Dworkin provides an opposing position to Mill’s on the legitimate extent of legal controls. The opposition is not sharp but Dworkin does look for a justification for extending legal controls of behavior to some cases that Mill would not allow. You can find an introduction to the substance of Dworkin’s view in Culver’s introduction to this part of the anthology (see pp. 319-321). Here I will only note that the heart of Dworkin’s view is in section VI of the first paper (pp. 350-356 in Culver) and the focus of our discussion be on that material. Earlier sections in the first paper prepare you for this (in part by giving an account of Mill’s argument and the questions it raises), and the second paper develops these ideas further in light of objections to Dworkin’s views.

One aspect of Dworkin’s discussion of Mill is worth noting in regard to things we’ve been talking about recently. Dworkin expresses surprise at the absolute character of Mill’s harm principle given Mill’s utilitarianism (see section V of the first paper, pp. 347-349). Recall here Rawls’s account of the problems of providing an act-utilitarian justification of absolute prohibitions against punishing the innocent or breaking promises. One alternative might be to see Mill as offering the kind of utilitarian justification of rules rather than individual actions that Rawls proposes in the cases of punishment and promising. But Dworkin suggests instead that Mill might be seen to base his harm principle in part on the idea of an “autonomous agent”—that is, the idea someone who makes his or her own moral choices and acts from his or her own reasons (see pp. 349-350 for this side of Dworkin’s discussion of Mill). Respect for autonomy is one common ground for the approach to ethics that I called “deontological.” One of the formulations of a fundamental deontological principle offered by the 18th century philosopher Kant was an injunction to treat people always as “ends in themselves” and never as means to one’s own ends; and a common interpretation of this principle takes it to imply not only that we shouldn’t use others but also that we shouldn’t substitute our judgment for theirs. It’s this sort of basis that Dworkin tries to use to justify certain exceptions to the harm principle. That is, while it would perhaps be easier to justify exceptions on utilitarian grounds, Dworkin is trying to do so on the basis of just the sort of grounds that might be used to justify an exceptionless harm principle.