Living Together · ages 9–12
What is freedom?
You want to play music at midnight. Your neighbour wants to sleep. Whose freedom wins?
Everybody is in favour of freedom. The argument is always about where it stops — and it stops somewhere, because your freedom to play the drums at midnight is somebody else’s freedom to sleep.
John Stuart Mill tried to put one rule where the argument keeps happening. You should be free to do as you like, he said, and nobody should be allowed to stop you, except to prevent harm to others. Not because they disapprove. Not because they think it’s bad for you. Only harm.
The first thing to notice is how much that rules out. Most of the reasons people actually give for making other people stop — it’s rude, it’s strange, it’s a bad idea, I don’t like it — fail his test. Mill thought that was the point: a society where you cannot be odd, or wrong, or experimental is a society that has stopped learning anything new.
The second thing to notice is how hard the rule is to apply. Your neighbour’s sleep is a clear harm. What about music played quietly enough to hear faintly, every night, for a year? What about a factory that pollutes a river a little at a time? What about something that harms nobody directly but harms the shared thing everyone depends on? Mill drew the line and then admitted the line was doing a lot of work.
There is one more turn. Mill said your own good is not a reason to stop you — nobody may interfere with you just because it would be better for you. But what if you are nine? Or what if you cannot yet understand the harm? Almost everyone allows more interference with children than with adults, and has to explain why, and the explanation is harder to give than it looks.
Try it
Write three rules you think should exist. For each one, say exactly who is protected from what, by whom. If you can't say, the rule is decoration.
What do you think?
Do you think there is a right answer to this question?
Talk about it
- Should you be allowed to do something that harms only you?
- Who decides what counts as harm?
- Is it fair to limit someone's freedom in order to protect them?
Yes, but… — the arguments people actually make
If it doesn't hurt anyone, how could it ever be wrong?
Ask whether it hurts anyone slowly, or many people a little, or someone who cannot complain. Mill admitted these cases were the work of a lifetime.
Children can't have full freedom, so the rule isn't real.
Then you owe an account of what changes with age — and 'they're not ready' needs to say ready for what, exactly.
Freedom means doing whatever you want.
That is licence, and it collapses the moment two people both want incompatible things. Freedom in a group has to mean something compatible with everyone else's.
What other philosophers think
- John Stuart MillYour freedom may be limited only to prevent harm to others — not because they disapprove, and not because they think it is bad for you.
- Isaiah BerlinDistinguished freedom from interference from freedom as self-mastery, and warned that the second can be used to tell people what they really want.
- Jean-Jacques RousseauArgued you can be forced to be free, which most people since have found a chilling sentence — and a useful one to test against any argument about liberty.
- Hannah ArendtSaid freedom is not a private feeling but something that happens between people, in acting together.
If you want to go further
- On Liberty — John Stuart Mill1859. Chapter 1 contains the whole principle in about two pages.
- Two Concepts of Liberty — Isaiah Berlin1958 lecture, short, and it changes how you hear the word 'free'.
- The Social Contract — Jean-Jacques Rousseau1762. Read it to see how the language of freedom can be turned against freedom.
Most of these were written for adults, which is why it is worth reading them with someone older.