About a month ago, I received a small donation for the translation of Eric Mack. It’s not that I was in a great rush with this translation, but I didn’t want to completely ignore the fact that someone felt it was important to encourage the process a bit. So here is a fresh chapter, the penultimate one in the part dedicated to the philosophical prerequisites for the emergence of libertarianism. The translation took some effort: John Stuart Mill wrote quite convolutedly.
The chapter is dedicated to utilitarian arguments in favor of freedom—in other words, attempts to justify its necessity not only by so-called natural rights (which is not a justification at all, but a simple postulate, as if there is such a right, and that’s that), but also by social utility. Of course, with the transition to methodological subjectivism, straightforward reasoning about the common good began to look somewhat like an anachronism, though not entirely, which surprised me a little. In essence, in his utilitarian arguments, from which any totalitarian doctrine can be easily derived if desired, Mill arrives at our old acquaintance, self-ownership, the primacy of individual security, and other liberal attributes.
From our current perspective, this, of course, looks like trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. Mill was a priori convinced of the value of individual freedom, and thereafter his task was reduced to selecting arguments as to why it is necessary to ensure the highest common good. Had he been a priori convinced of the value of Sharia norms or the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, he could have constructed arguments in exactly the same way, proving that these very crucial things were needed to achieve the highest common good.
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