John Stuart Mill

After reading, John Staurt Mill, I feel that he is very different from some of the other authors which we have read so far. Instead of presenting his ideas through a story or poetry, he simply wrote down his personal opinions for others to read. He grew up with very radical views which include avocation of sexual equality, the right to divorce, universal suffrage, free speech, and proportional representation. He had no problem in trying to be a social reformer and chose to publish his personal beliefs. He was fortunate to meet his future wide, Harriet Taylor, who shared his common views and he claims helped him write his great works.

His work, “On Liberty”, is dedicated to defense of an individual’s rights. It is hard to imagine having to do this at a time because I have grown up in a country where these rights are basically just given to us. I feel like we should all be thankful to writers such as Mill because they are the reason that we life in a free country. Individual rights should not be taken for granted because people had to fight hard to get them.

In the second chapter of this work, he is defending people’s rights to express there opinion which I am connecting it with their right to freedom of speech. I could not imagine this being an issue but when I started to read this all I could think about was all of the major revolutions in the world that would not have occurred if people did not have this right. When he says, “Wrong opinions and practices gradually yield to fact and argument: but facts and arguments to produce any effect on the mind, must be brought before it” I feel like he is trying to say that there will never be any kind of revolutions or movement toward the truth without this freedom to express ones opinions. For example, we would all still think the world is flat and that all the planets and sun revolve around the earth instead of around the sun.

There was a line that I really liked in the beginning of this chapter, “If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind.” After reading this statement, I could tell that Mill is very passionate about his argument and sticks with his point of view in all circumstance. When dealing with these issues, I think Mill looks at them in black and white without any grey areas.

I am in full agreement with Mill’s views on the right of people to express there own opinions. He believes that it is morally wrong and that a viewpoint that is popular does not necessarily make it correct. “We have no recognized the necessity to the mental well-being of mankind of freedom of opinion, and freedom of the expression of opinion”. When I read this statement, I felt like it was a very true statement and he had done a good job of expressing all the pros for this topic.