Self-government — the capacity to form, revise, and implement one's own plan of life — requires both positive and negative conditions.

Though important in its own right, Mill’s defense of freedom of thought and discussion provides the resources for a more general defense of basic liberties of thought and action that Mill offers in the balance of On Liberty. A good human life is one that exercises one’s higher capacities (I 11, 20; III 1–10); a person’s higher capacities include her deliberative capacities, in particular, capacities to form, revise, assess, select, and implement her own plan of life. This kind of self-government