1 John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty is rightly praised for its defense of the epistemic and social value of free, full, and vigorous speech and debate. But the value of listening, and the importance of conversation partners to the quality and significance of debate, often gets short shrift in discussions of Mill’s work. Here I examine the extent to which the dialogic nature of free speech is important, by examining its importance to the evolution of Mill’s own thinking on important social topics that were deeply controversial in his day. In at least two cases, Mill’s beliefs became more radical, and more in opposition to dominant views of his social and economic class, because he became friends and trusted intimates with people who had experienced social and economic oppression. Mill’s beliefs on the political and economic equality of women, and Irish independence, directly changed as a result of his friendships with Harriet Taylor and John Elliott Cairnes. By contrast, his views on colonialism never substantively evolved throughout his life, and I contend that part of this reason is that his knowledge of colonialism was consistently indirect and filtered through colonial authorities. In all three cases, there is a thematic consistency to the early views. His more critical or restrictive views of the capacity of women, Irish people, and those living on the Indian subcontinent are not due to essential failings, he claims, but to structural causes that induce character weaknesses. The crucial difference is that in the case of women and the Irish, he argues for immediate independence, suggesting that they can overcome these structural limitations of past oppression, whereas he expresses no such optimism for indigenous Indians. The difference here is that the improvement and autonomy for Indians, Mill makes clear, is defined by British metrics and and done on a British (and indefinitely postponed) timeline. The comparative stasis of Mill’s thinking on colonialism, as opposed to the relative bravery and evolution of his thinking on women’s rights and Irish independence, emerges as a result of his ability to listen and learn from those who’d lived through these injustices.
2 It seems to me that this pattern in Mill’s career is instructive for our debates about the value of truth-telling and standing against conventional wisdom. Mill himself recognizes the importance of valued and varied interlocutors in On Liberty itself. Famously, he observes that for most people what passes for “the world” in which they redound implicit epistemic trust reflects little more than those who share their religious faith, social and economic status, political identity, and so forth (Collected Works [hereafter CW] XVIII, p. 230). Mill’s own biography illustrates this; where he becomes close to people from different social and political statuses, who are able to demonstrate the limitations of his own views, he is able to adapt easily (and indeed, to withstand the social opprobrium that comes with adopting politically unpopular views). It is equally striking that he is incapable of recognizing where his own views are merely a reflection of his social status and identity.
- 2 And relevantly, of course, ‘private’ conversations can no longer be reliably assumed as such, given (...)
3 The last part of the essay traces some implications of this argument as it pertains to debates about free speech and the free thinker. It’s clear to me that part of why Mill is able to modify his views is because he is privately tested and challenged, and that these challenges are coming in an environment of mutual trust and respect. If we want to defend full and honest speech as a public service that enhances truth, we must attend to the environment in which this speech occurs. Public debate, particularly as it happens in the twenty-first century, incentivizes extreme positions adopted rigidly and publicly, by stark contrast to private conversations between trusted intimates.2 Fuller public debates are unlikely to occur or to be productive absent freer and more formative private friendships.
4 The argument will proceed as follows. First, I briefly sketch Mill’s changes of views on feminism and Irish independence, the role of his friends in these changes, and the political unpopularity of his views in these cases. Then, I illustrate the durability of his views on colonialism, and assess his source material for these views. Next, I think through the implications of these three cases in light of our views on epistemic humility. Finally, I apply these ideas to the status of public and private debate today. John Stuart Mill represents an important illustration of the great value of how robust public debate benefits from the balancing it gains from truly private, intimate conversations across divides, where people can learn from one another and stress test their ideas. Absent these kinds of considerations, what gets classed as “frank and full speech” may more often resemble what the New Testament describes as unintelligible “speaking into the air” (1 Cor. 14:9).
5 As is well known, even the young John Stuart Mill was a maverick about women’s independence; he was arrested as a seventeen-year-old for distributing literature on birth control in London tenements. But while he advocated for women’s political equality from an early age, his views about women were not fully egalitarian. In an 1832 essay on women he observes that while women can work, they should generally not, because it is better for a woman’s primary “occupation should rather be to adorn and beautify [life]” (Rossi 1979: 75). He sounds far too close to Rousseau’s description of Sophie when he characterizes woman as devoting “all [their] power of enjoyment, and power of giving enjoyment. . .to diffus[ing] beauty, elegance, and grace, everywhere” (Rossi 1979: 76). By contrast, Harriet Taylor (already not very happily married to John Taylor and a mother herself) was writing essays about marriage at the same time that argued that marriage succeeded as a legal contract mostly because women did not know what they were signing up for at its undertaking. In one essay, she observed that there were few marriages with substantive companionship or mutual sympathy (Taylor Mill 1998: 19, 22). Unlike the young Mill, Taylor had no squeamish resistance to women’s economic independence, arguing that women and men should be made fully equal in terms of all political and economic rights and privileges, so that “women would not then have children without considering how to maintain them. . .public offices being open to [men and women] alike, all occupations would be divided between the sexes” (ibid 23). In short, Taylor’s feminism was more robust than Mill’s, and explicitly included the importance of social and economic independence for women.
6 Mill and Taylor met and became friends in 1830, and Mill’s views on the character and capacities of women almost immediately started to evolve. Taylor’s influence seems indisputable. Early in their relationship, in a letter clearly responding to his pressure about their relationship, she reminds him that Mill’s “hesitation” is focused on his usefulness to society, whereas her role as wife and mother is “marked out as duty. I should spoil four lives & injure others” (Taylor Mill 1998: 332, emphasis original). Thus, while both Mill and Taylor were committed to women’s independence from an early age, the younger Mill held the culturally chauvinistic views more conventionally seen among his economic and social class and gender, whereas Taylor was from an early age committed to the full independent status of women, in what Menaka Philips describes as “experiential politics” (2018: 627). The mature views on gender equality expressed in On the Subjection of Women (1869) represent Mill’s moving to the fully feminist perspective Taylor had long maintained. Indeed, Mill credits Harriet Taylor for his intellectual developments in several places (in Subjection, in his autobiography, and in his dedication of On Liberty).
- 3 Helpful sources include Rossi, Jo Ellen Jacobs, The Voice of Harriet Taylor Mill, Phyllis Rose, Par (...)
7 Much has been written about the relationship between Mill and Taylor and the extent to which she influenced him.3 Here I want to stress explicitly how Taylor challenged Mill’s views; on women in particular, but on other groups, and with a consistent theme of her challenging his epistemic authority. How, she suggests repeatedly, is he confident in drawing such broad conclusions about people whose living conditions are so remote to his? In a letter written around 1844, she pushes back firmly on his willingness to accept August Comte’s sexist views of women as less intelligent than men by virtue of their having smaller brains on average. She dismisses Comte himself in the letter as having a “usual partial & prejudiced view”; but what disappoints her about Mill is his unwillingness to state his views firmly. “I am dissapointed [sic] at a tone more than half apologetic with which you state your opinions. . .do not think that I wish you had said more on the subject, I only wish that what was said was in the tone of conviction, not of suggestion” (Taylor Mill 1998: 337, emphasis original). Taylor is as annoyed with Mill’s half-heartedness, his lack of honesty with a worthy interlocutor, as she is with the views themselves. She pushes back explicitly on his agreement with Comte that men and women are suited for different occupations, noting that neither he nor Comte address the role of social and economic class in ability and powers of work (Taylor Mill 1998: 338). By mocking his ‘method’ (ibid., satirical quotes Taylor’s), she makes plain her disrespect for Mill’s assumption he has substantive knowledge of groups of people whose lives are remote from his own.
8 Because Mill and Taylor were in a deeply intimate and decade-long friendship at this point—spending many evenings, traveling together where they are able—it is not hard to imagine that these letters represent an infinitesimal fraction of the intimate conversations these two had over the decades of connection. Taylor’s tone in these letters is telling; she has no trouble being direct, teasing, or even sarcastic with Mill as she challenges his views or his ability to think outside his own experience. And it seems equally obvious that Mill was able to take these challenges seriously and thoughtfully, and modify his views.
9 Mill undergoes a similar evolution in his views on Irish independence, and here again a personal friendship plays a significant role. Mill’s earliest political writing on Ireland, an 1825 pamphlet, focuses most of its argumentative fire on the disproportionate power of the Irish Catholic Church and politicians who benefit from land tenancy rules. The two substantive mentions of the Irish people characterize them mainly as passive dupes of the Church and these politicians, making early marriages and “heedless[ly]” having children, and voting robotically for the leaders in their landlords’ interest, acting as “a sort of live stock on the estate” (CW VI, pp. 84, 87). A 26-year-old Mill damns the Irish with faint praise in an article (“The Irish Character,” 1832) in which he claims that what has kept the Irish “from the lowest stage of moral debasement” is their tendency towards generosity (Mill CW XXIII: 398). While he attributes positive emotional qualities to the Irish (generosity, bravery, kindness, hospitality), he equally suggests their lack of development of virtues of restraint like “integrity, justice, forethought, self-denial, veracity” (ibid). He lays responsibility for this situation at the foot of English control of Ireland, but the fact remains that his description of the Irish character strongly resembles his view of colonized peoples; childlike, emotional, lacking rationality and forethought. During the 1846 potato famine crisis, he writes dozens of newspaper articles that reflect this viewpoint. Most explicitly, he says that “[the Irish] have been as completely delivered into [English] hands as children into those of their parents and instructors” and describing them as “lazy, lawless savages, whose want of industry and energy keeps them ever on the verge of starvation, whose want or respect for life and property makes it unsafe for civilized beings to dwell among them” (“The Condition of Ireland” [1], CW XXIV: 880). His contempt for the childlike incapacity of the Irish is so deep that he emphatically criticizes any public laws providing relief as necessarily ineffective. “We protest with all our force against giving one additional farthing on plans which hold out no better promise than that. . .the Irish will be exactly as they were before. Give as much as you will, but let it be for the permanent improvement of the condition of the people. We will not hear of any giving merely to feed the disease, not to cure it” (“The Condition of Ireland” [2], CW XXIV: 886, emphasis added). The “disease” in this case, is the weak Irish character.
10 Even where Mill’s remedies for English oppression are structural, such as giving land grants to peasant to disempower remote landlords, his reasoning reflects structural paternalism: the Irish must learn to appreciate the value of hard work. While he promotes this idea in many of his columns on Ireland, this early column makes the paternalistic justification clear. “Give [the Irish] fixity of tenure, and they would thenceforth work and save for themselves alone. . .Here is the secret for converting an indolent and reckless into a laborious, provident, and careful people” (“The Condition of Ireland” [5], CW XXIV: 897, emphasis added). State incentives and inducements must be carefully managed, and the appearance of luxury avoided. Rather than the state building infrastructure of farm buildings and houses, which the Irish would not bother to maintain, “the [Irish] people themselves should do all the work of improvement which they are capable of. . .[that] will sift the more energetic portion of the population from the rest, and discriminate those in whose hands the experiment is most likely to thrive” (“The Condition of Ireland” [11], CW XXIV: 913). He makes his limited confidence in Irish people’s capacities plain; the state must manage and incentivize them to be responsible, for their natural character tendencies do not incline them this way. This account of political strategies to make up for essential character flaws tracks cleanly with Mill’s early views on women’s equality.
- 4 Ironically, Cairnes himself was less fond of Mill’s expression of his new views on Ireland, writing (...)
11 A central factor in Mill’s changed views on Ireland is his friendship with the Irish economist John Elliot Cairnes. They met in 1859 through their membership in the Political Economy Club; their shared opposition to slavery and liberal economic views fostered their friendship. Their epistolary friendship is robust; other than Herbert Spencer, Cairnes is the most frequent correspondent in Mill’s letters from the 1860s onwards. Mill’s letters to Cairnes are effusive in tone, and Mill’s regular requests for Cairnes’ travel schedule and plans for future social meetings indicate the degree of his fondness. And while their friendship is grounded on shared political interests (Irish independence, the end of slavery and Reconstruction in the United States, the status of women), their letters contain confidences. Mill lets his guard down in his letters to Cairnes; his contempt for the Irish Catholic Church is much more barbed than in his public writings. His next substantial work on Ireland, the 1869 pamphlet England and Ireland, reflects substantive changes in his views. The specific economic changes in his views are directly traceable to Cairnes’ views (and indeed, this tracing has been done in Boylan and Foley 1983, pp. 103 - 109). But what is more telling for the purposes of my argument is the shift in how Mill accounts for the character of the Irish. While his earlier newspaper articles regularly emphasized Mill’s low opinion of the Irish people’s abilities to discipline themselves, to plan ahead, to work for long-term gain, the 1869 pamphlet contains none of these condemnations. Rather, it is the English character that comes in for repeated and virulent criticism, and notably, Mill includes himself here. The opening paragraph foregrounds the virtues of the Irish character, emphasizing British “jealousy” of “Irish industry and enterprise”, in stark contrast to those newspaper columns (“England and Ireland,” CW VI: 507). Indeed, his critique of British rule of Ireland is premised in British myopia; the failures of British rulers to assume that British institutions wouldn’t map tidily on another country. He repeatedly critiques British “conceits” and mistakes in this pamphlet. The transformation here is stark. Mill makes Cairnes’ influence on his thinking plain in several letters; in 1866, he notes that he is drawing “nearer and nearer” to Cairnes’ view on the need for Irish universities to be secular and serving religiously inclusive populations (CW XVI letter 904, p. 1133). Mill seeks out Cairnes’ expertise and knowledge for insight about future labor prospects for the Irish in multiple letters (CW XV letters 726 and 728, pp. 965 and 967). Cairnes’ reply is so influential that Mill replies “On Ireland I shall cancel all I had newly written on that subject, and wait for the further communication you kindly promise” (CW XV letter 734, p. 975). And in a letter a few days later says that he has fully adopted Cairnes’ views.4 In sum, it seems clear that the tenor and fullness of Mill’s evolution on the Irish character is largely due to his friendship with Cairnes.
12 By contrast to these two cases, the relative stasis of Mill’s views on colonialism is straightforward and conventional, and reflects the views of his country, political party and class of society (pace On Liberty, CW XVII, p. 230). Most basically, there is a clear contrast between Mill’s sense of the weakness or incapacity of the character of Indian natives or their ability to self-govern, and his assessment of British competence in Indian rule. Even where Mill articulates a path forward for Indian self-governance or critiques violent excesses of colonialism, these moves are defined by British measures. The limitations of this viewpoint are straightforward when we examine some of the history of the East India Company. I contend that a principal reason for the persistence of this blind spot is in the virtual homogeneity of his sources for information about India.
13 It is clear that the young Mill absorbs and uncritically endorses his father James Mill’s views on India. James Mill spent twelve years writing his History of British India (1817), after which he was appointed to the East India Company. The History is a straightforward justification of colonialism on paternalist grounds; Jennifer Pitts describes the book as “propos[ing] a single index of civilization: all societies. . .could be ranged in a historical and moral hierarchy” (2005, p. 123). Colonial India, for the elder Mill, was towards the bottom of this hierarchy, and its inhabitants needed the intervention of the British for their improvement.
14 There are many instances of this in Mill’s writings throughout his career. Most famously, of course, he writes in On Liberty that colonized countries, “in which the race itself may be considered in its nonage,” are fit only for “despotism” (CW XVIII, p. 224). In 1852 he describes native Indians as “not ripe for. . .representative government” (“The East India Company’s Charter,” CW XXX, p. 49). The cause, for Mill is deficiencies in the Indian people’s characters; “I do not think that India has yet attained such a degree of civilization and improvement as to be ripe for anything like a representative system” (“The East India Company’s Charter,” CW XXX, p. 51). Lynn Zastoupil describes Mill’s view as “cultural orientalism,” describing Indian society and cultural as “primitive but capable of improvement” (1994: 14). This kind of cultural paternalism was a conventional view for its time. Caroline Elkins observes that many British elites equated the status of the Irish and of colonized peoples in the nineteenth century. She notes that “Britain ‘racialized’ the Irish and Afrikaners, equating their cultures to those of brown and Black subjects, sometimes using dehumanizing language to describe their physical appearances and living conditions, and believing that [just like colonized peoples] the Irish and Afrikaners were ‘backward’ populations that needed to be civilized” (2023: 12). Mill’s undervaluing of Indian competence and capacity leads him in particular to dismiss resistance movements. Douglas Peters notes that “Mill believed that the Indian people as a whole were politically apathetic,” and thus dismissed the 1857 insurgencies as “the product of discontented soldiers and some gullible peasants who had been seduced by their religious leaders” (1999: 210). For a thinker who so consistently demonstrates willingness to consider unconventional views, his quick readiness to dismiss and diminish struggle for independence as little short of a cult of personality is out of character and relatively simplistic.
15 Where Mill seems to depart from convention, however modestly, is in his belief of an a possibility for Indian self-rule, but even this is framed and defined entirely on British terms. When Mill describes the extent of Indian home rule in one letter, it is judged entirely on British terms. He agrees that it is crucial for the British to “undertake the education” of heirs in Indian rule. His benchmarks for success are clearly British; he praises one chief who “immediately commenced introducing the best parts of our system into his own” (CW XVI p. 1203, letter 998). In 1836, he writes that “our empire in India. . .will not exist for a day after we shall lose the character of being more just and disinterested than the native rulers and of being united among ourselves” (“Minute on the Black Act,” CW XXX, p. 15, emphasis added). While he expresses optimism that natives who are sufficiently “trustworthy” can be appointed to roles in the civil government (“East India Company’s Charter,” CW XXX, p. 64), it is clear that the assessment of trustworthiness will be done entirely by British administrators and on British terms. Duncan Bell describes Mill as thinking of civilization as a “rare and fragile achievement. . .a status attained by only a very few communities”, and defended the colonies as “laboratories of character development” (2016: 301, 225). This vague sense of a potential theoretical future of independence is clearly premised on British conditions and measurements.
- 5 To be sure, Mill’s response is relatively better than his opponents on the Eyre Commission, some of (...)
16 Even when Mill most clearly departs from conventional colonialist views, by his strong and forceful willingness to condemn violent excesses of colonialism, he does so by appealing to British principles and conventions. In other words, violent excesses are seen as a departure or exception, not the rule for colonialism. Mill was elected to Parliament the year of a native rebellion in Jamaica, which was met by an extremely violent response from its colonial government (led by John Eyre). Mill was on the Parliamentary commission appointed to investigate the rebellion and Eyre’s conduct, and while he was critical of Eyre, it was less on human rights grounds and more on law-and-order principles. Mill’s view is that the violence of the British response belied a national commitment to liberty (Elkins 2023, p. 59). But his response makes clear he sees Eyre’s response as an exceptional failing of otherwise sound principles, rather than reconciling the paradox at the heart of colonial liberalism.5
17 Mill’s generally charitable view towards British colonialism is at odds with the stark reality of Britain’s second empire. Caroline Elkins summarizes imperial governance as “legalized lawlessness,” and notes that Britain routinely invoked martial law against colonized peoples, and limited rule of law provisions in open-ended and brutal fashion (2023, pp. 51 - 67). I contend that part of why Mill is so content to hold this relatively timid position with respect to colonialism is because he hasn’t made sufficient effort to investigate what he actually knows about the region, and the sources of his information. Mill spends decades working for the East India Company, starting as a seventeen-year-old and leaving employment only when the Company becomes managed by the Crown. His employment, clearly coming through his father’s connections, is not unusual for how the Company hired its staff. The appointments of colonial administrators and their workloads was not through meritocracy, nor were their conditions designed for getting to know inhabitants well. Elkins notes that the administrators, who were often plucked from Eton or Harrow and minimally trained, “were barely out of their teens when they headed off to empire. One lone baby-faced white officer. . .was typically responsible for approximately one hundred thousand colonial subjects who became, in the minds of colonial administrators, ‘their natives’” (2023, p. 99). Some at the clerk level, including Mill himself, attained their positions largely through family or social connections (Bowen 2006, pp. 141, 194). While those at the Director level often had prior direct experience in India by the 1830s, when Mill joined the Company, this experience was generally limited to military experience (Bowen 2006, p. 131). Administrators in India were so reliably disconnected to local culture and practices that Warren Hastings’ fluency in Bengali, Urdu and Persian, and his respect for Indian culture, are worthy of extended commentary in one history of the Company. Hastings is described as “by far the most responsible and sympathetic of all the officials the Company had yet sent to India” (Dalrymple 2019, pp. 239, 312).
- 6 One other domain in which Mill appears to be unduly credulous is in his assessment of President And (...)
- 7 Lynn Zastoupil notes that Mill writes in 1832 about the benefits of “transporting oneself into the (...)
18 These historical details have epistemic relevance; they demonstrate Mill’s blind spot when it comes to colonial India. Mill’s confidence in British reports about India seems quite out of proportion to his skepticism in these other areas of justice. Mill’s confidence is jarring at times; he praises the effectiveness of colonial rule in India and attributes it in part to the fact that administrators go to the country when they are young, and claims that the hiring process has little to do with “the influential classes” (“East India Company’s Charter,” CW XXX, p. 37). Taking the testimony of British administrators at face value would be similar to trusting husbands to speak accurately for their wives, or English nationalists to advocate on behalf of the Irish.6 Trusting the reports of administrators as providing a comprehensive account of life under colonialism would be foolish, and yet Mill, who in other parts of his life actively set out to find interlocutors from varied life experiences (see next section), seems never to have questioned the intelligence provided here.7 Lynn Zastoupil concludes that Mill viewed Indians as “silent partners in the imperial project of information gathering, people whose interests and ideas could be adequately represented by knowledgeable Europeans” (1994, p. 174). This tendency is most shockingly demonstrated by one passage from England and Ireland, where Mill argues that British governance in Ireland should learn from the good practices from past rule in India. The passage is worth quoting in detail:
Englishmen are not always incapable of shaking off insular prejudices, and governing another country according to its wants, and not according to common English habits and notions. It is what they had had to do in India; and those Englishmen who know something of India, are even now those who understand Ireland best. . .[B]y a fortunate accident, the business of ruling India in the name of England did not rest with the Houses of Parliament or the offices of Westminster; it devolved on men who passed their lives in India, and made Indian interests their professional occupation. . .This work of stripping off their preconceived English ideas was at first done clumsily and imperfectly, and at the cost of many mistakes; but as they honestly meant to do it, they in time succeeded, and India is now governed, if with a large share of the ordinary imperfections of rulers, yet with a full perception and recognition of its differences from England.
(CW VI, p. 519, emphasis added)
- 8 Given that Mill himself spent his adult life working for the East India Company until its work was (...)
19Mill’s confidence here in his British interlocutors’ reliability and impartiality in governing India is startling, particularly when compared to the actual history of how these “professionals” were selected and hired. While these men may have “passed their lives” in India and made its interests their occupation, their engagement with the history, culture, and languages of the region were highly variant and often barely present. And they were serving a private company that was seeking to maximize profits. His assessment that India is now governed with a clear recognition of its differences from India also seems at odds with the actual lived experiences of the residents of the Indian subcontinent.8
20 Given Mill’s care in other parts of his intellectual and professional life to seek out widely different points of view, this blind spot is all the more striking. Indeed, Lynn Zastoupil points out that in at least one case, Mill seems to have gone out of his way to avoid substantive encounters with an indigenous intellectual who could have complicated his benevolent views of British colonialism. Zastoupil rightly describes Mill’s “neglect” of the Bengali intellectual Rammohun Roy (2017, p. 23), whose extended trip to London in the 1830s was well-publicized in the newspapers in advance, and who had a series of meetings with many of prominent British intellectuals, government figures, and activists. Roy and Mill held similar reformist views on many issues, including criticism of religious oppression on individual liberty, and in favor of greater economic independence for women (Zastoupil 2017, p. 29). This makes Mill’s almost total silence on Rammohun all the more puzzling, as he must have known about him and his work. Zastoupil generously suggests that Mill may have felt conflicted because one of Rammohun’s reasons for visiting England was to represent the Emperor in his financial claims against the East India Company, but since Mill’s own father met with Rammohun in 1833, this cannot be the only or primary reason (Zastoupil 2017, p. 30). And other evidence exists that demonstrates Mill’s sensitivity to criticism of the East India Company; Byung-Hoon Suh suggests that Mill and Alexis de Tocqueville ended their friendship in part over Tocqueville’s harsh criticism of the East India Company (2016, pp. 67 - 69). In light of this, even qualified defenses of Mill’s views on colonialism as allowing space for a future independence based on cultural development (cf. Varouxakis 2008, p. 13) seem overly charitable.
21 Let me develop why these three instances of Mill’s (in)ability to change his views, in part due to private friendships, matter for our thoughts about public debate. Mill’s own powerful language from On Liberty can help us think through why friendships matter for our public dialogues. Mill’s second case study for free speech, when the minority opinion is false, rests on his impassioned call for us to consider that our deeply held beliefs are merely “dead dogma” if we do not subject them to serious examination, if we do not take seriously thoughtful objections to them (CW XVIII, p. 243). He is explicit that serious examination is far from performative; one must consider objections in their strongest form, as they are most persuasive, he writes (CW XVIII, p. 245). Otherwise, we are simply playing around with false dichotomies and straw men, and not forced to acknowledge the weak spots of our own arguments.
- 9 Mill himself is clearly sympathetic to the need to attend to the social dynamics of speech. The fin (...)
22 This classic argument is framed with an adversarial version of truth, where ideas are fought over in starker forms, and where modifications and qualifications are a distraction to the point of winning the epistemic day. Indeed, this is why Mill not unsympathetically describes public argument as resembling armed combat in an objection to his view in On Liberty (CW XVIII, p. 254). Contemporary theorists of knowledge like Miranda Fricker urge us to focus on what we can learn from the weaknesses in our arguments. In particular, Fricker argues that what we can think of as weaker arguments may sometimes be drawn from credibility mistakes we make as hearers—excessive and unjustified scrutiny of one speaker (based on stereotype threat, for instance), or excessive and unjustified credibility granted to another speaker, because they fit our assumptions of authority and experience. Fricker’s theory of epistemic injustice doesn’t simply identify the ways in which our built-in biases can prejudice us against taking other people seriously, but argues for a constructive response. In line with virtue ethics, she argues for what she calls a “testimonial sensibility,” that is to say the active practice of reconsidering what we think we know, and our built-in assumptions. While we have a background set of beliefs and attitudes that we are all raised with, Fricker contends that epistemic justice requires us to reflect critically and regularly on those inherited views, and the experiences we have had that can reinforce them (2007, p. 82). Fricker notes that once we recognize patterns of testimonial injustice in ourselves, this practice can become easier and more reflexive; the habit of reflecting on individual and collective experience and being able to identify places of weakness in credibility. The hope, for Fricker, is to develop the faculty of “respond[ing] to the word of another with the sort of critical openness that is required for a thoroughly effortless sharing of knowledge” (2007, p. 84). Fricker’s phrasing here holds real tension; ‘critical openness’ are two orientations intuitively at odds with one another. Classic marketplace-of-ideas defenses tend to celebrate both but emphasize the one or the other. Fricker’s approach reminds us that the power dynamics in speaking and thinking operate regularly and often behind the scenes, and challenge us to better practices. Fricker makes this practice explicit towards the end of the book, where she points out that in an overwhelmingly homogeneous environment (her example is male-dominated Anglophone academic philosophy), the active practice of a kind of context-dependent epistemic humility might be justified. In particular, she recommends the need to listen to “what is not said, as much as what is said” (2007, pp. 171 - 172). Her argument here is forceful, containing both a caution for epistemic humility (a reminder that backdrop beliefs can precondition us to unwarranted skepticism), as well as a call to attend to the social dynamics of speech better.9
23 There is an important substantive step in cultivating epistemic humility, which is actively engaging with the substance of views differently than one’s own. Fricker makes this task plain (2007, p. 172), and it is not in tension with Mill’s theory or with his practices in general. Mill’s praise of this capacity in On Liberty is one he practices in his correspondence. He engages with a wide array of interlocutors, and takes care to cultivate correspondence with people whose life circumstances differ from his. One example is particularly illustrative. When William Wood, a worker in a pottery factory, writes him in 1867 to praise his comments on voting reform, Mill responds with exuberant praise, saying that Wood’s letter has shown “[as] true a perception of important principles and distinctions” as any of the many other letters he has received (implicitly from more learned correspondents, CW XVI letter 1062, p. 1257). He closes by inviting Wood to keep writing to him, and indeed they maintain an active correspondence for several years. Mill clearly values Wood’s correspondence in part because of his class background; he writes in a later letter to Wood that he would be happy to hear Wood’s opinions “about any subject” (CW XVII letter 1483, p. 1647), and in letters to allies helping Wood to arrange a public meeting about women’s suffrage, emphasizes the fact that Wood is a thoughtful man from the laboring classes (CW XVII letters 1484 and 1485, pp. 1647 - 1649).
24 Given the fact that Mill is abstractly committed to the value of variety in speech and debate, that he is keenly aware of the social dynamics of speech, and that he demonstrates an active engagement with an admirably wide variety of texts and interlocutors throughout his long life, the singular persistence of this particular blind spot of his towards the autonomy of Indian people should serve as a caution for embracing bold public debate as its own unmodified end. If one of the best-read people of the nineteenth century, who was keenly aware of how dangerous assumptions could be and who actively practiced habits to challenge his own ideas throughout his career, could so consistently miss this one particular lacuna in his reading and existence, we should be worried about relying too much on brave public debate as a path to truth, particularly given the structural features of public debate in the contemporary attention economy.
- 10 It seems clear that Mill himself would be horrified by the epistemic environment fostered by social (...)
25 If we want to think about the extent to which full and honest speech is a public service, we cannot consider this topic absent attention to the current environment our speech inhabits. I particularly want to attend to the differences between public debate and private conversations between trusted intimates. Norms around public debate often privilege extreme positions adopted for attention. Public debates are agonistic, and it is rare for speakers to modify or complicate their position in response to their interlocutor’s ideas. Today’s attention economy rewards provocative speech, particularly in front of hostile audiences. The structure of media and social media (Twitter/X posts limited to 240 characters) reward extreme views quickly posted, and actively disincentivize the sort of sustained engagement or charitable questioning and listening that Fricker’s testimonial sensibility demands.10 Mill himself is attentive to the 19th-century version of this distinction between collegial intimate dialogue and combative public performance. When Priscilla McLaren published one of her letters to him strongly endorsing women’s suffrage, he commented in a letter to her husband that he only preferred his letters to be published when he wrote them with this intention. He notes that while he does not “shrink from exposure to criticism. . .when writing confidentially to friends who feel as one does oneself, one takes many things for granted. . .[and] one does not guard one’s expressions as prudence & courtesy would require one to do in addressing oneself to those who differ from one” (CW XVII letter 1372, p. 1539). The fineness of his distinction matters here. Mill is not saying that the substance of his ideas are different in private letters than in public proclamations; rather, he is stressing that the conditions of friendship permit him to be playful, exploratory, familiar, and less precise in his arguments than he would in public writings. There is clearly distinct value for him in this sort of private generative thinking, but it is not indistinguishable from the more rigorous and adversarial intellectual combat with which Mill is so familiar.
- 11 His focus is on international relations in this book, but his observations can be fairly extrapolat (...)
26 But the problems of our informational ecosystem aren’t limited to social media. Daniel Drezner’s recent book The Ideas Industry (2017) illustrates the ways in which structural features of contemporary intellectual and political institutions reinforce more extreme public debate. He argues that private-sector incentives like donor-funded think tanks and pricy public speaking fees commercialize public debate; “superstars can hawk[] their wares [and] become their own brands” (2017, p. 193). By contrast, Drezner notes, public intellectuals from even fifty years prior had a relatively lower profile. In this rarefied economic air, these incentives make it easier to be a “thought leader” (an idea evangelist, whose focus is on promoting a singular and unchanging vision of the world) than a “public intellectual” (a critic, who is open to examining all shibboleths) (2017, pp. 192 - 193). Drezner’s characterization of thought leaders as a kind of intellectual salespeople deserves emphasis here.11 Drezner contends that to embrace the market incentives of the thought leader most fundamentally means to commit to a single (preferably profitably novel or controversial) position; that is, not to change one’s mind.
27 For public or private debate to be meaningful and substantive, it has to allow not just for the possibility of one side to vanquish another in a zero-sum fashion but for either or both sides to move, qualify, complicate or adapt their views. Otherwise, people are truly talking past one another. These calls for nuance are regularly made, but they often elide some of the power differentials in our speech. To be explicit, Mill’s concern about hate speech from 1859 is still relevant now: not all views are equally challenged to modify or consider complications. Myisha Cherry frames this concern well when she worries that public calls for conversations are often one-sided, where only some groups are encouraged to listen better. More authentic conversations require more from their participants, she contends; we must actively practice virtues like generosity, humility, patience, and diligence in our conversational work for it to be genuinely reciprocal and productive (2019, pp. 278 - 279).
28 John Stuart Mill’s biography stands as a stark example of the value of epistemic humility, and the difficulty in enacting it. Assessing his epistemic blindspot in contrast to his vast reading, his wide range of friends and interlocutors, and his generally careful thinking should stand as a warning for the rest of us with our more meager informational intakes. And yet, the structural features of public speech and debate contain few incentives for public speakers to practice epistemic humility. Institutions can be changed in ways to lower the temperature of public debate. Drezner argues for more endowment income to be directed to nonprofit actors like universities or think thanks to improve their independence, and for investors to commit to more longtermism in their collaborations as opposed to partisan leadership (2017, pp. 241 - 242). But neither of these seems especially likely absent significant public pressure. His recommendations for individuals (to read and listen more, to write with more humility) are of course sensible and welcome, but again scattershot. The fact that these are remarkable rather than usual qualities is illustrated by the fact that Cass Sunstein focused a whole laudatory column in the New York Times to celebrating an intellectual who found value in collaborating with his critics to stress-test his arguments (2024). Sunstein’s repeated urgings of adversarial collaboration remind us that it only works “if [people] act as if they are engaged in a common endeavor,” an enterprise Sunstein thinks is clearly worthy and all too rare.
29 But there are movements to foster dialogue and engagement that are worth amplifying. Many universities in the United States sponsor dialogue sessions or series to engage students in conversations across differences. Social institutions that draw people across demographic differences foment the possibility for substantive social engagement. Our promotion of the value of public debate should also be tempered with attention to its structural weaknesses, and an encouragement for debates to listen quietly to their challengers as much as they broadcast their views.