Humanities Core: Winter 2007

Outline 3

I. THE PROGRAM

II. J.S. Mill, the influential 19thC British political philosopher:

a. You are in the best position to make decisions about what makes your life go best.

III. Right of sovereignty: you have a right to decide, without the interference of others. Specifically, others have a moral duty not to intervene, even if you what you decide is wrong or mistaken or not in your own best interest.

a. Against paternalism: because your judgment is good enough, you have a right to decide for yourself.

b. There are conditions attached.

IV. Countries

i. Colonial rule as a kind of intervention which colonized populations had a right of sovereignty to be free from.

ii. Cases of genocide, mass murder, ethnic cleansing, or gross oppression.

V. What are the conditions? Why think a society should have a right of sovereignty at all?

a. Respect for people

b. Welfarism: respecting rights of sovereignty as a way of promoting the general welfare.

VI. International relations

a. “Civilized” nations

i. Intervention only under two conditions:

1. “protracted civil war” (p. 133)

2. Counter-intervention (p. 135)

b. “barbarians”: subjection likely to be beneficial (p. 131).

VII. Does Mill fully appreciate the implications of his welfarism? Might it mean that colonialism is itself intervention of a wrongful kind?

a. If “barbarous” nations are to be conquered, it is only because it is for their own good.

b. Beveridge’s “rule of liberty” (p. 83)

i. Filipinos aren’t capable of self-government

1. Individually?

2. Collectively? Mill agrees (p. 131).

c. Lowell: the “art of self-government” (p. 94).

i. Why stop at the “barbarians”?

ii. Mill: “civilized” societies are almost always better left to work out their own salvation.

VIII. To Mill: Why be so sure that intervention in “barbarian” societies is such a good idea?

a. a broad empirical generalization: a claim about how the world tends to work in certain general respects.

i. If colonialism tends not to work out very well in promoting human welfare—if its benefits are outweighed by its many human costs—then Mill’s account implies that colonized peoples did indeed have rights of sovereignty.

b. Did colonialism work?

IX. Doctrine of “tough love” (p. 134.).

a. Intervention likely to be self-defeating: any freedom it creates is unlikely to last.

i. “the feelings and the virtues needful for maintaining freedom.”

ii. Only by an “arduous struggle”

iii. Progress: revolution without intervention.

b. No fundamental, principled objection against workable intervention.