On Liberty

What Hacker News says

1. Gareth321Sep 2026
   I'll use a very specific example to explain my point, because I don't disagree with what you write: psychopaths. Psychopaths are 20x more prevalent among homicide offenders. Removing them from society would significantly reduce the number of homicides. It would make their friends and family sad, but this is a much smaller aggregate impact than a homicide.

   This also illustrates the messy nature of comparing social good and bad. Who am I to argue that the aggregate sadness created by removing a psychopath from society is better than a homicide? Maybe the person murdered was disliked by everyone and had no friends?

   I remain resolute in my premise, however, and there is a lot of theory on the issues of aggregate social good vs individualism. John Stuart Mill's On Liberty (1859) is an excellent foundation for this. This is a subjective problem to solve, meaning that the balance between individual freedom and aggregate wellbeing is different for everyone. An AI overlord would make decisions every day which individuals would disagree with, at least at the margins.

   Show morethread
2. egberts1Sep 2026
   One only need to brush up on John Stuart Mill and his "On Liberty (1859).

   He wrote about individual liberty (before SCOTUS Chief Warren and Brandeis branded the word "privacy" in their 1890 "Rights to Privacy".

   He should have been one of the Founding Fathers.

   thread
3. Joel_MckayFeb 2026
   Even today, people still discuss Carl Sagan and his Astronomy 490 course structure:

   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Pc3IuVNuO0

   The articles posted UFO cult study reference is part of the reading list. =3

   "On Liberty" (John Stuart Mill, 1859)

   https://gutenberg.org/files/34901/34901-h/34901-h.htm

   "Memoirs of extraordinary popular delusions and the madness of crowds" (Charles Mackay, 1852)

   https://www.gutenberg.org/files/24518/24518-h/24518-h.htm

   "The Evolution of Cooperation" (Robert Axelrod, )

   https://ee.stanford.edu/~hellman/Breakthrough/book/pdfs/axel...

   Show morethread
4. n4r9Jul 2025
   There's a great John Stuart Mill quotation from On Liberty related to this. In the UK it used to be the case that you were barred from testifying in court if you declared yourself an atheist.

   > Under pretence that atheists must be liars, it admits the testimony of all atheists who are willing to lie, and rejects only those who brave the obloquy of publicly confessing a detested creed rather than affirm a falsehood.

   thread
5. eykoMay 2025
   John Stuart Mill's essay "On Liberty"[1] offered one of the most comprehensive defences of free speech (that is as relevant today as it was then).

   You do raise a good point re: tradeoffs in a healthy society. Mill anticipated this objection and addressed it directly. He didn't advocate for free speech without consequences but developed a harm principle specifically to establish what limits are acceptable. Acceptable limits on thought and speech should be based on demonstrable harm, rather than alleged offence, discomfort, or the current popular opinion or cultural disapproval.

   He recognises the need to set some limits, yet also the dangers of who gets to set them. Historically, those with power to restrict speech have restricted truth as falsehood. The bar for restrictions should be very high, not because free speech should be absolute, but because the dangers of overzealous restrictions far outweigh the cost of permitting speech we might personally find objectionable. Even completely false opinions might have their value as they force defenders of truth to better articulate their position or reasoning, and prevents beliefs from becoming prejudiced, or platitudes.

   I thought I'd share since it's relevant and there may be some younger readers here that might not have come across his work. I really recommend reading it, even if it's an LLM summary as an introduction (as seems to be the trend nowadays)

   Edited to fix a few typos (typing from mobile)

   1. https://www.econlib.org/library/Mill/mlLbty.html#book-reader

   Show morethread
6. tenwz1Apr 2025
   My friend, I like you, and I like this place too. Most people on HN are very friendly. I understand your sadness. But please don't feel sad for me. I once read a book called On Liberty when I was a freshman in high school. I also read 1984 and The Road to Serfdom (stereotyped, some people may think that such books are banned from sale in China). At that time, I began to realize that our country restricted the freedom of citizens in some aspects. Later, I asked our university teacher, and she said that freedom is always relative, but I still don't quite understand this sentence. But there is one thing I can understand, that there is always a gap between real freedom and ideal freedom. For example, are your people really free? The words can be said very beautifully, but practice is often another matter. If you look at the development process of capitalist countries, have they also sacrificed the freedom of some people? I remember that your people flocked to RedNote a while ago, saying that the lower-class Americans worked several jobs to maintain the high rent. I was actually a little surprised, because in the past, such things would only be associated with our country. Are they free? Maybe I am making a choice between economy and freedom, but freedom is indeed not an independent concept. It is complex and related to many factors. So I simply don’t think about it. It is enough for me to work hard, improve myself, improve my life and create value.
   Show morethread