e, that if we are sure we are right, it is straightway
our business to make the person whom we think wrong smart for his error.
And in the same way such disapproval would be much more impressive to
the person whom it affected. If it was justified, he would be like a
froward child who is always less effectively reformed--if reformable at
all--by angry chidings and passionate punishments than by the sight of a
cool and austere displeasure which lets him persist in his frowardness
if he chooses.

The second weak point in the doctrine lies in the extreme vagueness of
the terms, protective and self-regarding. The practical difficulty
begins with the definition of these terms. Can any opinion, or any
serious part of conduct, be looked upon as truly and exclusively
self-regarding? This central ingredient in the discussion seems
insufficiently laboured in the essay on Liberty. Yet it is here more
than anywhere else that controversy is needed to clear up what is in
just as much need of elucidation, whatever view we may take of the
inherent virtue of freedom--whether we look on freedom as a mere
negation, or as one of the most powerful positive conditions of
attaining the highest kind of human excellence.

To some persons the analysis of conduct, on which the whole doctrine of
liberty rests, seems metaphysical and arbitrary. They are reluctant to
admit there are any self-regarding acts at all. This reluctance implies
a perfectly tenable proposition, a proposition which has been maintained
by nearly all religious bodies in the world's history in their
non-latitudinarian stages. To distinguish the self-regarding from the
other parts of conduct, strikes them not only as unscientific, but as
morally and socially mischievous. They insist that there is a social as
well as a personal element in every human act, though in very different
proportions. There is no gain, they contend, and there may be much harm,
in trying to mark off actions, in which the personal element decisively
preponderates, from actions of another sort. Mr. Mill did so distinguish
actions, nor was his distinction either metaphysical or arbitrary in its
source. As a matter of observation, and for the practical purposes of
morality, there are kinds of action whose consequences do not go beyond
the doer of them. No doubt, you may say that by engaging in these kinds
in any given moment, the doer is neglecting the actions in which the
social element preponderates, and t