Roy Hattersley writes a column today purporting to show why John Stuart Mill's views on liberty are 'out-of-date' and succeeds in showing why they aren't.
Hattersley starts by challenging Mill's anti-paternalist argument - the principle that the law should not interfere with a person's liberty purely for his or her own good. His counter-argument? That only cranks believe this now. Oh, and the fact that the compulsory wearing of seatbelts prevents people flying through the windscreens of cars and injuring pedestrians. This, of course, justifies the law on seatbelt-wearing on the grounds that seatbelts prevent harm to others, something with which Mill had no problem. But the issue of so-called paternalist (maternalist?) legislation only arises when the putative harm is to the person concerned and no one else. I have argued before on this blog that some types of paternalist legislation are justified and other types are not, but on that issue Hattersley has nothing to say beyond his cranks remark. It suggests he wouldn't be a reliable defender of anyone's liberties in face of a government that thought some favoured activity of the person concerned was bad for her.
He then goes on to challenge Mill's harm principle itself - that 'the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others' - by conflating the proposition that everything we do 'has an effect on the rest of society', which is largely true but irrelevant, with the thought that some of what we do is harmful to others, which is both true and relevant to how we should deal with what is indeed harmful to others - but irrelevant to that large class of individual actions that affect others without harming them.
Hattersley finally proposes an alternative definition of liberty to Mill's negative 'absence of restraint'. He prefers the more positive 'practical ability to enjoy the choices of a free society'. Leave aside that this is a circular definition since it depends on already knowing what a 'free' society is in specifying the meaning of... freedom. And leave aside a long discussion I could embark on but am not going to about the respective merits and demerits of negative and positive definitions of liberty. But the former minister might like to ponder the fact that, even understood as the 'practical ability' to, for example, read whatever books you choose to (because you have enough money to buy them, time free from toil in which to read, etc), freedom can be curtailed by governments that think it's not good for you to read certain things they don't like or it's bad in some general way for the moral development of the populace if you do so.