Wednesday, October 1, 2014

John Stuart Mill anticipates internet trolls

From On Liberty John Stuart Mill's On Liberty, Chapter IV, “Of the Limits to the Authority of Society over the Individual” paragraph 6. Mill lays out personal attributes that do not rise to the level of criminal law but should be subject to social disapprobation.
Cruelty of disposition; malice and ill-nature; that most anti-social and odious of all passions, envy; dissimulation and insincerity, irascibility on insufficient cause, and resentment disproportioned to the provocation; the love of domineering over others; the desire to engross more than one’s share of advantages (the pleonexia of the Greeks); the pride which derives gratification from the abasement of others; the egotism which thinks self and its concerns more important than everything else, and decides all doubtful questions in its own favour;—these are moral vices, and constitute a bad and odious moral character: unlike the self-regarding faults previously mentioned, which are not properly immoralities, and to whatever pitch they may be carried, do not constitute wickedness.
People with cruel dispositions, irascible, envious, insincere, egotistical, prideful, etc. have always been around. It has taken the internet to bring them out of the shadows and concentrate them in the comments section.


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