Explainer

Culture

Freedom

Liberalism

20 May 2023

6 min read

On liberty’s limits: why Mill was wrong about freedom

This month, it’s 150 years since philosopher JS Mill died. His definition of freedom remains hugely influential. But is it still the right one for healthy relationships and contentment amid the isolation of modern life?

Graham Tomlin

Graham is the Director of the Centre for Cultural Witness and a former Bishop of Kensington.

A copy of the Statue of Liberty, holding a stick of bread, stands outside a shop window displaying an 'Open 24 Hours' signs.

Photo by KC Welch on Unsplash.

You can tell what a society values by what it goes to war over. In the 17th century we fought our wars over religion. In the 19th it was empire. In the 20th and 21st, we fought our wars over freedom, either defending our own or trying to export our version of it to other parts of the world. We tend, of course, to assume we know what freedom is: the liberty to do what we like, as long as don’t harm other people. But we rarely know how time-conditioned and recent such a view of freedom is.

John Stuart Mill, child prodigy, colonial administrator, Member of Parliament and philosopher, who died 150 years ago this year, is one of the primary architects of our contemporary ideas of freedom. In his own words, his book On Liberty, published in 1859, was an exploration of the ‘nature and limits of the power that can legitimately be exercised by society over the individual’. Mill famously argues that the only valid reason for interfering with another person’s liberty of action is to protect them from physical harm. It is never justifiable to interfere with another person’s freedom to ensure their happiness, wisdom or well-being, because that is to determine what that person’s well-being is. Freedom is defined as liberty of conscience, thought, feeling and opinion, as ‘liberty of tastes and pursuits … doing as we like … without impediment from our fellow creatures, so long as what we do does not harm them’.

For Mill... individual liberty is vital, not just for the sake of the individual, but for the sake of human progress.

Mill is one of the great champions of nonconformity in thought and action. Even if just one person held a particular opinion while everyone else in the world held the opposite, there would be no justification in silencing that one voice. For Mill, one of the main ingredients of social progress is freedom from the traditions and customs imposed by others, both the past constraints of tradition, and the present ones of custom, which restrict the cultivation of individuality, which in turn ‘is one of the leading essentials of well-being’. Individual liberty is vital, not just for the sake of the individual, but for the sake of human progress. Without it there will be no originality or genius, no new discoveries or innovation. Civilisation cannot advance without individual freedom which encourages spontaneous expression, the development of new thoughts and ideas unconstrained by the patterns of the past.

It is a powerful argument. On Liberty is full of the fear of Victorian conformity – the individualist’s reaction to a stifling society with a high degree of social control. It is very much a book of its time, assuming the cultural superiority of the modern age. It also breathes an elitism that looks down on the mediocrity of what it calls ‘average men’.

But more than that, there is, I think, a deeper flaw in this way of thinking about freedom. If freedom is essentially my liberty to say or do what I like, as long as I don’t tread on the toes of my neighbour, then what does that do to my relationship with my neighbour? He or she becomes at best a limitation, or at worst a threat to my freedom. There may be all kinds of things I want to do – play music loud on a summer’s night, or drive my car at 100 mph on a quiet suburban road – but I can’t because I might disturb my neighbour’s peace or risk crashing into an oncoming bus. Or even worse, my neighbour might want to play her music too loud for me, or drive her car too fast in my direction, thus invading my personal space. This approach keeps the peace between us, but at the cost of making us see each other either as irritating limitations to our desires which of course define our self-chosen goals in life, or threats to our own precious autonomy.

The German sociologist Hartmut Rosa argues that

“the ethical imperative that guides modern subjects is not a particular or substantive definition of the good life, but the aspiration to acquire the resources necessary or helpful for leading one.”

In other words, in the individualised world imagined by Mill, we are all left to dream our own dreams, choose our own ambitions, and are all caught up in the fight to get hold of the money, rights, friends, looks, health, and knowledge that will enable us to get to our self-chosen destination. It therefore makes us competitors with each other, not only seeing each other as rivals in this race for resources, but also as potential threats who might stand in the way of our freedom to pursue our dreams.

There is however another, older view of freedom, rooted more in character and virtue than in individualised personal goals. This version, found in classical literature, sees liberty not as freedom from the limitations and social expectations that stop us following our self-chosen desires, but freedom from the passions. The Greeks viewed the soul as like a ship which should sail serenely towards the harbour of such virtues as prudence, courage and temperance. It was guided on this journey by paideia, or education in virtue, yet was at the same time buffeted by the winds of irrational and destructive impulses such as envy, anger or lust that threaten to blow it off course. For them, our passionate inner desires are not the sacrosanct moral guide to our true selves but are a distraction from the true path of virtue.

True liberty is freedom from anything that would stop us becoming the person we were created to be.

This version was developed further by Christian thinkers such as St Paul, St Augustine and Thomas Aquinas. For them, true liberty is freedom from anything that would stop us becoming the person we were created to be: someone capable of love for what is not ourselves – for God and our neighbour. True liberty is freedom from internal urges such as the greed, laziness or pride that turn us in upon ourselves rather than outwards towards God and each other. It is also freedom from external forces such as the grinding poverty that dangles the temptation to steal in order to survive, or an economy that constantly tells us that if you don’t acquire as much stuff as your neighbour you are a failure. It is not so much freedom for ourselves, but freedom from ourselves: freedom from self-centred desires, or the crippling self-absorption that makes us think only of our own interests. It is freedom to create the kind of society where we are more concerned with our neighbours’ wellbeing than our own.

In this view of freedom, my neighbour becomes not a limitation or a threat, but a gift – someone without whom I cannot become someone capable of the primary virtue of love. Putting it bluntly, if I am to become someone capable of other-centred love, I need someone to practice on.

This Christian understanding of freedom offers a vision of society where you might begin to trust other people to look after your own needs, because they are looking out for yours. It is also a vision of freedom that delivers personal happiness better than the libertarian view. Becoming the kind of person who has learnt, as St Paul once put it, to ‘look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others’ is in fact a recipe for healthy relationships and contentment rather than the increasing isolation of much modern life.

Mill may have had a point in the stifling conservatism of Victorian Britain, but in an age of increasing loneliness, isolation and anxiety, his view of freedom doesn’t help build good neighbourhoods, families or communities. We need a better version - one that brings us together, rather than drives us apart.

Essay

Culture

Film & TV

Monsters

Politics

1 October 2025

13 min read

In an age of nihilism it's time to revisit The Dark Knight

Batman, the Joker, and the disaffected

J.W. Olson

J.W. is a lecturer in the Study of Religions at the University of Oxford.

The Joker and Batman sit opposite each other in an interrogation room.

Warner Bros.

Christopher Nolan’s groundbreaking film The Dark Knight (2008), the second installment of his Batman trilogy, was a summer blockbuster that changed the superhero genre forever. Nolan’s gritty, realistic depiction of the Caped Crusader, played by a stoical Christian Bale, pushed back against the then nascent resurgence of comic-book cinema. Nolan resisted flashy computer-generated fight scenes and digitized superpowers in favor of psychological thrills intensified by cinematic restraint. The film’s combined financial and critical success empowered Nolan to become the preeminent big-budget auteur of Hollywood, going on to make such mind-benders as Inception (2010) and Interstellar (2014) and resurrecting the summer movie-going craze with the psychological biopic Oppenheimer (2023).

The Dark Knight changed the way the superhero genre was perceived not only because of its realism and cinematic skill, but also—perhaps principally—because of the late Heath Ledger’s performance as the Joker, Batman’s premier antagonist and the main villain of the film. Ledger’s Joker was mythologized even before the film’s release, as the actor’s untimely death from a drug overdose in January 2008 was almost immediately credited by the media to the intensity of having inhabited the Joker’s personality. Of more lasting importance, Ledger’s Joker in many ways marked the first serious consideration of moral and political nihilism for a large audience. The villain put on the page by Nolan and brought to life by Ledger (in a posthumously Academy Award-winning performance) was at turns disturbing in its philosophical coherence and alluring in the authenticity with which the Joker lived his principles. Batman was the unambiguous “good guy,” but the Joker captivated the audience’s imagination. I can remember being a high schooler the year after the film’s release, and at every sporting event or dance party there were dozens of Joker faces in the crowd, with the signature white makeup and lipsticked smile. Never before had insanity been so attractive. For those of us raised in the suburban optimism of the 1990s, this was the first time that nihilism had become cool.

In the wake of recent surges in political nihilism, though, ranging from online incel culture to a flurry of successful and attempted political assassinations to the January 6 capitol riots, it is perhaps worth revisiting the ideas considered by The Dark Knight nearly two decades after its release. Ours is a disaffected age, marked by despair at institutional incompetence and corruption on the one hand and a desire for a radical overhaul of justice on the other. As is often remarked, the predominant demographic of contemporary performative nihilism is millennial and Gen Z men, many of whom would have been old enough to see The Dark Knight in theaters but young enough to be profoundly impressionable to its ideas. It is not unreasonable to believe that the film acted as a foundational, if perhaps unconscious, philosophical education for whole generations coming of age in a cynical environment. Revisiting The Dark Knight today thus offers a potential lens on the sociopolitical challenges we face and the available philosophical and theological responses to them.

Part of the Joker’s appeal comes from the audience’s upfront endorsement of extrajudicial justice. No one enjoys a superhero flick unless they are willing to suspend the state’s monopoly on righteous violence, at least for the duration of the film. The romance of the genre comes from getting to vicariously live the hero’s superseding of the limits of legality, which is legitimated by their superior sense of justice. We are meant to envy Batman’s vigilantism: even when the authorities come after him, he is always too crafty, too physically fit, and too technologically advanced for the bumbling police to handle. This contempt for the law is then assuaged for us by a vision of justice that actually effects the change for which we long. The vigilante movie depends on ends that clearly justify the means.

Philosophical Joker

Released in the summer of 2008, The Dark Knight would have spoken to a generation of youth raised on the cynicism of post-9/11 society and distrust of authority resulting from the interminable war in Iraq. Even as the film was entering theaters, the global financial crash was well underway, even if the majority of the public was as yet unaware of it, spurred on by government deregulation in favor of too-big-to-fail banks and their dubious financial exploitation of the middle class. The resulting economic downturn, amplified for millennials by ballooning student loan debt and the ineffectiveness of university degrees as a stepping-stone to quality employment, would in turn have elevated Batman’s appeal in the years after the film’s release. Unlike other superheroes whose power resides in abilities we can never possess, Batman’s fully human limitations and resourcefulness uniquely channel our anger into seemingly plausible solutions. (The film seems to recognize this, as a theme early on in the movie is Batman’s struggle to control less skilled copycats of his vigilante style.) Batman sanitizes our thirst for vengeance under the aegis of a higher justice.

The effectiveness of the Joker as a philosophical villain, then, comes from the incisiveness with which he accurately diagnoses the inconsistencies in Batman’s arrangement with the law. In an early scene, the Joker attempts to make inroads with the mobsters of Gotham City. When their accountant flees to Hong Kong because it is beyond the jurisdiction of district attorney Harvey Dent, the Joker responds, “Batman has no jurisdiction. He’ll find him and make him squeal.” That Batman then predictably follows through on the Joker’s prediction—kidnapping the accountant with some spectacular escape artistry—is apparently no cause for the audience to question whether the Joker might be onto something.

The Joker’s philosophy in many ways articulates Batman’s actions better than Batman’s own worldview. Batman wants to inspire the public to justice. But what he is in fact doing is undermining the legitimacy of the institutions charged with enforcing justice, implicitly endorsing anarchism as a necessary response to official corruption. Of course, the Joker doesn’t malign Batman for his contempt of corruption but only for his hypocrisy. In what amounts to his philosophical manifesto, toward the end of the film the Joker explains his worldview to a newly scarred and traumatized Dent, attempting to lure him into his orbit:

They’re schemers. Schemers trying to control their little worlds. I’m not a schemer. I try to show the schemers how pathetic they’re attempts to control things really are… It’s the schemers that put you where you are. You were a schemer. You had plans. And look where that got you…

You know what I’ve noticed? Nobody panics when things go ‘according to plan.’ Even if the plan is horrifying. If tomorrow I tell the press that, like, a gang-banger will get shot or a truckload of soldiers will be blown up, nobody panics. Because it’s all ‘part of the plan.’ But when I say that one little, old mayor will die, then everyone loses their minds! Introduce a little anarchy. Upset the established order, and everything becomes chaos. I’m an agent of chaos. Oh, and you know the thing about chaos? It’s fear.

The Joker’s worldview, in a nutshell, is that evil is baked into the state’s attempts at control. No matter how hard they try, official authorities (governments, police, even churches) will never be able to enact real justice but only a mediocre shade of it. The compensation they provide is little more than a narrative to justify our collective misery and, if we’re lucky, a series of spectacles to distract us from our malaise.

Ahead of the curve

The Joker is in many ways a firm believer in existential freedom. Despite his apparent flippancy, he is the most serious character in the film, completely committed to his philosophy. The laughter and joy with which he carries out his heinous crimes is as much evidence of the ecstasies of genuine freedom as it is an indication of psychological disturbance. Contrary to the views of some, the Joker of Nolan and Ledger is not mentally ill. He is completely rational. He knows the human capacity for transcendence and finds civilization wanting as a vehicle for true human flourishing. He recognizes that we all know this to some extent, and he further recognizes that our primary motivation for denying our freedom is fear and convenience.

During what is probably the film’s philosophical climax, Batman conducts an extrajudicial interrogation of the Joker. In a profound twist, it is the Joker who is the more rational of the two characters in this scene, accurately diagnosing the unacknowledged dark side of Batman’s ideology while the ostensibly self-disciplined hero spirals into ever more erratic violence. Derisively comparing Batman to official law enforcement, often maligned throughout the film as variously corrupt or incompetent, the Joker says:

Don’t talk like one of them—you’re not, even if you’d like to be. To them you’re just a freak. Like me. They need you right now. But when they don’t, they’ll cast you out like a leper. See, their morals, their code: it’s a bad joke. Dropped at the first sign of trouble. They’re only as good as the world allows them to be. I’ll show you. When the chips are down, these ‘civilized’ people, they’ll eat each other. See, I’m not a monster. I’m just ahead of the curve.

In one fell swoop, the Joker has indicted both Batman and the establishment. If we side with the government, then we accept hypocrisy and ineffectiveness as the cost of a milquetoast justice. A grown adult fighting crime in a mask is freakish and absurd, nothing more than fantastical escapism. It is better to fall in line and get over your ideals. But if we instead take the side of Batman, then we have already cleared the greatest hurdle to embracing the Joker’s monstrosity.

The righteous Batman

Batman’s justice is derived from his single principle not to kill. He is constrained by neither ideological mercy nor legal precedent but only his own conscience. Yet as the Joker points out, once a vigilante has decided that their own justice is sufficient to discard the law, there is little to stop them from forsaking rules altogether: “The only sensible way to live in this world is without rules. And tonight you’re gonna break your one rule.” Batman understandably becomes more violent as the dialogue continues, exposing the dark side of his extralegal sense of justice. Pummeling the Joker in the interrogation room, Batman becomes a villain in his own right, enacting the Joker’s plan to perfection. The Joker wants Batman to kill him, if only because then the Joker’s triumph will be complete. One thinks here of Obi-Wan’s statement to Darth Vader in Star Wars (1977): “If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.” Or the final scene in V for Vendetta (2005): “Behind this mask there is an idea. And ideas are bulletproof.” The Joker’s philosophy is not proved by the superiority of his own strength but by his ability to lure even the most righteous figures into the abyss. Once stated, his diagnosis becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. In his own words at the film’s finale, “Madness, as you know, is like gravity. All it takes is a little push.” From the first time he donned the mask, Batman had entered the realm of nihilism. The Joker is simply pointing this out and trying to get him to follow through to vigilantism’s natural conclusion.

In his ideological war with Batman, the Joker’s final trick is consequently to turn Gotham City into a madhouse. If the general public caves to fear and begins to tear itself apart, then the Joker’s assessment of human nature will be proved correct. In the film, Batman is justified, first by the civilians and prisoners who collectively choose not to blow up each other’s boats with the Joker’s explosives (perhaps more out of cowardice than idealism) and then by his decision to personally take the blame for Harvey Dent’s murderous rampage in order to preserve Dent’s inspiring figure for the public. Whether or not these constitute real victories is debatable, but the film ends by willing us to believe that Batman’s worldview is not inconceivable for average folks like us. In an obviously Christlike swap, Batman is so righteous that he is even willing to take the consequences of the corrupted sinner on himself in order to redeem both the sinner and the public who needs him as their hero.

But with the contemporary proliferation of illiberal ideology, the dissemination of myriad conspiracy theories, and the surge in political violence in the years since The Dark Knight’s release, we may have cause to reassess the outcome of this ideological battle. Has Batman or the Joker more accurately grasped the modern public’s psyche? Is it the Joker or the film’s optimistic finale that is spinning a fantasy?

Jesus and The Joker

From the Christian perspective, the question is nuanced but not necessarily answered. The Jesus of the gospels is by turns vigilantist, nihilistic, and neither. He is at some moments indifferent to the state—as when he endorses paying taxes to Caesar while unambiguously discounting money as having any real value—and at other times openly hostile, as when he challenges King Herod as a schemer in the mode of the Joker’s own critique. He self-consciously transcends the law without abolishing it. The entire Sermon on the Mount endorses a view of justice that goes beyond what could ever be meted out by law or reasonably enforced by institutions. Jesus is even willing to engage in some raging guerilla theatre to expose corrupt institutional authorities, and he frequently lambasts legalist hypocrites for preaching an ideology inconsistent with their practice.

If I had to stake my own interpretation, I would aver that the Jesus portrayed in the New Testament is closer to the Joker’s nihilism than to Batman’s vigilantism, both in his own behavior and the model he endorses for others. Of course, Jesus’ pacifism differs immensely from the murderous Joker. The Joker wants to make a point through the expense of human life. For Jesus, abundant human life is itself the point. Jesus forgives his persecutors from the cross and condemns violence as a response to injustice. But what Jesus and the Joker both fundamentally agree upon is the inadequacy of institutional channels for true justice. Batman might agree in principle, but his view of justice is plagued by internal contradictions: He abandons the law while seeking to uphold it; he forsakes legal constraint while encoding justice in specific principles.

What the Joker gets right from the Christian perspective, even if he never says so, is that genuine flourishing is incompatible with legal framing. Spontaneity, play, and delight are essential to human freedom. The Joker exemplifies this, even if his joy is perversely tethered to violence. What the Joker desires is evil, but he effectively illustrates how law devoid of desire cannot amount to justice.

For Jesus, true justice consistently comes down to love, which is nothing if not rooted in desire. The only motivation to turn the other cheek, pray for your enemies, or give all your possessions to the poor is because you truly desire to do so. Such extreme acts of charity are absurd by the standards of the social contract. Transcending social and legal expectations can have no motivation other than desire. Gratuity, in the sense of both an unmerited gift and ridiculous excess, is the defining feature of Jesus’ ethic. This comes through most profoundly in Jesus’ metaphors for the Kingdom of God: a weed that grows like crazy, a pound of yeast in fifty pounds of flour, an economy where everyone gets paid the same regardless of merit. We need to remember that Jesus attracted the kind of followers who walked off good-paying jobs and abandoned their boats on a whim. The Joker has just the right amount of insanity to be a Christian, even if he misses the key ingredient of love.

This sketch of a classic film and the character of Jesus is not enough to provide a coherent ethical program. But that is precisely not the point. The attempt to narrowly codify justice is what Jesus and the Joker both call out for hypocrisy, and it’s the thing that sends Batman spiraling through contradictions. If we are to properly respond to the nihilism that surrounds us online and in our politics today, then we first need to appreciate the credibility of the nihilistic diagnosis of contemporary life. This does not mean conceding to the despair that leads to hatred and violence. If anything, the life and teachings of Jesus illustrate something akin to a post-nihilistic doctrine of love. Just as resurrection requires death, so answering nihilism might require passing through it rather than ignoring its existence. Like Batman, Jesus insists that true justice is realizable for all of us. Like the Joker, though, Jesus understands that this requires a leap into the absurd. We cannot love until we can play, when we burst the bounds of cultural norms and the status quo. We will be truly just only when we find the freedom to go beyond what is required and chart a new frontier, when we learn to jump out of the boat and wager our sanity on the absurd.

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