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On Doing What One Wants To Do
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2020
Extract
Liberalism, as currently manifest in the permissive, consumer society powerfully invokes the principle that, questions of harm aside, human beings ought to be able to do what they want to do; and, by implication, not be coerced into doing what they do not want to do. Liberty, defined in terms of want satisfaction, all wants being taken at par, and used by the more extreme adherents of liberalism as a necessary and even sufficient condition for the good life, is said to be increased or diminished with greater or decreasing opportunities for the satisfaction of wants: every want, given its rightful due, a success story.
As an adjunct to this first principle comes another, also of great political importance; namely, that it is for the subject of the want to say what his wants are, he being, logically speaking, in an impregnable position to identify these shy denizens of his mental world.
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- Copyright © The Authors 1975
References
1 Brian Barry (Political Argument, p. 136), distinguishing private from publicly orientated wants (which he, I think rightly argues are not properly speaking wants at all), writes that privately orientated wants “have a certain automatic claim to satisfaction.“
2 These, with social utility as an additional support, are stressed by Mill in Chapter 3 of On Liberty.
3 See Margaret MacDonald ‘Natural Rights', Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 1947/48.
4 It is conceivable, though barely, that a dominant elite might attempt to perpetuate a social pattern, training a massive but submissive army of ‘conditioners' geared to programming on a mind-boggling scale for a permanent slave class. Mill's warnings (Representative Government, Chapter 3; On Liberty, Chapter 5) of the vulnerability of such a society to cultural/economic backsliding are, I believe, more than merely pious; such a society, if it could be mounted, would be peculiarly liable to total collapse. But Mill's primary moral objection to such societies would be, as is Marcuse's objection to contemporary capitalist-consumer societies, that it constitues an offence against the autonomy of the individual.
5 As Rousseau said in the Social Contract “The nature of things does not madden us, only ill-will does.“
6 For this point I have long been indebted to Professor Dan Taylor.
7 A similar point is made by Professor Hart, Concept of the Law, Chapter 9.
8 Chekhov (Early Stories)in ‘Sergeant Prishibeyev’ precisely illustrates this point.
9 Mill (Utilitarianism, p. 50 Everyman Edition)’ … but security no human being can possibly do without; on it we depend for all our immunity from evil and for the whole value of all and every good, beyond the passing moment; since nothing but the gratification of the instant could be of any worth to us if we could be deprived of anything the next instant by whoever was momentarily stronger than ourselves.“
10 Intention, p. 70.