In Namibia, as in many other parts of Africa, customary law continues to play an important role for ordinary people, by setting the framework of behaviour that the law expects of them and, in return, what protections they can expect from the law. This role is today increasingly under challenge from the growing importance of constitutional law.

How long can we accept the fact that what is needed for running water, schools, hospitals, and food enough for all humanity is a sum that corresponds to the amount spent by wealthy Western countries on perfume in a year? This is not a question of human rights and morality. It is a question of the fundamental battle for equality of all people, against the law of profit, whether personal or national.

Long before self-awareness, memory, foresight and powers of conscious deliberation emerge to give an advantage over those creatures that lack those things, there is a more promising alternative to consciousness at every step of the way: more efficient unconscious mechanisms, which seem equally or more likely to be thrown up by spontaneous variation. If you had to undertake something really difficult – for example growing in utero a brain with all its connexions in place – consciousness is the last thing you would want to oversee the task.

The simple principle of individual liberty evidently does identify particular rights as rights which ought to be recognised and enforced by the laws and customs of every civil society, namely, the rights of self-regarding liberty and individuality. If sex between consenting adults is purely self-regarding conduct under some conditions, for instance, then adults should have a right to spontaneously engage in sex under those conditions if they wish.

One hundred and fifty years is not really such a long time; and the world Mill inhabited, if not exactly our own, is the one from which our own has developed. His is our predecessor culture, and the similarities between then and now are such that we may easily overlook the differences which also exist.

Dialogue, unconstrained truth-seeking discussion, is nothing but the social expression of free thought. Given the distortions and manipulations to which free thought is subject, only continued full exposure to free discussion can give us continued rational warrant for our beliefs. Socially possessed truth and disinterested, rational qualities of mind among citizens are public goods.

Mill’s vision of a good, autonomous life demanded a great deal of personal energy. One of the more telling charges that Mill levelled at Christian morality, at least in its existing form, was that its ideal was “passive rather than active”, more concerned with “Abstinence from Evil, rather than energetic Pursuit of the Good”.

On Liberty celebrates a collaborative theory of knowing exemplified in the way Harriet and John worked together. They believed fervently in the power of individuals struggling together to grasp the truth – including both the “idealistic” belief that there is truth as opposed to mere subjective opinion, and a deep scepticism about the beliefs accepted by the majority.

Brian Barry believed liberals should not follow Mill in appealing to the value of autonomy in order to justify liberal rights. Barry believed the basic liberal aim was to find social and political institutions that could be justified to citizens who held differing views about the good life as a fair way of adjudicating between these citizens’ conflicting interests and conceptions of the good.

Ministers’ problem was not confusion, but dogma. They reduced the debate on the relationship between state and individual to a simple matrix in which you could be either a naïve libertarian who worried only about individual rights or a responsible citizen ever on the alert for threats. For me, and others like me, that was one of the most dispiriting aspects of the age.

A modern Stoic might say the fact that the universe has kept things going for billions of years suggests that we should pay more attention to its workings as we organise our life. We should definitely not let our feelings overtake us and cause us to lose sight of how well things can work out. Even when they don’t seem to work out, as when the Watchmen fail to stop Ozymandias from saving the world, the universe seems to correct for it.