SOURCE: “Rights, Consequences, and Mill on Liberty,” in Of Liberty, edited by A. Phillips Griffiths, Cambridge University Press, 1983, pp. 167-80.

In the following essay, Thomas offers philosophical and moral justifications for Mill's liberty principle as contained in his essay, On Liberty.

Mill says that the object of his essay On Liberty is to defend a certain principle, which I will call the ‘liberty principle’, and will take to say the following¹: ‘It is permissible, in principle, for the state (through law) or society (through social pressure) to control the actions of individuals “only in respect to those actions of each, which concern the interest of other people” ’.² The liberty principle is a prescription of intermediate generality. Mill intends it to support more specific political prescriptions, such as liberty of conscience, of expressing and publishing opinions, of framing a plan of life to suit our own character, and of...