A Strong Emphasis on Individual Freedom

This Aristotelian conception of the break up or aim of life requires freedom and a come up of situations to Mill. Above all, however, the soul must be free in the ut nigh to pursue his personal happiness in intercourse to society and state. A legitimate state will name checks on the human tendency for self-serving behavior, but the rudimentary principle of this freedom's existence is that individuals should not pursue self-interests at the write down of others: "The strongest of all arguments against the deputisence of the public with purely personal conduct, is that when it does interfere, the betting odds atomic number 18 that it interferes wrongly, and in the wrong place. On questions of social morality, or duty to others" (Mill 102).

Mill asserts in On Liberty that individual freedom is inviolable, "In the part which merely concerns himself, his independence is, of right, inviolable" ("John" 1). scorn his belief in the absolute dis speckle of the right of individual liberty, Mill does maintain that there are certain instances in which the legitimate state passel interfere with this right. One of these times pertains to pr blushting injury or pain to others. In Mill's theory of utility, the guiding principle of utility is to achieve by and through one's actions the greatest good for the greatest numbers of people. For example, we might intervene to rob a potential Adolph Hitler or, more recently, Sad

There is little question that Marx' analysis successfully counters and provides an adequate and convincing alternative to Mill's liberal understanding of freedom. The most legitimate states and go'ernments in the Western world still tap labor as the basis for national economy and maintaining the stance quo with respect to ownership of the means of production and class position and power. Yet despite his belief that capitalist economy was doomed because of its temper to alienate and exploit, Marx did not think that this historical stage of developing toward true freedom was anomalous or deviance.

As Sullivan (1) suggests, "It is grave to point out that Marx did not view capitalism as an aberration in society's growing toward true freedom, but as a necessary historical stage in that evolution." Without the limits on freedom being excessive, no such revolution promoting evolution might come about.

In other words, Marx believed that social infrastructure, capitalism in our contemporary world, imparts beliefs and values. In this way, history is a "class struggle" to Marx, one wherein one group has advantage over the other in ways that oppress individual freedom: "freeman and slave, patrician and plebian, lord and serf?in a word, oppressor and oppressed," (Rayment, p. 1). Different classes form and maintain values and beliefs that typically favour their own class and oppress the liberties or freedoms of other classes. We can see this in Hindu society or even modern America, where the values and beliefs of white, wealth Protestants still dominate through social institutions. As Marx believed, "The entire class creates and forms them out of its hooey foundations and out of the corresponding social relations," (Sabine and Thorston, p. 696). In this view, there is no consideration of the greatest happiness for the greatest number or the utility promoted by Mill's liberal view of individual freedom.

Despite Mill's liberal views of individual freedom, Mar
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