Our society faces a lot of challenges despite living in such a liberal world. We like to limit the activities we are not okay with or don’t understand, so in terms we label them as wrong or even outlaw them. We don’t like to experiment new ways of life, because we are often too comfortable living in our own shell of what is good and what is not. Anything outside of it is considered to be erroneous. John Stuart Mill stresses on the issue of conscience and individuality. Mill’s theory is that society should be free of any constraints; we should allow different opinions and experiments of living in order for man to be true to his nature. Society must facilitate and provide these alternatives of living in order for society to be vibrant and flourish.
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Mill would say he can be a drunk and he can be a gambler but he cannot be a father at least not all at once. If he is a father than he must perform his fatherly duties and nothing less than that. Experimenting in life should be the main concern in everyone’s mind, however, the majority of people are considered to be average and practice the norms. Mill writes, “But the evil is, that individual spontaneity is hardly recognized by the common modes of thinking, as having any intrinsic worth, or deserving any regard on his on account” (Mill, 65). In other words, people who are average cannot think outside the box and are headstrong that their way of life and thinking is the appropriate and ideal way, furthermore, they consider that to be good enough for everyone else. As a solution to that, Mill simply suggests that individuality should be the preeminent goal because it is fundamental to the development of the self. To illustrate this we can take the example of someone being gay and the considerable amount of people who still feel pretty uneasy with same sex marriage. Society makes laws to avoid the things they don’t understand, but what regrettably happens is those laws interfere in the wrong place.
Mill would say he can be a drunk and he can be a gambler but he cannot be a father at least not all at once. If he is a father than he must perform his fatherly duties and nothing less than that. Experimenting in life should be the main concern in everyone’s mind, however, the majority of people are considered to be average and practice the norms. Mill writes, “But the evil is, that individual spontaneity is hardly recognized by the common modes of thinking, as having any intrinsic worth, or deserving any regard on his on account” (Mill, 65). In other words, people who are average cannot think outside the box and are headstrong that their way of life and thinking is the appropriate and ideal way, furthermore, they consider that to be good enough for everyone else. As a solution to that, Mill simply suggests that individuality should be the preeminent goal because it is fundamental to the development of the self. To illustrate this we can take the example of someone being gay and the considerable amount of people who still feel pretty uneasy with same sex marriage. Society makes laws to avoid the things they don’t understand, but what regrettably happens is those laws interfere in the wrong place.