Week 4: More Mill

Hi guys, welcome back! Your comments last week were super interesting and I hope to incorporate your thoughts and ideas within my project going forward. As for this week, I spent most of time continuing to read through On Liberty, attempting to understand the complex principles and arguments that Mill brings up throughout the book. Last week, I focused heavily on chapter 2, so to keep it more consistent, I'll go through the basic ideas that Mill brings up in chapters 1 and 3.
Chapter 1 serves as Mill's overall introduction to the book and his overall argument, pretty straight forward. First, he states that the focus of his book is on civil liberties, as seen in my explanation of chapter 2 last week. He goes into what he believes the word "liberty" actually means, and he uses the definition that ancient Greece and Rome used, and that is protection from the tyranny of governments and rulers. He talks about how to avoid this issue, and the main solution to it is by allowing for as many civil liberties as possible without the possibility of them harming others within a society. So as long as other individuals' liberties are protected, then you are free to carry out your own liberties. He then concludes the chapter by separating liberty into three general areas, the liberty of individual thought and opinion, the liberty of personal pursuit, and the liberty to unite with other consenting individuals.
In Chapter 3, Mill distinguishes between actions and opinions. Although opinions may not be as limited in a society, for they are not directly harmful to others in most cases, actions can be, and should be limited, such as with murder, an obvious example. He also places a very large role on individuality, for many of the societies of his time were trending towards conformist ideals. He believes society can learn from individual spontaneity.
A lot of these concepts can be analogous to the topic of knowledge. For example, we could postulate that knowledge is acceptable so long as it does not do harm onto others, or how what we could deem as "lesser" forms of knowledge is something actually worth learning from and could turn out to be more valuable than we originally thought.
Anyways, that's all for this week! I can't wait to read your thoughts in the comments!