Democracy Dies in Darkness

MONKEY CAGE

Was slavery a ‘necessary

evil’? Here’s what John Stuart
Mill would say.
Mill’s lesson: The winners in unjust systems always want the oppressed to assume
their fate was inevitable.
Analysis by David Lay Williams
July 30, 2020 at 7:45 a.m. EDT

Over this past weekend, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) introduced a bill that would prevent federal education funds
from being spent on a curriculum drawn from the New York Times’ “1619 Project.” The project defines its
mission as “aim[ing] to reframe the country’s history by placing the consequences of slavery and the
contributions of black Americans at the very center of our national narrative.” Cotton has implied that the Times
project exaggerates and overemphasizes what he called “the necessary evil upon which the union was built,” as
he said the United States’ Founding Fathers viewed it.

Was slavery indeed a “necessary evil?” One can certainly argue that the Northern Founders at the Constitutional
Convention reluctantly agreed to allow slavery to persist, since the Southern states were unlikely to join the
republic otherwise. But Cotton specifies that slavery was a “necessary evil” precisely because it helped build the
United States into the nation it is today. To be sure, in doing so, he distances himself from former vice president
John C. Calhoun, who held that slavery was not a “necessary evil” but a “positive good.” Cotton clearly states that
he is pleased that American chattel slavery died long ago. But he also clearly states that he thinks this country
was only made possible by importing non-consenting persons into forced and uncompensated labor, with all the
attending horrors.

Here’s what John Stuart Mill had to say about necessary and unnecessary evils

The 19th-century English political philosopher John Stuart Mill gave some thought to the concept of “necessary
evils.” Mill was no fan of slavery. As he wrote in his lengthy “Principles of Political Economy,” “It is almost
superfluous to observe, that this institution can have no place in any society even pretending to be founded on
justice, or on fellowship between human creatures.” He even criticizes it on economic terms, as did Adam Smith,
as an especially inefficient mode of labor.
In his posthumously published “Chapters on Socialism,” Mill examined the viability of economic systems built
on private property. Here he confronts the question of “necessary evils,” while considering early industrialism’s
economic inequality combined with the British laboring class’s growing discontent and growing political power.
As he wrote:

[A] few are born to great riches, and many to a penury, made only more grating by contrast.
No longer enslaved or made dependent by force of law, the great majority are so by force of
poverty; they are still chained to a place, to an occupation, and to conformity with the will of
an employer, and debarred by the accident of birth both from the enjoyments, and from the
mental and moral advantages, which others inherit without exertion and independently of
desert.
— John Stuart Mill, Chapters on Socialism

Mill describes the debilitating conditions of the English working class and the starkness of their fate contrasted
with the prosperous class as “an evil equal to almost any of those against which mankind have hitherto
struggled.” He then asks the crucial question, “Is it a necessary evil?”

Mill recognized that the wealthy class desperately wanted the working class to assume that their fate, which their
children would surely inherit, was absolutely necessary, almost a natural law — and, in fact, told them it was so.
He added, “But it was also said that slavery, that despotism, that all the privileges of oligarchy were necessary.”

Mill’s lesson here is that the winners in unjust systems always want the oppressed to assume their fate was
inevitable. The wealthy want to treat the “necessary evil” as unchangeable — as unchangeable as the laws of
physics. Therefore, the working class, the poor and other oppressed individuals should never question their
preordained suffering.

Mill rejected the idea that brutal inequality is “necessary”

Interestingly, Karl Marx — a very different kind of political philosopher — largely accepted the oppressors’ logic
that oppression was an inevitable fact of history, at least until history itself could be overturned via revolution.
For Marx, feudalism’s and industrial capitalism’s injustices, while deeply disturbing, were effectively “necessary
evils” that ultimately led to true justice and equality. But Mill rejected the idea of such economic and social
“necessities.” He asserted that such issues as production, slavery and the distribution of wealth are not the same
as physical laws of nature; rather, they are “human institutions” that can be altered by the human will.
Inequality, slavery and despotism, he wrote, are “a matter of human institution solely. The things once there,
mankind, individually or collectively, can do with them as they like.” In other words, there is nothing “necessary”
about injustice.

Cotton has elsewhere suggested that “Socialism may begin with the best of intentions, but it always ends with the
Gestapo,” while voting in support of a significant tax break for America’s most prosperous citizens. He has
questioned whether systemic inequalities and injustices actually exist. If Mill’s arguments are persuasive — that
the powerful want to justify existing but oppressive systems as “necessary evils” — then we might question the
motives of anyone who has benefited from systems built on racial and economic inequalities. Denying other
voices the ability to help narrate history might push Mill to suspect that “those who have gained the prizes” have
no interest in examining or changing the system that delivered those prizes in the first place.
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David Lay Williams is professor of political science at DePaul University, and is writing a book on economic
inequality in the history of political thought for Princeton University Press.

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