Mill's Point example essay topic

Imagine going through life not questioning anything that anyone tells you. Anything that is said to be true you would just agree with and not question the statement for yourself. Imagine how blindly you would go through life not finding anything out for yourself. A good example of this is something that just happened to me today. I have always been told that the population of the United States is 240 million and I have been told that for the longest time, even recently within the last month. I was always under this assumption and never questioned it.

In my sociology class, my teacher told me that it is now 260 million and has been for quite some time. I took it upon myself to look up the census information on the Internet and found out that indeed, the population is 260 million. Without ever questioning the "truth" about the population, I never would have obtained the real truth. John Stuart Mill illustrates this point in his book, On Liberty and I will discuss how he makes these certain points. Mill claims that we may not interfere with a person's liberty unless her or his acting freely will bring harm to others. In addition, he claims that the root cause for most of our errors in action and thought is "the fatal tendency of mankind to leave off thinking about a thing when it is no longer doubtful".

This statement is part of Mill's initial argument promoting total freedom of both thought and discussion. The statement "You get what you put in", is a statement that may further illustrate Mill's point. If someone just hears this statement, he / she would not get the same feeling from it as someone who has put a lot of time and effort into something and received many benefits from it. Many times these experiences are not pleasant, rather, they are considered painful. Not only is it observing other people experiences, it is experiencing them for yourself and finding out the real truth. Judging by these experiences, the goal is to help us act on them in an educated manner in the future.

Thus, if we want to avoid having problems and encountering bad experiences, we should be able to discuss all opinions. Mill anticipates any objections to his claim and tries to resolve them. He suspects that they will say that if his position must be true, then it must also be true that that no opinion is true unless someone disagrees. Of course, this makes no sense because the issue of agreement / disagreement has no relationship to the validity of the statement (41).

Mill also states less clearly, that we should fear a collection of true opinions, which is crazy because no one should fear the truth. Mill does answer these questions simply saying that the more and more opinions that are obtained inevitably. When all these valid opinions are gathered, it is not necessarily true that all the consequences of them will be good. The opinions that are not beneficial build up to a point we tend to stop thinking about the fact that we do not doubt anymore (42). In order to believe a given point, Mill says, that the given and the opposing arguments should be acknowledged and should both be proven, either right or wrong (43). This type of questioning should be taught at a young age so throughout life, people strive to question all that they know and find the real "truth.".