John Stuart Mill

Professor John M Skorupski

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780415487672
• eBook ISBN: 9781136866883
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

First Published in 1999. John Skorupski's book is a comprehensive revaluation of Mill as a philosopher. The opening chapters outline Mill's main doctrines and attitudes and provide an up-to-date account of his views on language, logic and the mind. Skorupski carefully examines Mill's analysis of connotation and denotation and brings out the affinities between Mill's naturalistic view of logic, mathematics and science and important themes in current philosophy. Mill's standing as a political philosopher rests on his insights into the bases of liberalism, and on the power and eloquence with which he grounds them in an appeal to general human good. His views on social science, on utilitarianism and on liberty are examined in the final three chapters. This book aims to re-establish Mill as a major philosopher whose ideas on issues as different as the nature of mathematics and the foundations of liberal democracy are strikingly relevant to today's philosophical debates and inquiries. This book should be of interest to students and lecturers in political/social philosophy.

1
The Millian Philosophy

Coleridge’s sayings about half-truths; and Goethe’s device, ‘many-sidedness, was one which I would most willingly, at this period, have taken for mine…. (Autobiography I 171)

1 Philosophy and its past

One’s interest in a philosopher of the past may be mainly philosophical or mainly historical, but the two kinds of interest cannot be divorced. To understand the historical origins and consequences of philosophical ideas one must understand the ideas. And though the history of philosophy is a living part of philosophy, it can contribute to it—by placing present reflection in historical parameters, bringing home its historicity—only as serious history.

Tracing the story of a philosophical outlook is seeing how philosophy interacts with those parameters—responding to its own necessities, generating new questions, slowly shifting the parameters. Some past philosophies cease to be options for us. Others remain as earlier castings of traditions which are still in play. Wherever there is philosophical thought of distinction there is something to learn. The first case at the least gives us a view of ourselves from a diverging path. In the latter we take stock in another way. We get a benchmark against which to measure current philosophical assumptions, and an improved sense of what is transient in them and what is more likely to endure.

The reasons for studying Mill’s philosophy are of the second kind. He is sufficiently distant to be seen historically, but he speaks in familiar accents. Mill’s positions are live positions in current philosophical thought. In fact they have not been more so at any time this century, or even since his death. Philosophy has moved, across the whole range from logic and metaphysics to ethics and politics, towards a state of debate which makes Mill easier to appreciate than at any time in the last hundred years.

This striking fact is in the first place a matter of Mill’s particular interests. His range is wide, and his subjects overlap very largely with topics—be it the analysis of language, the justification of deduction, the nature of scientific reasoning, the epistemology of arithmetic and geometry, the nature of human well-being or the foundations of political liberty—which are at the centre of discussion today. On all of them Mill’s attitudes are challenging and fresh; his treatment of any one of them repays study.

The overlap reflects a number of sea-changes in recent philosophy; but in particular it reflects the resurgence of interest in a certain self-consciously liberal and naturalistic perspective. The interest is hostile as well as friendly; however it is an interest in that perspective and its consequences and coherence. But that perspective unifies Mill’s philosophy: the perspective, in fact, of the enlightenment. Mill’s project, in most general terms, was to present the enlightenment perspective in a way which would claim the allegiance and enthusiasm of thinking men and women, and, through them, exercise a social authority for good. He wanted to rethink it in detail and to show how it could incorporate and transcend the criticisms which had been made of it in the age of early nineteenth-century romanticism, the age in which he grew to maturity. Accordingly, the deepest criticisms of Mill are those which argue that he failed in just this respect; that the enlightenment perspective as such is incoherent—in its metaphysics, or its politics, or both. A full appreciation of Mill requires that one recognise what issues are at stake here and why they are significant.

But it takes a certain philosophical setting to see things in this way. In this century English-speaking philosophy at least has by and large had other paths to follow. And the liberal and naturalistic perspective itself fell in esteem though certainly not in underlying influence. It has often seemed threadbare and trite. It has been shrugged off with the more irritation by people who have few genuinely penetrating points to make against it, and correspondingly lack a dialectical sense of its real uncertainties. For the same reason Mill has passed as a philosopher whose ideas—and their inadequacies—we know only too well. But that reputation is itself a historical artefact. Let us trace how it emerged.

When Mill died in 1873 he already seemed to belong to an earlier intellectual epoch, across all the subjects about which he thought — metaphysics and logic, moral and political philosophy, political economy. The last three decades of the nineteenth century and the first decade or so of this were a period of extraordinary fertility in all those subjects; those who created and experienced its excitement saw Mill’s legacy as a citadel which had to be circumvented or destroyed. His was the received position, the too easily achieved synthesis, stultifying in its complacent finality.¹

When a philosopher acquires the exceptional influence Mill achieved in his lifetime, a trough in his reputation over the next few generations is inevitable. But as philosophy developed in this century Mill’s reputation did not revive. Its questions were not Mill’s. For one thing, Mill’s System of Logic preceded the developments in logic and set theory which date back to the 1870s, and transformed twentieth-century ways of philosophising about language, logic and mathematics. But something else went deeper than this. It was the reaction, in that modernist period in which both analytic philosophy and phenomenology emerged, against nineteenth-century modes of thought as such—in philosophy, against ‘historicism’, ‘psychologism’, ‘evolutionism’; against grand systems which fused philosophical doctrines with substantive conceptions of history, man and reason. Philosophy was now understood as the analysis of logical relations—and that meant (depending on one’s affiliation) of pure essences, or of propositions and their internal relations, or of linguistic conventions. It was rigorously pure inquiry, sharply distinguished from questions about what history or psychology in fact constrain us to think.

These distinctions between logical and empirical, factual and evaluative, do of course contain an important truth—the elementary truth expressed in the ‘is-ought’ distinction. However it was not the elementary truth, but the single-minded modernist obsession with it, that made sympathetic appreciation of nineteenth-century philosophy difficult. In itself, the elementary truth is perfectly consistent with something taken for granted on all sides in the nineteenth century—that in reflecting on what we have reason to believe or do our only ultimate appeal is to what we find ourselves (after critical examination) constrained to think. But the modernist obsession with the purity and autonomy of philosophy and logic transforms the elementary truth into a blinding light: blinding the philosopher to the inescapable psychological or historical context of his inquiry.

An example of a modernist philosopher misreading a nineteenth-century argument in just this way is the ‘naturalistic fallacy’ of whichG. E.Moore accused Mill (see 9–2). When Mill argues that happiness is desirable by appealing to the ‘evidence’ of what human beings reflectively desire, he points out that he is not putting forward a deductive proof. So he does not sin against the elementary truth. But Moore’s preoccupation with the purity of ethical analysis blinds him to the very simple point Mill makes—and to the inescapability of his way of making it: deliberation about ends can take no other form than appeal to what we discover by reflective analysis to be our categorial ends.

Similar things can be said about Mill’s ultra-empiricism about logic and mathematics and about his analysis of the grounds of inductive reasoning. Neither was destined to find a sympathetic audience. Mill’s conception of logic and mathematics clashed with the fervent modernist affirmation of their a priori purity, and the attempt to explain that purity in conventionalist or platonist terms. And his grounding of the inductive principle on an appeal to spontaneous forms of reasoning seemed no more than a failure to appreciate Hume’s problem of induction.

The reputation of his political philosophy was not in better shape, The most important cause here is undoubtedly liberalism’s historic crisis of confidence in the first half of this century. But it is also true, perhaps connectedly, that the intellectual climate was not favourable for political philosophy, not, at least, for the tradition of disciplined reasoning about human nature and its forms of political expression of which Mill is one of the supreme exponents. It was possible to salute him as an eloquent spokesman for liberty, inspiring at least as much by saintly personal example as by rigour of argument. That is the approach taken by Bertrand Russell and by Isaiah Berlin. But to appreciate the true force of Mill’s liberalism, one has to accept that political philosophy requires substantive conceptions of human nature, and substantive links with political practice.

The modernist affirmation of philosophical purity allows neither. Philosophical conceptions of human nature are consigned to the realm of undisciplined speculation. And a political philosophy with practical implications disappears down the chasm between is and ought. It is not unconnected that when Russell himself writes on ethics and politics the results are embarrassing in just the respects in which Mill is impressive. Mill thinks soberly and hard about psychological and historical constraints on ethical ideals. He often over-simplifies, often seems over-confident, often blusters about ‘science’ as a way of whistling in the dark. But Russell sentimentalises. The spirit of Russell’s time and milieu gave him little support for anything between rigorously abstract inquiry and fine feelings: but it is on just that missing ground that worthwhile social and political philosophy has to be anchored. Utilitarianism has been accused of lacking a politics and a psychology. Levelled at Mill the accusation would be absurd. It does however have a proper target: it is ethics in the modernist vein that lacks them.

I have said that Millian positions are now more in play than they have been for a very long time. This is fairly obvious in moral and political philosophy, but it is also true in logic and metaphysics, though less obviously so, because Mill’s writings on these subjects are much less familiar. Yet it is remarkable how similar in spirit Mill’s outlook is to the Quinean naturalism which has become so dominant in recent philosophy. There are fundamental philosophical differences between Mill and Quine, and there also lies between them the technical development of modern logic. But the latter point should not mislead us. The essence of Mill’s analysis of language, and his empiricist view of logic and mathematics, can be stated as well in modern logical as in syllogistic terms. In fact the language of modern logic makes it much easier to state it with flexibility and precision. Philosophically, on the other hand, exactly the same questions about the coherence of the naturalistic stance arise now as arose then. The central question remains the tenability of naturalism in the face of Kantian critique.

The chapters which follow this one examine Mill’s philosophical doctrines in detail; it is important however—more with Mill than with many other philosophers—not to lose sight of the wood for the trees. So this introductory chapter sets out some of Mill’s larger themes and problems, and estimates the present significance of his ideas. Of course a broad sketch of any philosophical position can sink in fully only at the end of detailed analysis, and not in advance of it, but it is still useful to have a rough map in hand.

2 Logic and metaphysics

The root of Mill’s philosophical thought is thoroughgoing naturalism. Human beings are entirely a part of the natural causal order studied by science. They are causal systems within that larger causal order. In this fundamental premise Mill was always a child of the enlightenment.

But the first decades of the nineteenth century saw a sharp reaction against enlightenment ideas and values. Philosophically, that reaction was most fully worked through by German philosophers, and it came to Mill through his ‘Germano-Coleridgean’ friends.² Its starting point was precisely the rejection of naturalism. This was the ‘Copernican revolution’ of which Kant spoke in the Critique of Pure Reason—from which idealism in its distinctive nineteenth-century meaning grew. The antagonism between naturalism and various forms of post-Kantian idealism became the central philosophical debate of the nineteenth century. It is the constant background of Mill’s philosophical writings.

The fully naturalistic view of human thought has an implication of which both Kant and Mill were intensely aware. Both would have taken the following point as fundamental: if the mind is simply and only a part of nature then no real knowledge of the natural world can be a priori. Either all real knowledge is a posteriori, grounded in experience, or there is no real knowledge—‘knowledge is impossible’. Any grounds for asserting a proposition that has real content must be empirical grounds. Empiricism is then the thesis that there are such grounds, scepticism, that there are none. The point on which Mill and Kant could have agreed is that naturalism entails either scepticism or empiricism. Where they disagreed, of course, was on the question of which disjunct was forced.

The inference from naturalism to the disjunction of empiricism and scepticism turns on a distinction which is as central to the System of Logic as it is to the Critique of Pure Reason: that between Kant’s ‘analytic’ and ‘synthetic’ judgements, or in Mill’s terms, between ‘verbal’ and ‘real’ propositions and, correspondingly, between ‘merely apparent’ and ‘real’ inferences (3.2–4). But Mill’s use of the distinction differs in one crucial respect from Kant (3.5). Verbal propositions and merely apparent inferences have no genuine cognitive content: in particular, a merely apparent inference is merely apparent precisely in the sense that no real inferential move has been made. The conclusion has literally been asserted in the premises. Since verbal propositions and merely apparent inferences have no cognitive content there can be no epistemological problem about the grounds which justify them—they need no grounds.

Similar points apply to Kant’s analytic judgements, when they are strictly understood as ‘adding nothing through the predicate to the concept of the subject, but merely breaking it up into those constituent concepts that have all along been thought in it’ (Kant 1929:A7B11). There is however a broader conception of analyticity: it defines an analytic truth as one from whose negation a contradiction can be deduced—with the help (if necessary) of definitional transformations, and using principles of logic alone. Whether or not this ‘broad’ definition can be read into Kant, it is a common one, and it differs importantly from the ‘narrow’ definition. In the broad sense of ‘analytic’, it becomes of course a trivial truth that logical principles are analytic. They are derivable from themselves using no principles that are not principles of logic. But what is no longer trivial is what, for the purposes of an epistemological inquiry into logic, should be trivial—viz. the crucial thesis that analytic judgements have no genuine cognitive content, and hence pose no epistemological problem. That thesis is no longer trivial, and not true: for logic itself contains, reverting to Mill’s terms, ‘real’ propositions and inferences, containing genuine cognitive content. The clear recognition of this fact is one of the chief philosophical virtues of the System of Logic. But it could not of course be seen as such so long as the thesis that logical and mathematical propositions are empty of all real content—so important to philosophy in the first half of this century—remained an orthodoxy.

Mill’s attempt to establish the fact, which involves him, in various places, in an analysis of the meaning of sentences and terms, of syllogistic theory and of the so-called ‘Laws of Thought’, is less than clear, and he never brings it together into a unified, perspicuous account. Nevertheless he pushes through the definition of ‘verbal’ and ‘real’, and the analysis in these terms of logical and mathematical propositions, far enough to show how radical the implications of naturalism must be. If no real proposition is known a priori, then either logical and mathematical knowledge turns out to be empirical or there can be no knowledge at all.

Why is it that no real proposition can be known a priori? According to Mill, when we hold a real proposition to be true a priori our grounds for doing so in reality come down to psychological facts about us—that we find its negation inconceivable, or that it is derived, by principles whose unsoundness we find inconceivable, from premises whose negation we find inconceivable. Mill is not offering a definition of what is meant by such terms as ‘a priori’ ‘necessary’, ‘self-evident’. He is not saying that this is what we are daiming when we claim a proposition to be any of these things—his point is tha...

Table of contents

• The Arguments of the Philosophers
• Contents
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• 1 The Millian Philosophy
• 2 The Analysis of Language
• 3 Verbal Propositions and Apparent Inference
• 4 The Justification of Deduction
• 5 Empiricism in Logic and Mathematics
• 6 Induction and Inductivism
• 7 Induction, Perception and Consciousness
• 8 The Logic of the Moral Sciences
• 9 Utilitarianism
• 10 Liberty
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index