Mill, from On Liberty

Paternalism - restricting a person's liberty for his or her 'own good'

Mill's Harm Principle - restricting the liberty of a person is justified only to protect others from harm, never to protect a person from himself or herself.  (The Harm Principle is inappropriate and inapplicable with respect to children and the incompetent.)

    There is only one reason to interfere with the freedom of others, and that is protection of yourself from that person's actions.  There is no right of anyone to prevent harm to the actor himself; a person's own physical or moral good is not enough.  Even if you are convinced that another person will be happier, healthier, or wiser, those things are reasons to attempt to convince the other person that you are right, but they are not good reasons to compel or force the other person to do or think or be anything that he does not want to do or think or be.
    For Mill, over the individual's own body and mind, he and he alone is sovereign.
    Utility is the ultimate appeal in all questions.
 
Liberty's proper domain is:
a.  Consciousness - conscience, though, feeling and opinion in science, morals and religion, expressing and publishing opinions.
b.  Tastes and Pursuits - right to make and work toward a plan of life; right of combination and assembly.
c.  Each person is the guardian of his own health.

3 categories of paternalistic laws:
    1.  promoting morality
    2.  promoting health and safety
    3.  promoting economic welfare

The tyranny of the majority is more insidious than the tyranny of government
 

"Of the Liberty of Thought and Discussion"

Freedom of thought and discussion are security against corrupt or tyrannical governments.

Restricting the ability to read, hear, or disseminate information robs the entire human race:
    1.  If the opinion is right, we are deprived of the right to exchange error for truth
    2.  If the opinion is wrong, we lose the benefit of a clearer apprehension of the truth through its collision with error
            We can never be sure that the censored opinion is actually false or wrong.  It may be true.  To believe otherwise assumes YOUR infallibility.  People assume that their feeling that their opinion is true is the same thing as absolute certainty, and they are not the same.  To assume truth because it has not been refuted is one thing.  To presume truth to avoid contesting it is wrong.
    If an opinion is true, but it is not discussed frequently and fearlessly, it becomes dogma.  The meaning of opinion is forgotten when it is not discussed.  It turns out to be nothing more than rote memorization.
    3.  The more common case is that a censored position contains both truth and falsehood.  We lose the same benefits as in cases 1 and 2.
 

Women are generally kept in a state of perpetual childhood.  For MW, the most important thing is the development of character because "elegance is inferior to virtue."

Women have always been "either a slave or a despot, . . . and each of these situations equally retards the progress of reason."

There is an odd view of "respect for women" - men expect women to be weak.  Men pride themselves on paying "this arbitrary insolent respect to the sex, with the most scrupulous exactness, and are most inclined to tyrannize over, and despise, the very weakness they cherish."

Men bow to women - and isn't this odd?  If women are inferior to men, isn't it "condescension to bow to an inferior"?  "So ludicrous, in fact, do these ceremonies appear to me, that I scarcely am able to govern my muscles when I see a man start with eager and serious solicitude to life a handkerchief or shut a door, when the lady could have done it herself, had she only moved a pace or two."

Novels, music, poetry - these things tend to make women creatures of sensation.  This "relaxes" the powersof the mind and "prevents intellect from attaining that sovereignty which it ought to attain to render a rational creature useful to others and content with its own station. . . ."

Women are assumed not only to want to remain innocent and fragile, they are also expected to do so.  To remain innocent is to remain in a state of childhood; to remain fragile is to be forced to look up to a man for every comfort.  Trifling dangers (a mouse or a rat would be terribly scary) they can't handle.  "In the name of reason, and even common sense, what can save such beings from contempt, even though they be soft and fair? . . ."

Strength of body and mind are reuqired of men and of women.  Inferior reason will not enable a woman to perform any duty properly.
 

Some comments on feminist ethics, social and political theory:

Feminist theory and ethics is not:
a.  a priority of women's interests over all others
b.  exclusive focus on women's issues
c.  accepting women as moral experts
d.  substituting female for male values

Reference to the work of Gilligan on different "moral voices"

Prisoners' Dilemma games are boys' games.  Are these involved in family/caring relationships?

Perhaps if there were a distinctive moral theory of women, it would be an ethic of love....  "Women moral theorists, if any, will have this very great advantage over the men whose theories theirs supplant, that they can stand on the shoulders of men moral theorists, as no man has yet been able to stand on the shoulders of any woman moral theorist.  There can be advantages, as well as handicaps, in being latecomers.  So women theorists will need to connect their ethics of love with what has been the men theorists' preoccupation, namely obligation."

Trust brings obligation and love together.

"Trutsting enforcers with the use of force is the most problematic form of trust involved."

"Undoubtedly some important part of morality does depend in part on a system of threats and bribes, at least for its survival in difficult conditions when normal goodwill and normally virtuous dispositions may be insufficient ot motivate the conduct required for the preservation and justice of the moral network of relationships.  But equally undoubtedly life will be nasty, emotionally poor, and worse than brutish (even if longer), if that is all morality is, or even if that coercive structure of morality is regarded as the backbone, rather than as an available crutch, should the main support fail."

Nurturing relationships may be the paradigm of all human association.  Perhaps it is not the case that the contractual model of many traditional views of ethical theory are not paradigmatic at all.

The private versus the public domain.

Reason = male strength - active, determinate, form
Emotion = female weakness - passive, inferior, matter

Public and Private Distinction:

Citizen - creates government/Woman - reproduces life
Warrior - protects society/Woman - natural needs for food and shelter
Philosopher, artist - overcomes morality
Obligation/Love
Individual Rights/Individual Interests
Avoiding Harm/Doing Good
Penalizing Offenders/Rewarding
"Male" virtues/"Female" virtues - love, kindness, nurturing, care
The Market/The Home
Public/Private
Valued/De-valued
Rational/Emotional
Contractual/Natural
Distinctively Human/Animal-like

Note Aristotle's view of the family and household and Hobbes's view of the state of nature and the role of women and mothers in it.  Note Rousseau's claim that women's education ought to be primarily to teach them how to please men and how to submit.  Notice that Kant claims that women are incapable of full morality and "lose their charm" when they exhibit rationality.

To call everyone "rational" won't fix the problem.  "The promptings of the heart" are moral, too.

Women's experience is not contractual experience.
    Human beings become social through their experience with those who are nurturers.  Nurturing behavior creates human culture, it is not antithetical to it.
    The traditional view is that mothering is a simple matter of reproducing human beings.  It is not simply that - it creates human beings.

    Many traditional theories are built on the notion of "rational economic man" - but connections between people then become nothing more than instrumental relationships, relationships of using and being used.

    Many of the problems of ethics are presented as problems of "self and other" - as competitive relationships.  But this ignores family and friendship relationships that ARE A CENTRAL ELEMENT OF THE HUMAN EXPERIENCE.

    When we see the economic model, the model of morality that pits one person against another, we see that "when the relationship between 'mother' and child is as it should be, the caretaker does not care for the child (nor the child for the caretaker) because of universal moral rules.  The love and concern one feels for the child already motivate much of what one does."
    But care alone is not enough - there is also need for understanding and applying equalitya and obligation.

    "The call for an ethic of care may be a call, which I share, for a more pluralistic view of ethics, recognizing that we need a division of moral labor employing different moral approaches for different domains, at least for the time being."

    "To the extent that moral theory takes natural male tendencies into account, it would at least be reasonable to take natural female tendencies into account."