Winter 2001
Volume 27, Number 2

Mill does not distinguish consistently in chapter three of On Liberty between two notions of individuality. One is the idea that it is good to be different from other people and the other that it is good to be self-created, to "choose"--as he says--one's own "plan of life." Nor is he always clear that he is defending the position that it is good in itself for us to have played a central role in shaping our selves, in developing our individualities. But I think it is best to read Mill as arguing not just for diversity--being different--but in fact for self-creation, as claiming that such an enterprise is, in itself, a good. For I might choose a plan of life that was, as it happened, very like somebody else's and still not be merely aping them, following them blindly as a model. I wouldn't, then, be contributing to diversity (so, in one sense, I wouldn't be very individual), but I would still be constructing my own--in another sense, individual--plan of life. On Liberty defends freedom from government because only free people can take full command of their own lives.
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I want to raise and respond to two problems associated with this defense of self-chosen individuality. First, it is harder to accept the idea that certain values derive from my choices if those choices themselves are just arbitrary. (That may be why, immediately after proposing this view, Mill introduces the more conventional idea--Matthew Arnold's idea--of cultivating one's higher nature.) Why should the fact that I have laid out my existence mean that it is the best, especially if it is not the best in itself?

Kwame Anthony Appiah is Charles H. Carswell Professor of Afro-American studies and of philosophy at Harvard University and author, with Amy Gutmann, of Color Conscious: The Political Morality of Race (1996). He is also coeditor, with Henry Louis Gates, Jr., of Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African-American Experience (1999).