On Liberty

Introduction

This essay concerns civil or social liberty, rather than so-called freedom of the will, which is unfortunately opposed to the misnamed doctrine of philosophical necessity. Its subject is the nature and limits of the power that society may legitimately exercise over the individual. This question is seldom stated, and hardly ever discussed, in general terms. Yet its unspoken presence profoundly influences the practical controversies of the age, and it is likely soon to be recognized as the vital question of the future. It is far from new. In one sense, it has divided humanity almost from the earliest ages. But at the stage of progress now reached by the more civilized portions of the human race, the question arises under new conditions and requires a different, more fundamental treatment.

The struggle between liberty and authority is the most conspicuous feature of the history with which we first become familiar, particularly the history of Greece, Rome, and England. In ancient times, however, this contest was between the government and its subjects, or certain classes of its subjects. Liberty meant protection against the tyranny of political rulers. Except in some of the popular governments of Greece, rulers were understood to occupy a position necessarily opposed to the people they governed. The ruler might be one person, or a ruling tribe or caste, whose authority came from inheritance or conquest. In any event, the ruler did not hold power at the pleasure of the governed. People did not dare, and perhaps did not wish, to challenge this supremacy, whatever precautions they might take against its oppressive use.

The ruler’s power was considered necessary but also highly dangerous: a weapon the ruler would try to use against his subjects no less than against foreign enemies. To keep the weaker members of the community from being preyed upon by countless vultures, it was necessary to appoint a bird of prey stronger than the rest to hold them down. But the king of the vultures would be just as eager as the lesser harpies to prey upon the flock. The people therefore had to remain constantly on guard against his beak and claws.

The aim of patriots was accordingly to set limits on the power that the ruler could exercise over the community. This limitation was what they meant by liberty. They pursued it in two ways. First, they obtained recognition of certain immunities, called political liberties or rights. A ruler who violated them was considered to have broken his duty, and specific resistance or general rebellion was then held to be justified. A second and generally later method was to establish constitutional checks. These made the consent of the community, or of some body thought to represent its interests, a necessary condition for certain more important acts of governing power.

In most European countries, rulers were compelled, to a greater or lesser degree, to accept the first kind of limitation. The same was not true of the second. Achieving these constitutional checks, or securing them more completely where they already existed to some extent, became the chief object of liberty’s supporters everywhere. As long as people were content to fight one enemy by means of another, and to be ruled by a master provided they were protected more or less effectively against his tyranny, their aspirations went no further.

A time came, however, when people ceased to regard it as a natural necessity that their governors should form an independent power whose interests opposed their own. It seemed much better for the various officers of the state to be their agents or delegates, removable whenever they wished. Only in this way, they thought, could they be fully secure against the powers of government being abused to their disadvantage.

Wherever a popular party existed, the new demand for elected and temporary rulers gradually became its leading objective. To a considerable extent, this demand replaced earlier efforts to limit the rulers’ power. As the struggle continued to make governing power arise from the governed people’s periodic choice, some began to think that too much importance had been given to limiting the power itself. Such limits might seem to be a defense against rulers whose interests were habitually opposed to those of the people. What was now wanted was for the rulers to be identified with the people, so that their interests and will would be those of the nation.

The nation did not need protection against its own will. There was no danger that it would tyrannize over itself. If the rulers were made genuinely accountable to the nation and could be promptly removed by it, the nation could safely entrust them with power whose use it could dictate. Their power was simply the nation’s own power, concentrated into a form convenient to exercise.

This way of thinking, or perhaps rather of feeling, was common among the previous generation of European liberals. It apparently still predominates among liberals on the European continent. Political thinkers there who accept any limit on what a government may do, except when speaking of governments they believe should not exist at all, stand out as brilliant exceptions. A similar attitude might by now have prevailed in England if the circumstances that encouraged it for a time had remained unchanged.

But in political and philosophical theories, as in individuals, success reveals faults and weaknesses that failure might have hidden. The idea that the people have no need to limit their power over themselves could seem self-evident when popular government was something known only from dreams or accounts of its existence in some distant period. Nor was this idea necessarily shaken by temporary departures such as those of the French Revolution. The worst of those were the work of a usurping few. In any case, they belonged not to the permanent operation of popular institutions, but to a sudden, convulsive outbreak against monarchical and aristocratic despotism.

In time, however, a democratic republic came to occupy a large portion of the earth’s surface and made itself felt as one of the most powerful members of the community of nations. Elected and accountable government then became subject to the observation and criticism that attend any great existing fact. It became clear that phrases such as “self-government” and “the power of the people over themselves” do not accurately describe the situation. The “people” who exercise power are not always the same people over whom it is exercised. The supposed “self-government” is not each person’s government of himself, but the government of each person by all the others.

Moreover, the will of the people in practice means the will of the most numerous or most active part of the people: the majority, or those who succeed in having themselves accepted as the majority. The people may consequently wish to oppress some of their own number. Precautions against this are as necessary as precautions against any other abuse of power. Limiting the government’s power over individuals therefore loses none of its importance when those who hold power are regularly accountable to the community, meaning its strongest party.

This view readily appealed both to thoughtful minds and to the inclinations of important classes in European society whose real or supposed interests conflict with democracy. It therefore had no difficulty becoming established. In political thought, “the tyranny of the majority” is now generally included among the evils against which society must guard.

Like other forms of tyranny, the tyranny of the majority was initially feared, and is still commonly feared, chiefly when it operates through public authorities. But reflective people recognized that when society itself becomes the tyrant, society collectively exercising power over the separate individuals who compose it, its means of oppression are not limited to acts carried out by political officials. Society can and does enforce its own commands. If it issues wrong commands instead of right ones, or issues any commands at all concerning matters in which it should not interfere, it practices a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression. Although this tyranny is not usually enforced by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape. It penetrates much more deeply into the details of life and enslaves the soul itself.

Protection against the tyranny of government officials is therefore not enough. Protection is also needed against the tyranny of prevailing opinion and feeling. Society has a tendency to impose its own ideas and practices, by means other than civil penalties, as rules of conduct on those who disagree with them. It tends to restrain the development, and if possible prevent the formation, of any individuality that does not conform to its ways, and to compel every character to shape itself according to society’s own model. There is a limit to the legitimate interference of collective opinion with individual independence. Finding that limit and defending it against encroachment are just as essential to a healthy state of human affairs as protection against political despotism.

But although this proposition is unlikely to be disputed in general terms, nearly everything remains to be done about the practical question of where to set the limit and how to strike the proper balance between individual independence and social control. Everything that makes life valuable to anyone depends on restraints being enforced on other people’s actions. Some rules of conduct must therefore be imposed, first by law, and also by public opinion in many matters that are not suitable for legal regulation. What those rules should be is the central question in human affairs. Yet, apart from a few of the most obvious cases, it is also one of the questions on which we have made the least progress. No two ages, and scarcely any two countries, have decided it in the same way, and the decision of one age or country astonishes another. Still, the people of any particular age and country are no more likely to suspect that the question is difficult than if humanity had always agreed about it.

The rules accepted among them seem self-evident and self-justifying. This nearly universal illusion is one example of the magical influence of custom. As the proverb says, custom is not only a second nature but is continually mistaken for the first. Custom prevents people from questioning the rules of conduct they impose on one another, and its effect is all the more complete because this is a subject on which people generally do not think that reasons need to be given, either to others or to themselves. People are accustomed to believe, and some who aspire to be considered philosophers have encouraged the belief, that their feelings on such matters are better than reasons and make reasons unnecessary.

The practical principle guiding their opinions about the regulation of human conduct is the feeling in each person’s mind that everyone should be required to act as that person and those who share that person’s sympathies would like them to act. No one admits, even inwardly, that personal preference is the standard of judgment. But an opinion about conduct that is unsupported by reasons can amount only to one person’s preference. If the reasons offered merely appeal to a similar preference felt by others, it remains nothing more than the preference of many people instead of one.

To an ordinary person, however, a personal preference supported in this way is not only a completely satisfactory reason, but generally the only reason behind any ideas of morality, taste, or propriety that are not expressly stated in that person’s religious creed. It is also the principal guide to interpreting even that creed. People’s opinions about what deserves praise or blame are therefore shaped by all the many causes that influence what they want from the conduct of others. These causes are as numerous as those that determine their wishes on any other subject. Sometimes they include reason, and at other times prejudice or superstition. They often include social affections, and not infrequently antisocial feelings such as envy or jealousy, arrogance, or contempt. Most commonly, however, they include people’s desires or fears for themselves, whether their self-interest is legitimate or illegitimate.

Wherever one class is dominant, much of the country’s morality arises from that class’s interests and its sense of superiority. The morality governing relations between Spartans and Helots, plantation owners and enslaved Black people, princes and subjects, nobles and commoners, and men and women has largely been created by these class interests and feelings. The sentiments produced in this way then react upon the moral feelings of the dominant class’s own members in their relations with one another. On the other hand, when a formerly dominant class has lost its ascendancy, or when its ascendancy is unpopular, prevailing moral sentiments often bear the mark of an impatient hostility toward superiority.

Another major influence on the rules, enforced by law or opinion, about acting and refraining from action has been humanity’s servility toward the supposed preferences and aversions of its earthly masters or its gods. Although this servility is fundamentally self-interested, it is not hypocritical. It gives rise to perfectly genuine feelings of abhorrence, and it led people to burn magicians and heretics. Among so many baser influences, society’s general and obvious interests have naturally played a large part in shaping moral sentiments. Yet they have done so less through reason and for their own sake than through the sympathies and antipathies that grew out of them. Sympathies and antipathies having little or nothing to do with society’s interests have influenced the establishment of moral codes with just as much force.

The likes and dislikes of society, or of some powerful part of it, have thus been the main practical influence determining the rules imposed on everyone under the penalties of law or public opinion. In general, even those whose thought and feeling were ahead of their society did not challenge this state of affairs in principle, however much they might have opposed some of its details. They focused on asking what society ought to like or dislike instead of questioning whether its likes and dislikes should be laws for individuals. On the particular points where they themselves were heretics, they preferred trying to change humanity’s feelings rather than joining heretics generally in a common defense of freedom.

Religious belief is the only case in which anyone beyond a scattered individual here and there has consistently taken and maintained the higher ground as a matter of principle. This case is instructive in many ways. Not least, it offers a striking example of the fallibility of what is called the moral sense, since theological hatred in a sincere bigot is one of the clearest examples of moral feeling. Those who first broke the yoke of the institution that called itself the Universal Church were generally just as unwilling as that church to permit differences of religious opinion. But the conflict eventually cooled without any party winning a complete victory, and every church or sect had to limit its hopes to retaining the territory it already held. Minorities, seeing that they had no chance of becoming majorities, were forced to ask those whom they could not convert for permission to differ.

It is accordingly on this battlefield, almost exclusively, that the rights of the individual against society have been asserted on broad grounds of principle and society’s claim to exercise authority over dissenters has been openly challenged. The great writers to whom the world owes what religious liberty it possesses have mostly declared freedom of conscience to be a right that cannot be forfeited. They have denied absolutely that one person is accountable to others for that person’s religious beliefs.

Yet intolerance toward whatever people truly care about comes so naturally to humanity that religious freedom has scarcely been achieved in practice anywhere, except where religious indifference has added its weight to the balance because it dislikes having its peace disturbed by theological disputes. In the minds of almost all religious people, even in the most tolerant countries, the duty of tolerance is accepted with unspoken reservations. One person will tolerate dissent about church government but not about doctrine. Another will tolerate everyone except a Catholic or a Unitarian. Another will tolerate anyone who believes in revealed religion. A few extend their tolerance somewhat further, but only to people who believe both in God and in an afterlife. Wherever the majority’s feeling remains genuine and intense, it has surrendered very little of its claim to obedience.

Because of the peculiar circumstances of England’s political history, the yoke of public opinion may be heavier there than in most other European countries, but the yoke of law is lighter. There is considerable suspicion of direct interference in private conduct by the legislative or executive power. This comes not so much from any proper respect for individual independence as from the still-surviving habit of viewing the government as the representative of interests opposed to those of the public. The majority has not yet learned to regard the government’s power as its own power or the government’s opinions as its own opinions. When it does, individual liberty will probably be just as vulnerable to government encroachment as it already is to public opinion.

For now, however, a considerable body of feeling is ready to rise against any attempt by law to control individuals in matters where legal control has not previously been customary. This reaction makes very little distinction between matters that fall within the legitimate sphere of legal control and those that do not. Consequently, although the feeling is highly beneficial overall, it is perhaps misplaced about as often as it is well founded in particular cases.

In fact, there is no recognized principle by which people ordinarily test whether government interference is proper or improper. They decide according to their personal preferences. Some people, whenever they see good that could be accomplished or evil that could be corrected, would gladly urge the government to undertake the task. Others would rather endure almost any amount of social evil than add one more area of human affairs to those subject to government control.

In each particular case, people place themselves on one side or the other according to the general direction of their feelings, the degree of interest they take in the specific action proposed for the government, or their belief that the government would or would not act in the way they prefer. Very rarely do they decide according to any consistently held view about which matters are properly handled by government. It seems to me that, because there is no accepted rule or principle, one side is currently wrong about as often as the other: government interference is invoked improperly about as frequently as it is improperly condemned.

The purpose of this essay is to assert one very simple principle as the absolute rule governing society’s use of compulsion and control over individuals, whether through physical force in the form of legal penalties or through the moral coercion of public opinion. That principle is that humanity is justified, individually or collectively, in interfering with anyone’s freedom of action for only one purpose: self-protection. Power may rightfully be exercised against the will of any member of a civilized community only to prevent harm to others. A person’s own good, whether physical or moral, is not sufficient justification. He cannot rightfully be compelled to act or refrain from acting because doing so would be better for him, make him happier, or, in the opinion of others, be wise or even right. These are good reasons to protest, reason with him, persuade him, or plead with him, but not to compel him or punish him if he acts otherwise. To justify compulsion, the conduct being discouraged must be likely to harm someone else. The only part of anyone’s conduct for which he is answerable to society is the part that concerns others. In matters that concern only himself, his independence is absolute by right. Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.

It is perhaps hardly necessary to say that this doctrine applies only to human beings whose faculties have matured. We are not speaking of children or of young people below the age that the law may establish as adulthood. Those who are still at a stage when they must be cared for by others need protection against their own actions as well as against external injury.

For the same reason, we may leave out of consideration those backward conditions of society in which a people may themselves be regarded as underage. The early obstacles to spontaneous progress are so great that there is seldom any choice about the means of overcoming them. A ruler filled with the spirit of improvement is justified in using any measures that achieve an end perhaps otherwise unattainable. Despotism is a legitimate form of government in dealing with barbarians, provided that their improvement is the goal and that the means are justified by actually achieving it. Liberty as a principle does not apply to any condition before humanity has become capable of improvement through free and equal discussion. Until then, people have no alternative to complete obedience to an Akbar or a Charlemagne, if they are fortunate enough to find one. But as soon as they become capable of being guided toward their own improvement by conviction or persuasion, a stage long since reached by every nation that concerns us here, compulsion for their own good is no longer permissible. This is true whether compulsion is direct or takes the form of suffering and penalties for noncompliance. From that point on, it can be justified only to protect others.

I should make clear that I give up any advantage my argument might gain from the idea of abstract right as something independent of utility. I regard utility as the ultimate standard in all ethical questions, but it must be utility in the broadest sense, grounded in the permanent interests of humanity as a progressive species. I contend that those interests authorize external control over individual spontaneity only in relation to actions that concern the interests of other people.

If anyone does something harmful to others, there is an initial case for punishing him by law or, where legal penalties cannot safely be applied, through general disapproval. There are also many positive acts for the benefit of others that a person may rightfully be compelled to perform. He may be required to give evidence in a court of justice; to bear his fair share in the common defense or in any other cooperative work necessary to the interests of the society whose protection he enjoys; and to perform certain acts of individual kindness, such as saving another person’s life or intervening to protect someone defenseless from abuse. Whenever it is clearly a person’s duty to do such things, society may rightfully hold him responsible for failing to do them.

A person may harm others through inaction as well as through action, and in either case he is rightly accountable to them for the injury. It is true that compulsion must be used much more cautiously in cases of inaction. Holding someone responsible for harming others is the rule; holding him responsible for failing to prevent harm is, comparatively speaking, the exception. Yet many cases are clear and serious enough to justify that exception.

In every matter involving an individual’s external relations, he is accountable by right to those whose interests are affected and, if necessary, to society as their protector. There are often good reasons not to enforce that responsibility, but they must arise from the special practical circumstances of the case. Perhaps it is the kind of case in which a person will, on the whole, act better when left to his own judgment than when subjected to any form of control society can exercise. Or perhaps the attempt to control him would create harms greater than those it would prevent. When reasons like these rule out the enforcement of responsibility, the person’s own conscience should occupy the vacant judgment seat and protect the interests of others that have no external protection. He should judge himself all the more strictly because the case does not allow his fellow human beings to hold him accountable.

There is, however, a sphere of action in which society, as distinct from the individual, has at most an indirect interest. It includes every part of a person’s life and conduct that affects only himself or, if it also affects others, does so only with their free and voluntary consent and participation, without deception. When I say that conduct affects only himself, I mean directly and in the first instance, since whatever affects a person may affect others through him. I will consider later the objection based on that possibility.

This, then, is the proper domain of human liberty. First, it includes the inward realm of consciousness. This requires liberty of conscience in the most comprehensive sense; liberty of thought and feeling; and absolute freedom of opinion and conviction on every subject, whether practical or speculative, scientific, moral, or theological. The freedom to express and publish opinions may seem to fall under a different principle, because it belongs to the part of individual conduct that concerns other people. But it is almost as important as freedom of thought itself, and it rests largely on the same reasons, so in practice the two cannot be separated.

Second, the principle requires freedom of tastes and pursuits: freedom to shape the plan of our lives according to our own character and to do as we wish, accepting whatever consequences may follow. Our fellow human beings must not obstruct us as long as our actions do not harm them, even if they consider our conduct foolish, perverse, or wrong.

Third, from each individual’s liberty follows the liberty, within the same limits, of association among individuals. People must be free to unite for any purpose that does not involve harm to others, provided that those joining together are adults and have not been forced or deceived.

No society in which these liberties are not generally respected is free, whatever form its government may take. Nor is any society completely free unless they exist absolutely and without qualification. The only freedom deserving the name is the freedom to pursue our own good in our own way, so long as we do not try to deprive others of theirs or obstruct their efforts to obtain it. Each person is the proper guardian of his own health, whether bodily, mental, or spiritual. Humanity gains more by allowing people to live as they think best than by compelling each person to live as the rest think best.

Although this doctrine is far from new and may strike some people as an obvious truth, no doctrine stands in more direct opposition to the general tendency of existing opinion and practice. Society has devoted fully as much effort, according to its understanding, to forcing people to conform to its standards of personal excellence as to its standards of social excellence.

The ancient republics claimed the right to regulate every part of private conduct through public authority, and ancient philosophers supported that claim. They believed that the State had a deep interest in the entire physical and mental discipline of each citizen. This way of thinking may have been defensible in small republics surrounded by powerful enemies and constantly threatened with destruction by foreign attack or internal disorder. Even a brief relaxation of energy and self-command could so easily prove fatal that they could not afford to wait for freedom’s beneficial long-term effects.

In the modern world, political communities became larger. Above all, spiritual and temporal authority were separated, placing the direction of people’s consciences in hands other than those that controlled their worldly affairs. These developments prevented the law from interfering so extensively in the details of private life. But the machinery of moral repression has been used even more forcefully against departures from prevailing opinion in self-regarding matters than in social ones. Religion, the most powerful influence in the formation of moral feeling, has almost always been governed either by the ambition of a hierarchy seeking control over every area of human conduct or by the spirit of Puritanism.

Some modern reformers who have set themselves most strongly against the religions of the past have been no less determined than churches or sects to claim the right of spiritual domination. Mr. Comte in particular, whose social system is presented in his Traité de Politique Positive, seeks to establish a social despotism over the individual, using moral instruments more than legal ones, that surpasses anything envisioned in the political ideal of the strictest disciplinarian among the ancient philosophers.

Beyond the distinctive doctrines of individual thinkers, the world at large also shows a growing tendency to extend society’s power over the individual too far, both through the force of opinion and even through legislation. All the changes taking place in the world tend to strengthen society and weaken the individual. This encroachment, therefore, is not one of the evils likely to disappear on its own. On the contrary, it is likely to become increasingly formidable.

Human beings, whether acting as rulers or as fellow citizens, are disposed to impose their own opinions and inclinations on others as rules of conduct. Some of the best and some of the worst feelings in human nature energetically support this disposition, so it is hardly ever restrained by anything except lack of power. Since that power is growing rather than declining, we must expect the problem to increase under present conditions unless a strong barrier of moral conviction can be raised against it.

For the sake of the argument, it will be useful not to begin immediately with the general thesis. Instead, we will first focus on a single branch of it, one on which current opinion recognizes the principle stated here to some extent, though not completely. That branch is freedom of thought, from which the related freedom of speaking and writing cannot be separated.

Although these liberties form a substantial part of the political morality of every country that professes religious tolerance and free institutions, the philosophical and practical grounds on which they rest may be less familiar to the public, and less fully appreciated even by many leading figures in public opinion, than might have been expected. Properly understood, those grounds apply far more widely than to this one part of the subject, and a thorough examination of this question will provide the best introduction to everything that follows. I therefore hope that those for whom nothing I am about to say will be new will excuse me for offering one more discussion of a subject so often debated over the last three centuries.