom which deserves the name, is that of pursuing our own good in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs, or impede their efforts to obtain it.”[11]
In developing a metaphysics of morals, Kant asserts that moral laws have “absolute necessity,” with all rational beings obliged to obey them since these laws are not due to our nature or our circumstances, which are contingent, but are a priori and derived solely from pure reason.[16] However, we still have freedom, so it is the governance of the good will by reason that leads to the necessity of obeying. Kant implies that if we act immorally, we are acting irrationally. In summary, obeying the imperative is “a matter of human agents freely adopting principles that express the autonomy of reason,” writes O’Neill and Timmermann.[17]
Individuality and Agency
Because we live with others, our freedom is not unlimited. While positing the need for freedom to pursue our own good, Mill is clear that we must not harm others in that pursuit. He explains that people should be free to form opinions and to express them, but not necessarily to act on them. If they choose to act on them, it is “at their own risk and peril.”[18] Hence, a person has to take responsibility for his actions. Nonetheless, a diversity of opinion and ways of life is important since man is fallible. Diversity, as “different experiments of living”, will give room for people to achieve the correct opinion and the right way of living. “In things that do not primarily concern others, individuality should assert itself,” writes Mill.[19]
1) In the aesthetic stage, an individual “conceives of himself solely in terms of the physical, the finite, and the temporal, ignoring the infinite, eternal, and spiritual aspects of the self,” according to Law.[21] He sees things as belonging or happening to him in an accidental way.[22]
2) In the ethical stage, the individual chooses to discard the aesthetic self and take on “the absolute self […] according to its absolute validity,”[23] exercising choice and taking responsibility for his life.
3) In the religious stage, the individual discovers the inadequacy of the ethical sphere, confounded by the contradiction of being an infinite eternal being in a finite and temporal existence, according to Law.[24] He explains that the religious individual is “called upon to reduce existence or the finite and temporal elements of the self to the greatest degree possible in order to allow the eternal truth to express itself and a genuine God-relationship to be established.”[25] In this stage, the intersection of freedom, individuality and agency is manifested when man uses his freedom to choose himself in his individuality to be in a free relationship with God.
What differentiates individuality from individualism is the responsibility entailed by the choices that a man makes through exercising his autonomous agency. This distinction is also present in Kierkegaard’s Either/Or, II, when the ethical stage shifts away from the aesthetic stage of existence. In the ethical stage, one assumes responsibility for one’s choices. Kierkegaard writes: “The person who lives esthetically sees only possibilities everywhere […] whereas the person who lives ethically sees tasks everywhere.”[26] Tasks contain the notion of responsibility, even for what is contingent, while possibilities connote the accidental. If something happens accidentally to a man, then he is not responsible for its occurrence, since he had not participated in making it happen – he was merely present when it occured. The accidental characterises the man in the aesthetic stage. Kierkegaard contrasts this with the ethical person who has agency: “In seeing his possibility as his task, the individual expresses precisely his sovereignty over himself, […] this gives the ethical individual a security that the person who lives only esthetically lacks altogether.”[27] The aesthete “expects everything from the place, nothing from himself,” and hence faces an anxiety of the “dreadfulness of not having found [his] place in the world,”[28] having surrendered agency over his life. As for the ethical person, his task is to “work the accidental and the universal together into a whole,” incorporating his aesthetic self into his ethical self, doing what Kierkegaard calls the “true art of living.” [29]
Kierkegaard believes we have to take control of our destiny: “The art is not to wish but to will.”[30] The ethical man makes things happen and not simply hope for things to fall in place, the way an aesthete would. The aesthete is hence vulnerable – “the more esthetically he is allowed to live, the more conditions his life requires, and if only the least of them is not satisfied, he is dead,” explains Kierkegaard.[31] Contrast this with the ethical person who “has a way out when everything goes against him; […] he still has not perished, there is always a point to which he holds fast, and that point is – himself.”[32]
For Kierkegaard, assuming responsibility for ourselves is a necessary step to be our authentic selves. He dislikes Kant’s idea of duty derived from the categorical imperative, where meaning in life comes from performing one’s duties. He thinks the imperative is antithetical to ethics, “devised to discredit the ethical.” “The mistake is that the individual is placed in an external relation to duty […] a life of duty such as that is very unlovely and boring,” he writes.[33] Kierkegaard sees the duty-driven life as abstracting oneself and carrying out one’s actions in a mechanical way rather than from a genuine personal choice. He believes that being ethical has to be something much more interwoven with a person’s personality, where the duty needs to be “the expression of his innermost being,” so that the ethical person will not “run himself ragged performing his duties.”[34]
Kant will agree, since he talks about how we have to internalise the duty and give the law to ourselves: “The will is not merely subject to the law but subject to it in such a way that it must be viewed as also giving the law to itself and just because of this as first subject to the law (of which it can regard itself as the author).”[35] According to Schneewind, “Kant thinks our own reason gives us the law. Morality can be understood only if we see that each of us is equally a lawgiving member of the group of those who must also obey the moral law. He holds that each of us is both to legislate the law and to obey it.”[36]
However, while Kant speaks of the universalisation of maxims, Kierkegaard speaks of the universalisation of the man. Kierkegaard writes: “Not until the individual is the universal, not until then can the ethical be actualised […] simultaneously, it is an individual life and also the universal.” How this is done is “not by taking off his concretion, for then he becomes a complete non-entity, but by putting it on and interpenetrating it with the universal,” recognising both his individuality and his universality, in contrast to the aesthete who is so immersed in his individualism (not individuality) that he “believes he is the perfect human being by being the one and only human being,”[37] failing to see his relation to society.
Conclusion
Man needs to be free, not just from the tyranny of rulers but also from the opinions of society, writes Mill. Kant’s moral law, the categorical imperative, complements the freedom Mill envisions. It allows man to use and develop his reason while leaving him the freedom to act morally. With freedom as the foundation, man can then pursue his individuality and exercise his agency. Mill argues that freedom comes with responsibility which Kierkegaard presents through the ethical man who exercises his agency through making choices and taking responsibility for their consequences. While the Kantian notion of duty is criticised by Kierkegaard, both Kant and Kierkegaard will agree that we need to internalise our morality. Finally, Mill asserts that human individuality, when free to manifest, is not antagonistic to society but elevates it. It makes mankind noble and beautiful.
Bibliography
Kant, Immanuel. Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals. Edited and translated by Allen W. Wood. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002.
Kierkegaard, Søren. Either/Or, II. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987.
Law, David R. Kierkegaard as Negative Theologian. Oxford Theological Monographs. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993.
Mill, John Stuart. On Liberty and Other Essays. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.
O’Neill, Onora, and Jens Timmermann. “Kantian Ethics,” Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2011. doi: 10.4324/9780415249126-L042-2.
Schneewind, J. B. “Why Study Kant’s Ethics.” In Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002.
[1] John Stuart Mill, On Liberty and Other Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 5.
[2] Ibid., 6.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Ibid., 7.
[6] Ibid., 8.
[7] Ibid., 9.
[8] Ibid.
[9] Ibid.
[10] Ibid., 15.
[11] Ibid., 17.
[12] Immanuel Kant, Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, ed. and trans. Allen W. Wood (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), G 4:393.
[13] Ibid.
[14] Ibid., G 4:395.
[15] Ibid., G 4:389.
[16] Ibid., G 4:389.
[17] Onora O’Neill and Jens Timmermann, “Kantian Ethics,” Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, published 2011, doi: 10.4324/9780415249126-L042-2.
[18] Mill, On Liberty, 62.
[19] Ibid., 63.
[20] Ibid., 65.
[21] David R. Law, Kierkegaard as Negative Theologian, Oxford Theological Monographs (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 2.
[22] Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or, II (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), 260.
[23] Ibid., 219.
[24] Law, Kierkegaard as Negative Theologian, 5.
[25] Ibid., 6.
[26] Kierkegaard, Either/Or, II, 251.
[27] Ibid., 251–52.
[28] Ibid., 252.
[29] Ibid., 256.
[30] Ibid., 252.
[31] Ibid., 253.
[32] Ibid.
[33] Ibid., 254.
[34] Ibid.
[35] Kant, G 4:431.
[36] J. B. Schneewind, “Why Study Kant’s Ethics,” in Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 84.
[37] Kierkegaard, Either/Or, II, 256.
[38] Mill, On Liberty, 67.
[39] Ibid., 70.
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