Mill, Liberty and freedom of speech

[sawyl]

Instead of hauling my lazy ass down to Plymouth for my philosophy tutorial today, I spent my day hitting John Stuart Mill's On Liberty and I was reminded what a brilliant and relevant work it is. Here's Mill on free speech:

No one pretends that actions should be as free as opinions. On the contrary, even opinions lose their immunity, when the circumstances in which they are expressed are such as to constitute their expression a positive instigation to some mischievous act. An opinion that corn-dealers are starvers of the poor, or that private property is robbery, ought to be unmolested when simply circulated through the press, but may justly incur punishment when delivered orally to an excited mob assembled before the house of a corn-dealer, or when handed about among the same mob in the form of a placard. Acts of whatever kind, which, without justifiable cause, do harm to others, may be, and in the more important cases absolutely require to be, controlled by the unfavorable sentiments, and, when needful, by the active interference of mankind. The liberty of the individual must be thus far limited; he must not make himself a nuisance to other people.

Exactly. It's like the current row about the anti-Islamic cartoons: many of the newspapers who gleefully published them knew full well that they would cause offence and would trigger harmful consequences, but they went ahead and published them anyway despite the lack of a justifiable cause. Not so much a demonstration of their unswerving support of free speech as a demonstration of their lack of judgement.