Mill, paternalism, and slavery
Mill proceeds to defend the nonenforcement of slavery contracts on the ground that this interference with a person's liberty is for the sake of that same person's liberty; respect for liberty does not require that we allow a person to abdicate liberty. This position of Mill's has been taken to be an exception to his well-known opposition to strong paternalism.' Those unwilling to embrace strong paternalism have been forced to seek other justifications for the law's refusal to enforce slavery contracts.2 Without suggesting that these approaches are unsuccessful, I want to suggest that they are unnecessary. They are unnecessary because, as I shall argue, there is no need to justify the refusal to enforce slavery contracts. Under what circumstances is it necessary to justify an action or a governmental policy? Moral justification is necessary only when there is some prima fade objection to the action or policy. Unless there is some prima facie objection, the action or policy is either morally neutral or morally desirable; in those cases no justification is necessary. I shall argue that there is no prima fade objection to the nonenforcement of slavery contracts, and thus that we need neither seek paternalistic justifications nor alternative justifications for such nonenforcement. Mill and, I suspect, others who have sought to justify the refusal to enforce slavery contracts have found the prima fade objection in the assumption that nonenforcement constitutes an interference with the liberty of the would-be slave (henceforth: 'slave'). Accordingly, in the above quotation we find Mill speaking of the 'ground for thus limiting [the slave's] power of voluntarily disposing of his own lot in life.' This,