John Stuart Mill

Moral, Social, and Political Thought

Dale E. Miller

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780745625843, 9780745625836
• eBook ISBN: 9780745654782
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

This book offers a clear and highly readable introduction to the ethical and social-political philosophy of John Stuart Mill.

Dale E. Miller argues for a "utopian" reading of Mill's utilitarianism. He analyses Mill's views on happiness and goes on to show the practical, social and political implications that can be drawn from his utilitarianism, especially in relation to the construction of morality, individual freedom, democratic reform, and economic organization. By highlighting the utopian thinking which lies at the heart of Mill's theories, Miller shows that rather than allowing for well-being for the few, Mill believed that a society must do everything in its power to see to it that each individual can enjoy a genuinely happy life if the happiness of its members is to be maximized. Miller provides a cogent and careful account of the main arguments offered by Mill, considers the critical responses to his work, and assesses its legacy for contemporary philosophy.

Lucidly and persuasively written, this book will be a valuable resource for students and scholars seeking to understand the continued importance of Mill's thinking.

Part I: Foundations of Mill’s Moral, Social and Political Thought

1

A Singular Life

The story of Mill’s life is not only engaging in its own right but throws considerable light on his work. It helps us to understand both the influences that shaped him as a thinker and the milieu to which he is responding.

Early years

Mill was born in London on 20 May 1806. He was the first child of James and Harriet Mill. James was a Scot who had been trained for the Presbyterian ministry but chose to pursue a career as a writer instead. Harriet was the daughter of a widow who kept a mental asylum.¹

Young John Mill was a prodigy. He was educated at home by James, who expected John from an early age to apply himself to learning with the same intensity and seriousness with which an industrious adult might apply himself to earning a living. While James wrote, John studied next to him, and when James broke off from writing John demonstrated to him what he had learned. The method produced its intended results, at least initially: at age three, John began to read Greek; at age eight, he was reading Herodotus and Xenophon in Greek and beginning to learn Latin; by age twelve, he had learned ‘elementary geometry and algebra thoroughly, the differential calculus and other portions of the higher mathematics far from thoroughly’.²

Mill never experienced what most people would regard as a real childhood. While he had a number of younger siblings, to some of whom he was made a teacher himself, he was never given the opportunity to play with children of his own age. He may never have kicked or thrown a ball in his life. While he was not literally working constantly, he chose to spend his leisure time with more books. For fun, he wrote digests of histories, including a history of Rome, one of Holland and then a ‘history of the Roman government, compiled from Livy and Dionysius ’.³

Philosophical radicalism

James Mill had a specific ambition for his eldest son. This was for John to become the champion of a reformist political view that James Mill shared with his friend the philosopher Jeremy Bentham. This view came to be known as ‘philosophical radicalism’.

The philosophical component of philosophical radicalism is the theory known as ‘utilitarianism’. Utilitarianism will be discussed in detail in later chapters, but in a sentence it might be crudely described as the view that what it is right for us to do depends upon how we can most effectively promote happiness, and not just the happiness of the person who is to act or of some limited group but everyone’s happiness. By itself, utilitarianism gives no specific guidance about what should or should not be done in a given set of circumstances. It gives this sort of guidance only when it is combined with factual propositions about how happiness or well-being can best be promoted.

Philosophical radicalism, of which James Mill and Bentham were the intellectual leaders, combines the abstract utilitarian philosophy with a particular set of ‘radical’ beliefs about what social and political arrangements are most conducive to happiness. Victorian society was divided into three rather distinct social classes: an ‘aristocracy’ that owned much of the country’s agricultural land and that included both the true aristocrats – peers of the realm who owned the largest landed estates and who sat in the House of Lords – and the ‘squires’ and ‘gentlemen’ of the lesser gentry; a commercial middle class that included everyone from wealthy capitalists to shopkeepers to civil servants; and the vast working or labouring class, whose members ranged from skilled workers to manual labourers to unemployed paupers.⁴ Oversimplifying greatly, one might say that in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries the interests of the aristocracy were generally represented in Parliament by the Tory party and those of the commercial class by the Whigs. The workers could not vote – indeed, the existence of property qualifications on voting disenfranchised even much of the middle class – and so their interests were unrepresented except where they overlapped with the interests of another class. What the philosophical radicals aimed to do was to minimize the influence of special interests – or ‘sinister interests’, in Bentham’s memorable phrase – on the government and establish a greater harmony between the interests of the rulers and those of the general public. This involved giving the working class the vote, via secret ballot. It involved eliminating artificial restrictions on trade that were imposed in order to benefit particular classes, such as the hated ‘Corn Laws’, in effect from 1815–46, which inhibited the importation of grain and thus enriched domestic landowners. And it also entailed rationalizing the legal system.

Mental crisis

James Mill intended for John Stuart Mill to become the leader of the next generation of radicals. Given this, John’s first encounter with Bentham’s utilitarianism came surprisingly late in life, by his precocious standards. He was already fifteen before his father put a copy of the Traité de Législation in his hands, a volume of Bentham’s work in French edited by Pierre Dumont. The experience was transformative: ‘When I laid down the last volume of the Traité, I had become a different being. … I now had opinions; a creed, a doctrine, a philosophy; in one among the best senses of the word, a religion. … ’⁵

James Mill’s project seemed to be proceeding on schedule, but something was soon to happen that would, if not derail it entirely, at least prevent it from reaching fruition in quite the way that he intended. In 1826, the year of his twentieth birthday, John Mill’s life bore many of the outward marks of happiness. He had, for nearly the first time in his life, friends his own age. He had fora in which he could advance his Benthamite views: his articles and reviews were appearing in opinion journals, especially the Radical organ The Westminster Review, and he was acquiring a reputation as a speaker in the London Debating Society that he had helped to found. He even had the prospect of a promising career. In 1818, James Mill had published a three-volume work on the history of British rule in India. A year after this work’s appearance, he was hired in the Examiner’s Office of the East India Company, which was charged with drafting the instructions sent to company officials in India. As he was promoted to increasingly higher positions within the company, he was able to secure John a clerk’s position in the same office. First father and then son would eventually rise to the position of Chief Examiner.⁶

Happiness, however, had begun to elude John. In a chapter in his Autobiography titled ‘A Crisis in My Mental History’, he relates how, in the fall of 1826, he found himself sinking into a state of (what we would now call) depression. When already suffering from a ‘dull state of nerves, … unsusceptible to enjoyment or pleasurable excitement’, he asked himself one day if it would give him any happiness if the Radical political programme that he had been working to advance was adopted in its entirety: ‘And an irrepressible self-consciousness distinctly answered, “No!” At this my heart sank within me: the whole foundation on which my life was constructed fell down. … I seemed to have nothing left to live for. … ’⁷

At the root of Mill’s depression was the belief that his hyper-intellectualized upbringing might have permanently destroyed his capacity for feeling. Fortunately, his darkest despair lasted no more than six months. When reading an account of a young boy’s promising his family that he would take the place of his recently deceased father, Mill found himself in tears and realized that his emotions had not entirely deserted him. This encouraged him to turn to poetry for relief, and he found the tonic he was seeking in Wordsworth.⁸

While Mill’s ‘crisis’ is sometimes described as a ‘mental breakdown’, this is too strong. He continued with all of his usual activities, he writes, albeit without affect, like an automaton.⁹ The episode did have a considerable influence on his thinking, though. First, it led him to appreciate what is sometimes called the ‘paradox of hedonism’, the notion that the direct pursuit of pleasure or happiness is self-defeating: ‘Ask yourself whether you are happy, and you cease to be so. The only chance is to treat, not happiness, but some end external to it, as the purpose of life. Let your self-consciousness, your scrutiny, your self-interrogation, exhaust themselves on that; and if otherwise fortunately circumstanced you will inhale happiness with the air you breathe.’¹⁰ (Somewhat curiously, Mill implies that later in life he became convinced that this advice may not apply to people with a superior ‘sensibility and … capacity for enjoyment’, although he still takes it to hold ‘for the great majority of mankind’.)

Second, and perhaps even more momentously, Mill began to believe that education needs to be concerned at least as much with fostering the growth of the feelings as with that of the intellect:

I never turned recreant to intellectual culture, or ceased to consider the power and practice of analysis as an essential condition both of individual and of social improvement. But I thought that it had consequences which required to be corrected, by joining other kinds of cultivation with it. … The cultivation of the feelings became one of the cardinal points in my ethical and philosophical creed.¹¹

These are the two changes of view that Mill explicitly describes as products of his crisis in the published version of his Autobiography. While both involve changes in his conception of how happiness can best be promoted, neither indicates any slackening of his commitment to utilitarianism, and indeed he says explicitly that ‘I never, indeed, wavered in the conviction that happiness is the test of all rules of conduct, and the end of life.’¹² In an unpublished early draft of the Autobiography, he mentions another respect in which his thinking altered in this period that, if not directly a result of having experienced depression, is clearly a consequence of his having realized that his father and Bentham had overlooked some important truths. It does not pertain to the promotion of happiness, at least not directly, but to his self-understanding and ambitions as a thinker. In describing the beginning of the end of the period of his closest friendship with the future MP John Arthur Roebuck, Mill delineates an emerging difference in their mental dispositions:

When any proposition came before him as that of an opponent, he rushed eagerly to demonstrate its falsity, without taking any pains to discover and appropriate the portion of truth which there might be in it. … I had now taken a most decided bent in the opposite direction, that of eclecticism; looking out for the truth which is generally to be found in errors when they are anything more than mere paralogisms, or logical blunders.¹³

The contrast that Mill draws between Roebuck and himself is similar to the one that he draws between Bentham and the conservative poet Samuel Coleridge in an essay on the latter:

Bentham judged a proposition true or false as it accorded or not with the result of his own inquiries. … With Coleridge, on the contrary, the … long duration of a belief … is at least proof of an adaptation in it to some portion or other of the human mind; and if, on digging down to the root, we do not find, as is generally the case, some truth, we shall find some natural want or requirement of human nature which the doctrine in question is fitted to satisfy. … ¹⁴

Mill’s aspiration as a thinker is to emulate Coleridge’s openness to the fragments of truth that can be discovered in views that are partly – maybe even almost entirely – false. But he intends to avoid the ‘too rigid adherence’ to this method that even he can detect in Coleridge and to retain Bentham’s (and Roebuck’s) willingness to repudiate views that ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Part I: Foundations of Mill’s Moral, Social and Political Thought
• Part II: Mill’s Moral Philosophy
• Part III: Mill’s Social and Political Thought
• Part IV: Concluding Remarks
• References
• Index