Anti-Climacus

WELL: So Andreas' lecture today was on J.S. Mill's On Liberty, #2 on my list of political theory books I'd like to make disappear (behind only Democracy in America), and he covered at some length Mill's theory of why freedom to dissent was crucial. Our big danger within modern democratic societies is the potentially coercive effects of majoritarian opinion (a silly notion on its own, if you at all take seriously individuals as moral agents). Mill talks about three different scenarios, all of which are supposed to show us that having free, unfettered debate is better than letting majorities dictate acceptable opinion:

1. the majority is wrong and some minority is right--only through dialogue with the minority can the majority reach the right opinion.
2. The majority is partially right, and some minority is partially right--through dialogue with each other, they can all come to have the right view.
3. the majority is right and the minority is wrong--obviously, this would be a paradigmatic case of dialogue being counterproductive, so Mill defends it here for two reasons: so the majority doesn't seem insecure, and so the majority doesn't seem dogmatic.

Obviously, my first question for Andreas was whether or not the majority could be right, be in dialogue with a wrong minority, and come out of that process with the wrong belief (through rhetorical strength of the minority, or something similar). Answer: no, because people will recognize superior reasons for one particular belief. You can think this is wrong on several levels: either it's hopelessly naive, in that it thinks that people with bad beliefs can never sway those with good ones; you can think it's descriptively wrong, in that it assumes people's reasons for coming to their beliefs are essentially rationalistic (I, for one, don't buy into this); or you might find it odd that people can work their way to having wrong beliefs (as some people must) through, presumably, rationalistic processes, but not be convinced into having wrong beliefs (which begs the question about where wrong beliefs come from in the first place).

And then again, you might find it odd that Mill's system presupposes the very centrifugal force he finds so repellent in previous political theory: it's bad that the majority uses its views to block out competitors, but everyone, according to Mill, is just waiting to have someone who has the right arguments come along and change their minds: everyone ends up in the 'right' camp in that case, as much as Rousseau (or someone similar) thinks they could be there as things are.