John Stuart Mill's Freedom Of Speech

In a time where Freedom of Speech has caused many controversial debates, it has become essential to understand the value of this freedom in our society. Although Freedom of Speech certainly comes with its downsides, it plays a necessary function to humans in nature as well as our government because it allows for moral comparisons and subjectivity. “Whatever can be proved to be good, must be so by being shown to be as a means to something admitted to be good without proof”, (Mill p.3). Here Mill begins to introduce the root cause for utilitarianism, which he depicts in this section as the ideology to follow whatever action benefits the majority. He does so by supporting the notion that disagreement and scrutiny between moral beliefs allows

This argument is often made because in theory we could be the individual who faces silencing of our belief if it is intended to harm others. Although this argument may seem sound at first, if we further examine utilitarianism we can recognize that the harm principle states that the goal is never to infringe on one 's individual freedom as long as it doesn 't harm others. This idea is ultimately still in favor of supporting individual’s beliefs because its very purpose is to benefit the vast majority who may be affected by harmful speech.

As expressed, Freedom of Speech is vital towards maintaining a healthy society because of its ability to contrast opposing beliefs and find moral truths. Not only does this principle aid in supporting the individual mentally, but as a society it encourages new ideas that lead to innovation. Finally, Freedom of Speech prevents the state from gaining to much power. Without citizens having the right to certain moral beliefs the government could potentially censor its population in order to gain complete power within the