For Mill, happiness is the absence of pain. In terms of governance, social pain comes by way of social tyranny, which is produced by the issuance of "wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with which [society] ought not to meddle."[footnoteRef:4] Mill speaks of propriety with the same reverence as Tocqueville inherently holds for natural and moral law. He warned that individuals need to be protected "against the tendency of society to impose, by other means than civil penalties, its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent from them."[footnoteRef:5] Finding the limit of "legitimate interference of collective opinion with individual independence" was a matter that society must consider "as indispensable to a good condition of human affairs."[footnoteRef:6] That limit, today, is less clear than it was in Mill's own time. [3: J. S. Mill, On Liberty, chapter 2, para 2. https://www.utilitarianism.com/mill2.htm] [4: J. S. Mill, On Liberty, introduction, para 5. http://www.bartleby.com/130/1.html] [5: J. S. Mill, On Liberty, introduction, para 5. http://www.bartleby.com/130/1.html] [6: J. S. Mill, On Liberty, introduction, para 5. http://www.bartleby.com/130/1.html]
The reason it is less clear is that the modern conception of democracy is less clear, just as the modern conception of goodness, rightness, correctness, truth, and virtue are less clear.[footnoteRef:7] Lickona argues that there is "no consensus" as to what character education even means or what it should consist of. Meanwhile, education curriculum is constructed by a group at a centralized level of power (individuals appointed by the President). Democracy has little to do with how various aspects of society are situated. As Kolodny notes, "an alternative form of rule, where social decisions would be made by an unchosen class, whether defined by birth, or virtue, or training, is not so much as seriously contemplated"[footnoteRef:8] -- and yet it is precisely what exists in today's so-called democractic societies. In fact, the inverse of what Mill and Tocqueville feared has come true: personal liberty (to a degree) is guaranteed (one may choose one's gender, one's sexual preferences, one's method of becoming an indentured servant) -- but one has very little choice as to who will govern (a two party system that so often resembles a one party system does not provide much choice, after all). Jones notes that this is the modern trade-off: personal liberty (typically sexual) for totalitarian control (political submission).[footnoteRef:9] By enshrining liberty in 1791, the West yielded up its liberty: in other words, liberty is not a foundation upon which one builds, but rather an outcome that is yielded from adherence to truth, rightness and order, as Plato indicated -- and what Mill and Tocqueville each in their own ways…
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