PHL 232: What is Freedom? Professor Jason D. Hill Answer any One Question of Your Choice in a double-spaced essay numbering 5 pages. You may write up to 7 pages if you wish. Your essay is due to me via email on Thursday, Fe
PHL 232: What is Freedom?
Professor Jason D. Hill
Answer any One Question of Your Choice in a double-spaced essay numbering 5 pages. You may write up to 7 pages if you wish. Your essay is due to me via email on Thursday, Fe
uary 22, 2024 by noon. Send your Essays via a WORD DOC or Goole DOC to my D2L email: XXXXXXXXXX Please DO NOT send essays as PDF files as I will not be able to make comments inside such documents. Enclosed you should also find an evaluative ru
ic that delineates the criteria for which grades are assigned.
On your essay title page, please indicate which author and question number to which you are responding.
For Tuesday, Fe
uary 20, Read Chapter IV (4) of ON LIBERTY by John Stuart Mill.
1) In "On Liberty," John Stuart Mill defends the view that individual freedom should be protected even when society disapproves of certain actions or opinions. This freedom ought to be protected by law. Mill asserts, however, that it can be regulated by pubic opinion in cases where human actions are not any business of the law. Paradoxically, Mill inveighs against what he calls, social tyranny: the codification of public mores and norms that stifle the individuality and creativity out of the human personality. How does Mill navigate between these two registers: social oppro
ium is necessary to regulate human behavior in places where it is not any of the law’s business; and social oppro
ium if ca
ied too far can crush the individuality and vitality form the human spirit? What is Mill's justification for this principle, and how does he respond to objections to it? To what extent do you agree or disagree with Mill's position, and why? Provide specific examples to support your argument.
2) Do you think that Todd May’s articulation of a meaningful and significant life presupposes a life that is free? This is the one question he seems to take for granted. There have been millions of people who have been enslaved or, lived lives that are deeply compromised by a paucity of freedom, or mobility and a capacity to navigate the world in as equal a manner as people possessed of greater rights, privileges and advantages. What is your position on this topic? Does a meaningful life require a life of some semblance of significant freedom? Think here of Dilsey as described by May in Faulkner’s novel, The Sound and The Fury. Hers was a highly circumscribed life as one lived as a maid who was Black and who worked in the house of a white family at the height of Jim Crow segregation in Mississippi. In spite of what May says, could Dilsey truly live a meaningful life? Give clearly thought-out reasons to support your answers.