John Stuart Mill: Freedom Of Expression: Argument Persuasive?

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Recommended: John stuart mill, “of the liberty of thought and discussion

Sam Friedell
Introduction to Political Philosophy
Professor Glyn Morgan
Essay #2
4/20/14

Question: How does Mill justify freedom of expression? Is his argument persuasive?

In his Writing, On Liberty, John Stuart Mill does an incredible job explaining how his argument for the freedom of expression can be utilized to help individuals discover the ultimate truth of an individual’s opinion and the validity to their opinions. Before determining whether or not John Stuart Mill’s argument for freedom of expression is persuasive, and whether or not it works, it is important to understand the argument itself. In the second section of his piece of writing Mill lays out and goes into his argument for freedom of expression. In defending freedom of expression he argues, “The received opinion may be false… or the received opinion being true, a conflict with the opposite error is essential to a clear apprehension and deep feeling of its truth. But there is a commoner case than either of these; when the conflicting doctrines, instead of one being true and the other false, share the truth between them; and the nonconforming opinion is needed to supply the remainder of the truth” (On Liberty, pages 43 & 44). Mill uses his argument of freedom of expression to show that even though people will have different opinions, instead of settling on the fact that one opinion is true and the other is false, they can work together in a fair manner to figure out and share the truth between them. Mill’s argument is then later broken up into four separate grounds, which can be found on page 50 of On Liberty, which allows for us to better understand the overall argument.
The first ground of his argument is the concept or idea of “infallibility.” Here he says, “...

... middle of paper ...

...finally, I think the biggest upside to Mill’s argument is that it’s always to one’s advantage to know the truth. While the argument that Mill makes could be very beneficial, if it is followed properly, there are still some downsides to it. The world isn’t a perfect world; we don’t live in a utopia. With this in mind, if people attempt to go by Mill’s argument, if one individual disagrees with what another individual has to say, it could get ugly; it could lead to a verbal or physical argument if one individual “pushes them [the other individual] hard”.
All in all, while even though we don’t live in a perfect society, for the most part, John Stuart Mill’s defense of freedom of expression should work; the way I thought about his overall argument is that it always helps to know the truth and that means doing whatever it takes, within fair grounds, to reach that truth.

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