reduction of art to something that in shunning retinal flutters really does
not signify anything terribly relevant to human experience? To explore a
response to these questions, I now turn to Mill’s views on liberty, for
some of the problems facing the individual as she tries to achieve a
flourishing human life are similar, or so I would like to suggest, to the
problems facing the future of art.
- An Aesthetic Harm Principle?
J.S. Mill’s essay, On Liberty, is a celebration of human creativity and
individuality in all of its manifestations. The essay is basically an elab-
oration of what has become known as the harm principle: human beings
should be free to do what they choose, orchestrating their life projects as
they see fit, so long as they are not harming others.^31 Mill is careful to
respect human choice in all of its manifestations: foolish choices are no
less choices, because they are foolish; the brilliant scientist and the
couch potato are both individuals exercising the same freedom, their
right to choose a path in life. Just as a bad work of art is still a work of
art, so is the life of liberty used foolishly still a life of liberty. Bad
choices must be allowed in Mill’s liberal society, but not thebad choice
that makes all future choice impossible. For example, no human being
can choose to become a slave, because the condition of slavery harms
human liberty to such an extent that it destroys freedom and makes any
future choices impossible. As Mill puts it:
[A]n engagement by which a person should sell himself, or allow himself to
be sold as a slave, would be null and void; neither enforced by law nor by
opinion. The ground for thus limiting his power of voluntarily disposing of
his own lot in life, is apparent, and is very clearly seen in this extreme case.
The reason for not interfering, unless for the sake of others, with a person’s
voluntary acts, is consideration for his liberty. His voluntary choice is evi-
dence that what he so chooses is desirable, or at the least endurable, to him,
and his good is on the whole best provided by allowing him to take his own
means of pursuing it. But by selling himself for a slave, he abdicates his lib-
erty; he foregoes any future use of it beyond that single act.... The princi-
ple of freedom cannot require that he should be free not to be free. It is not
freedom to be allowed to alienate his freedom.^32In this passage, Mill identifies a case of the exercise of liberty which
alienates freedom itself and thus negates the principle of freedom, and
he goes on to clearly caution us that there are cases in which individual
freedom cannot be the sole guide for an individual’s choices: freedom
The Humanizing Function of Art 87