Great illiberals of the past - Locke and Mill

Stephen Tall has added his name to the list of those who think that David Davis can't possibly be a liberal because of his support for the death penalty.

I was amused to see that a commenter on Stephen's piece points out that one of the prominent supporters of the death penalty was none other than John Locke, who opined:

Man being born, as has been proved, with a title to perfect freedom and an uncontrolled enjoyment of all the rights and privileges of the law of Nature, equally with any other man, or number of men in the world, hath by nature a power not only to preserve his property - that is, his life, liberty, and estate, against the injuries and attempts of other men, but to judge of and punish the breaches of that law in others, as he is persuaded the offence deserves, even with death itself, in crimes where the heinousness of the fact, in his opinion, requires it. 

Chris Dillow, a man who is never likely to be mistaken for a Tory, has also posted at length on this subject and, rather amusingly for me, calls in his support none other than John Stuart Mill, who apparently said:

I defend this [the death] penalty, when confined to atrocious cases, on the very ground on which it is commonly attacked-on that of humanity to the criminal; as beyond comparison the least cruel mode in which it is possible adequately to deter from the crime…What comparison can there really be, in point of severity, between consigning a man to the short pang of a rapid death, and immuring him in a living tomb, there to linger out what may be a long life in the hardest and most monotonous toil, without any of its alleviations or rewards--debarred from all pleasant sights and sounds, and cut off from all earthly hope, except a slight mitigation of bodily restraint, or a small improvement of diet?

As I've said in an earlier posting, many people seem to mistake "views commonly held by liberals" with liberalism itself. All these Liberals are going to have to explain to me how a the holding of a view that was shared by the two greatest philosophers of the liberal movement can be diagnostic of not being a liberal at all.

Comments

[Tristan Mills]

Personally I don't think DD is that liberal, but then again I think that of many LibDems.
The think which matters is he's on the right side on the civil liberties front.

As for liberals supporting the death penaly, I recently made a post quoting Benjamin Tucker lamenting Gladstone's government supporting it (after most of them had opposed it when in opposition).

[Devil's Kitchen]

<i>"... and immuring him in a living tomb, there to linger out what may be a long life in the hardest and most monotonous toil..."</i>

Ah, well there it falls down, you see; they've got Playstations and Human Rights now...

DK

[Kit]

I see no contradiction in liberals supporting the death penalty - quite the opposite in fact. I think the problem is that our legal system is now distant from us and inseparable from the "State".

[stephen rouse]

The answer is found, perhaps surprising, in Thomas Hobbes, often incorrectly seen as an authoritarian.
Hobbes argues that we all enter a contract with the state, or Leviathan. We give up certain freedoms in return for protection against our "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short" existence in the State of Nature. The Leviathan can take as many or as few freedoms as it pleases, leaving us free to act in those areas on which it is silent.(This is the basis of the essentially English concept of negative freedom which endured for 300 years until Blair, with his notions of "good citizenship" and "responsibilities", signed us up for the European Human Rights Act. But that's another story.)
According to Hobbes however, the one freedom which Leviathan may not take is our right to life. Once the state threatens to kill me, I am no better off than I would have been in the State of Nature. The guarantee to protect me is over, the contract with Leviathan breaks down, and the state is therefore no longer sovereign over me.
If your concern is property, by all means quote Locke. If your concern is freedom, read Hobbes.

[DocBud]

I think Hobbes is quite rightly considered to be authoritarian. His basic premise was that people give up certain freedoms in return for protection from the state (seems reminiscent of Gordon Brown's arguments for various allegedly security measures). He saw the state as distinct from society, not a part of it. To Hobbes, the state was the bestower of rights, not the people the bestower of governing power.

On the death penalty, it is possible for even great philosophers to be wrong. I am opposed to it, primarily intuitively but I do believe that it is fundamentally wrong for the state to cold bloodedly take life. I don't believe in using arguments to do with deterrence or execution of innocent people as that implies that if one were satisfied on these counts one would change one's opinion.

Nevertheless, I respect anyone's right to disagree with me and fully support DD's stance. He did not, afterall, resign in order to bring attention to his beliefs on the death penalty, he did so to highlight the undermining of civil liberties in the UK, and on that issue I agree with him. The real point is that DD is the only game in town, it could be a long wait for another one.

[Bishop Hill]

DocBud

That's interesting. It seems very much as if we are living in that Hobbesian world. We have no death penalty and our political masters are removing from us any rights they feel we can do without. Liberal it ain't.

[Passer By]

to understand DD, and what I would call conservative liberalism, you might like a stab at this.

Kant and Liberal Internationalism: Sovereignty, Justice, and Global Reform
http://www.amazon.com/Kant-Liberal-Internationalism-Sovereignty-Justice/dp/0312296177

Its is ofter said, Hume is father of modern conservativism, but more and more it is Kant.

Kant would be anti-Eu (see his essay perpetual peace), pro liberal civil society, would not be a neocon but would certainly kick the hell our of Saddam at the first opportunity.

[stephen rouse]

DocBud, you're quite right. Hobbes did draw a healthy distinction between society and the state. He called it Liberty.

"For seeing there is no Commonwealth in the world wherein there be rules enough set down for the regulating of all the actions and words of men (as being a thing impossible): it followeth necessarily that in all kinds of actions, by the laws pretermitted, men have the liberty of doing what their own reasons shall suggest for the most profitable to themselves."

If you see no distinction between society and state, presumably you're more with Rousseau, who saw the state as the collective embodiment of our true natures. Unfortunately, this led to all kinds of attempts to create Commonwealths with "rules enough set down for the regulating of all the actions and words of men." This took us down some rather dark alleyways during the 20th Century but, hey, Tony Blair's with you so it can't be all bad.

Hobbes' state (and, to be fair, that of old property-loving Locke) is a regrettable, mechanical necessity for delivering certain basic goods. Rousseau's (and that of old property-hating Marx) is a Romantic ideal in which we conform to the will of our higher, nobler selves. Read Isaiah Berlin's Two Concepts of Liberty and work out where the true freedom lies.

[DocBud]

Hobbes believed that we need the state to protect us from each other, such was his low opinion of humans in their 'natural state'. I find it strange that someone who thought all humans to be naturally selfish would suggest that the best way of tackling the conflicts arising from this selfishness was for everyone to vest all power in the hands of one individual. This individual was then to have absolute discretion in choosing what liberties were to be curtailed, was not to be questioned and was not subject to the laws he or she enacted. Most people would regard that as hoping for a benevolent dictatorship.

I think most peope believe that the state should be a division of society, run by people elected by and accountable to the rest of society. The state apparatus is not there to protect everyone from everyone else (just a few criminal types), but to carry out those functions that people cannot perform as individuals. For my part, I believe the state should be as small as possible and make as few laws as possible, carefully weighing up the supposed benefits of a proposed law against its infringement of liberty and likelihood of success.

I think it is patently clear that the government of Tony Blair contradicted almost all, if not all, of the preceding paragraph. In particular, he had a very unhealthy belief in his ability to know what was best for everyone, having utter disdain for the electorate. This has lead to the UK becoming a society in which people are subjects of the state, not citizens of the country.