John Stuart Mill: Difference between revisions

From Citizendium
Jump to navigation Jump to search
imported>Martin Cohen
mNo edit summary
 
(76 intermediate revisions by 4 users not shown)
Line 1: Line 1:
{{subpages}}
{{subpages}}


'''John Stuart Mill''' (20 May 1806 – 8 May 1873) was a British political philosopher, ethicist, civil servant and Member of Parliament, most noted for his defense of libertarianism in ''On Liberty''.  
'''John Stuart Mill''' (1806-1873), was the leading British philosopher of the nineteenth century. An exponent and developer of the [[empiricism]] of [[John Locke]], [[George Berkeley]] and [[David Hume]], and of the [[utilitarianism]] of [[Jeremy Bentham]], he made major contributions to [[economics]] and [[political philosophy]] and is generally considered to be the founder of British [[Liberalism]].
{{TOC|right}}
==Biography==
''(based upon his autbiography<ref>[[http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10378/10378-8.txt ''Autobiography of John Stuart Mill'', Project Gutenberg ebook]</ref>)''<br>
John Stuart Mill was the eldest son of James Mill, a writer, philosopher and follower of [[Jeremy Bentham]]. He was intensively  educated by his father, receiving childhood instruction in Greek, Latin,  and political economy.  From an early age he was an avid reader of history, and as a teenager  he acquired a profound understanding of logic and became familiar with the teachings of  [[Adam Smith]] and [[David Ricardo]]. At the age of 14 he began a year's stay with a friend of his father's in France, where he made the acquaintance of the economist [[Jean-Baptiste Say]]; and on his return he turned his attention to the works of [[John Locke]] and [[Jeremy Bentham]] and became a convinced [[utilitarianism|utilitarian]]. At the age of 17 he started work as a minor civil servant: a job that was sufficiently undemanding that he could  do it and simultaneusly pursue his own thoughts. For a time he took the achievement of political reform to be his sole objective, but at the age of twenty he suffered a bout of depression, triggered by  doubts about the merit of that objective. In 1830, at the age of 25, he formed "the most valuable friendship of my life" - with Mrs Harriet Taylor. Twenty years later, on the death of her husband, they were married - a marriage which ended with her death in 1858. In the meantime his outstanding intellectual reputation had been established by the publication in 1844 of his ''System of Logic'' that ran to eight editions. The succession of major works that followed ''(links to which are available on the [[/Works|works subpage]])'' is recorded on the [[/Timelines|timelines subpage]]. In 1865 he started a three-year stint as a [[Member of Parliament]],  and he died in 1873 at the age of 66.


John Stuart was born in London, son of James Mill, and worked at the East India Company with a brief spell as an Member of Parliament, particularly interested in women's rights, constitutional reform and economics. He met Harriet Taylor , of whom he says in his Autobiography, that he owes none of his 'technical doctrines' but all of the liberal ideas, in 1830. Mill holds that allowing people to decide for themselves as much as possible increases the general happiness, thereby arriving at a philosophy arguing in favour of liberty of thought, speech and association. And it these ideas, on the roles of individuals and society, set out in ''On Liberty'' (1859) and ''The Principles of Political Economy (with Some of the Applications to Social Philosophy)'' (1848) that are indeed the where his legacy lies, as a great political thinker.
==Mill's views==
{|align="right" cellpadding="10" style="background-color:#FFFFCC; width:50%; border: 1px solid #aaa; margin:20px; font-size: 92%;"
===A British Liberal===
|''In matters of evidence, as in all other human things, we neither require, nor can attain, the absolute. We must hold even our strongest convictions with an opening left in our minds for the reception of facts which contradict them; and only when we have taken this precaution, have we earned the right to act upon our convictions with complete confidence when no such contradiction appears. Whatever has been found true in innumerable instances, and never found to be false after due examination in any, we are safe in acting on as universal provisionally, until an undoubted exception could scarcely have escaped notion.''
: A System of Logic[http://www.gutenberg.org/files/27942/27942-h/27942-h.html]  page 405.
|}
===Logic===
John Stuart Mill was a proponent of [[induction]] at a time when the generally accepted method of reasoning was [[deduction]] from axioms that were taken to be self-evidently true (as practised by the classical philosophers). He expounded and expanded upon the work on induction by [[Francis Bacon]], and Mill's  "five canons of induction"
<ref>[http://www.gutenberg.org/files/27942/27942-h/27942-h.html John Stuart Mill: ''A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive'', Project Gutenberg ebook pages 280-292]</ref><ref>[http://philosophy.hku.hk/think/sci/mill.php ''Mill's methods for identifying causes'', OpenCourseWare on critical thinking, logic, and creativity (a graphical illustration of Mill's 5 canons of induction)]</ref> were accepted for teaching purposes by the major English universities. He maintained that induction from observations by the five senses was the only acceptable method of scientific enquiry, but he regarded it, not as a path to certainty but as a way of reaching a provisional conclusion with an acceptable degree of confidence ''(see box)''.
{|align="right" cellpadding="10" style="background-color:#FFFFCC; width:50%; border: 1px solid #aaa; margin:20px; font-size: 92%;"
|''The creed which accepts as the foundation of morals, Utility, or the "Greatest Happiness Principle", holds that actins are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they promote the reverse of happiness''
''The utilitarian morality does recognise in human beings the power of sacrificing their own greatest good for the good of others. It only refuses to recognise that the sacrifice is itself a good. A sacrifice that does not ... tend to increase the sum total of happiness, it considers wasted.''
: Utilitarianism[http://www.gofigger.org/hphist/gutenberg/Utilitarianism,%20by%20John%20Stuart%20Mill.htm] Chapter II.
|}


''The Principles of Political Economy (with Some of the Applications to Social Philosophy)'' was written in 1848, around the same time as Marx and Engels were (attempting to ) foment proletarian revolution. It is essentially an attempt to emulate Mill's illustrious Scottish predecessor, [[Adam Smith]], in setting out the workings of the modern state. Unlike Smith, however, Mill is a poor writer and lacks both the insight and subtlety of the Scot. Despite, or perhaps because of, his famous education at the hands of James Mill (see below), where Smith has pace and acuity, Mill has leaden prose and plodding mathematics.  
===Utilitarianism===
John Stuart Mill was a devoted exponent and defender of [[Jeremy Bentham]]'s [[Utilitarianism]]. He sought develop the concept and to correct the misunderstandings that he attributed to its critics. In contrast to the [[deontology|deontist]] tradition of morality as conformance to given rules of conduct, he insisted that what is good contact depends solely upon its consequences for the welfare of those that it affects. In contrast to the [[paternalism|paternalist]] tradition, he took it to mean that what matters is people's  individual happiness (meaning their own assessment of their welfare) and not what is deemed to be good for them ''(see [[John Stuart Mill#Liberty|Liberty]])''. He advocated the use of utilitarianism as the principal of justice, with implications that he carried over to his writings on government.
{|align="right" cellpadding="10" style="background-color:#FFFFCC; width:50%; border: 1px solid #aaa; margin:20px; font-size: 92%;"
|''The ideally best form of government is that in which  sovereignty ... is vested in the entire aggregate of the community; every citizen not only having a voice in the exercise of that ultimate sovereignty, but being, at least occasionally, called on to take an actual part in the government. Its superiority ... rests upon two principles... The first is, that the rights and interests of every or any person are only secure ... when the person interested is himself able .. to stand up for them. The second is, that the general prosperity attains a greater height, and is more widely diffused, in proportion to the amount and variety of the personal energies enlisted in promoting it.''
:Representative Government[http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/m/mill/john_stuart/m645r/index.html]  Chapter 3
|}


Mill's strength is less in the analysis, particularly not the economic one, than in the ethical system building, and the idealism, where he places economic and social claims in a new framework or political rights. For example, he writes, following Smith, that only labour creates wealth, but capital is stored up labour, and may be accumulated - or even inherited - quite legitimately. Then he goes on, inheritance is acceptable, even when initially based on an injustice, once a few human generations have passed, as to remedy the injustice would create worse problems than leaving the situation alone. On the other hand, the inheritance of wealth, beyond the point of achieving 'comfortable independence' should be prevented by the state intervening and confiscating assets. People who want to live more than 'comfortably' should work for it.
===Representative government===
The details of Mill's exposition of what he considered to be the ideal form of government, were clearly intended for an English readership, but its central thesis had a wider impact. It went beyond the principle of the sovereignty of the people, to advocate  that people should also be called upon to participate in government ''(see box)''. He did not, however, suggest that  elected representatives should engage directly  in the conduct of government. He proposed  instead to give the representative assembly the duties of ensuring that the administration of government is in competent hands, and of holding it to account for satisfactory performance. He also advocated a large but qualified extension of the [[franchise]] (at a time when only about a quarter of English adult males (and no females) were entitled to vote at parliamentary elections), and many other less significant changes to the British constitution.
Mill thought that this 'Benthamite' part of his book would cause more than a little stir, and indeed hoped to become notorious for it. However, tucked away in nearly half a million other words, it attracted little interest. Still, as he himself wrote in a letter to a friend, "The purely abstract investigations of political economy as of very minor importance compared with great practical tensions that the progress of democracy and the spread of socialist opinions are pressing on'.
{|align="right" cellpadding="10" style="background-color:#FFFFCC; width:50%; border: 1px solid #aaa; margin:20px; font-size: 92%;"
|''As soon as ...a person's conduct affects prejudicially the interests of others, society has jurisdiction over it .... But there is no room for entertaining any such question when a person's conduct affects no persons besides himself...''
It is these elements, largely confined to the end portion of Book V, which make for the most original parts of the whole work. Mill is one of the first writers to consider themselves a 'social scientist', and was firm in his conviction that the social sciences were justly related alongside to the natural sciences, and could be pursued using similar methods. Mill distinguished between the study of individuals, which would be largely psychology, and the study of collective behaviour, which would be largely economics and politics. He tried out various terms for summing up his study, such as 'social economy', 'political economy' (which he thought might belong on its own somewhere) , even 'speculative politics' but eventually returned to what he called Comte's' 'convenient barbarism' - sociology.  
:On Liberty[http://www.gutenberg.org/files/34901/34901-h/34901-h.htm]  Chapter 4
|}
And his finding, really drawn from Smith, it that is this element of 'co-operation' that is the key to modern societies. From it characteristically follows a great 'flowering of co-operatives' and joint-stock companies. But Mill adds to it this distinctive rider, that:


<blockquote>Whatever theory we may adopt respecting the foundation of the social union, and under whatever political institutions we live, there is a circle around every individual human being which no government, be it that of one, of a few, or of the many, ought to be permitted to overstep... That there is, or ought to be, some space in human existence thus entrenched around, and 'sacred from authoritative intrusion, no one who professes the smallest regard to human freedom or dignity will call into question: the point to be determined is, where the limit should be placed; how large a province of human life this reserved territory should include.</blockquote>
===Liberty===
John Stuart Mill's political creed is succinctly stated as "the only freedom that deserves the name is that of pursuing our own good in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs, or impede their efforts to obtain it. Each is the proper guardian of his own health, whether, bodily or mental and spiritual. Mankind are greater gainers by suffering each other to live as seems good to themselves, than by compelling each to live as seems good to the rest"<ref>[http://www.gutenberg.org/files/34901/34901-h/34901-h.htm John Stuart Mill ''On Liberty'', Project Gutenberg ebook, page 23]</ref>


Mill's liberalism is grounded in the utilitarian ethic adopted from [[Bentham|Jeremy Bentham]], rather than on the appeal to fundamental rights of that other great liberal Englishman, [[John Locke]]. Yet despite different starting points, both arrive at the characteristic set of individual rights and freedoms.  
===Economics===
Mill's ''Principles Of Political Economy''<ref>[http://www.gutenberg.org/files/30107/30107-h/30107-h.html ''Principles Of Political Economy'']</ref> was a restatement and extension of the theoretical work of [[David Ricardo]]. It embodied the  [[History of economic thought#Classical Economics|classical economics]] assumptions that prices are determined by the cost of production, and that wages are determined in the short term by the size of a savings-determined [[Wage-fund theory|wage fund]], and the acceptance of [[Malthus]]'s population theory that the long-term supply of labour is determined by the level of subsistence.


===Upbringing===
===Religion===
Mill argued that, although the community's  perceptions of right and wrong  had, in the past, been based upon supernatural religious belief, that basis of belief  was no longer socially necessary. He looked forward to a time when people would be motivated by a  deep concern for the general good. This would be "a religion of humanity" (a concept  that had been advanced by the philosopher Auguste Comte)<ref>[http://www.earlymoderntexts.com/pdf/millutre.pdf John Stuart Mill: ''The Usefulness of Religion'', earlymoderntexts.com]</ref><ref>[http://www.earlymoderntexts.com/pdf/millthei.pdf John Stuart Mill: ''Theism'', earlymoderntexts.com]</ref>
.


Mill was born in Pentonville to Harriet Barrow and [[James Mill]], a Scotsman and disciple of [[utilitarianism|utilitarian]] philosopher [[Jeremy Bentham]]. James Mill gave John Stuart an unconventional, rigorous education in Greek, mathematics and many other subjects, from an early age, of which Mill wrote:
===Sexual equality===
<blockquote>my father, in all his teaching, demanded of me not only the utmost that I could do, but much that I could by no possibility have done<ref>''Autobiography'', §1, [http://www.utilitarianism.com/millauto/ online at utilitarianism.com]</ref></blockquote>
Mill argued at length that "the principle which regulates the existing social relations between the two sexes—the legal subordination of one sex to the other—is wrong in itself, and now one of the chief hindrances to human improvement; and that it ought to be replaced by a principle of perfect equality, admitting no power or privilege on the one side, nor disability on the other" <ref>[http://www.gutenberg.org/files/27083/27083-h/27083-h.htm Title: John Stuart Mill: ''The Subjection of Women'', Project Gutenberg]</ref>.
From the age of eight, Mill started on Latin, and also started teaching his younger siblings, as well as encountering [[Homer|Homer's]] ''[[Illiad]]'' both in Greek and in [[Alexander Pope|Pope's]] translation. Between the age of eight and twelve, Mill writes of having read the [[Aeneid]] of [[Virgil]], [[Horace]], the Fables of [[Phaedrus]], [[Livy]], [[Sallust]], the ''[[Metamorphoses]]'' by [[Ovid]], [[Lucretius]], [[Terence]] and [[Cicero]], as well as [[Sophocles]], [[Euripides]], [[Aristophanes]], [[Thucydides]] and many, many other writers. Mill writes of his education:
<blockquote>My father never permitted anything which I learnt to degenerate into a mere exercise of memory. He strove to make the understanding not only go along with every step of the teaching, but, if possible, precede it. Anything which could be found out by thinking I never was told, until I had exhausted my efforts to find it out for myself... One of the evils most liable to attend on any sort of early proficiency, and which often fatally blights its promise, my father most anxiously guarded against. This was self-conceit. He kept me, with extreme vigilance, out of the way of hearing myself praised, or of being led to make self-flattering comparisons between myself and others. From his own intercourse with me I could derive none but a very humble opinion of myself; and the standard of comparison he always held up to me, was not what other people did, but what a man could and ought to do. He completely succeeded in preserving me from the sort of influences he so much dreaded. I was not at all aware that my attainments were anything unusual at my age.<ref>''Autobiography'', §1</ref></blockquote>


==Mill's impact==
John Stuart Mill has been best known for his advocacy of Utilitarianism, and in that connection his impact has been considerable. According to the philospher, [[Mary Warnock]], Utilitarian principles had a major influence on the overhauling of the machinery of British government in the 19th century, by leading people to question whether its institutions provided an effective mechanism for the delivery of tangible benefits to the community<ref>Mary Warnock in her introduction to J S Mill's ''Utilitarianism'', Collins, 1962</ref>. In the 20th century its distributional implications have been criticised  by, among others, John Rawls<ref> John Rawls: ''A Theory of Justice'', Harvard University Press, Page 26</ref> on the grounds that it would sanction suffering by a minority if sufficiently offset by benefits to the majority. It has also been pointed out by [[Ronald Dworkin]] that it would, in principle, mean preferential treatment for people with expensive tastes<ref>Ronald Dworkin ''Sovereign Virtue'', Harvard University Press, 2000, page 54</ref>. The most durable of Mill's works may turn out to be "On Liberty", which has been continuously in print for over 150 years. It has almost certainly contributed to the trend away from [[paternalism|paternalist]] legislation  that has occurred in western countries during that period. Similarly, it may reasonably be presumed that his "The Subjection of Women" played a part in the major extension of female [[suffrage]] that has happened since its pubication. His "Principles of  Political Economy" were well-received at the time, but were overtaken in the late-19th century by the [[History of economic thought#Marginal analysis|marginal analysis]] of the economists of the  [[History of economic thought#Neoclassical Economics|neoclassical school]].


=== Citations ===
== References ==
 
<references />[[Category:Suggestion Bot Tag]]
''A significant part of an early version of this article (other than that on the upbringing of Mill)  was taken from the entry on Mill in 'Essentials of Philosophy and Ethics', edited by Martin Cohen, (Hodder Arnold 2006) and donated to the Citizendium by the author.''
 
=== References ===
<references />

Latest revision as of 07:00, 6 September 2024

This article is developing and not approved.
Main Article
Discussion
Related Articles  [?]
Bibliography  [?]
External Links  [?]
Citable Version  [?]
Works [?]
Timelines [?]
Addendum [?]
 
This editable Main Article is under development and subject to a disclaimer.

John Stuart Mill (1806-1873), was the leading British philosopher of the nineteenth century. An exponent and developer of the empiricism of John Locke, George Berkeley and David Hume, and of the utilitarianism of Jeremy Bentham, he made major contributions to economics and political philosophy and is generally considered to be the founder of British Liberalism.

Biography

(based upon his autbiography[1])
John Stuart Mill was the eldest son of James Mill, a writer, philosopher and follower of Jeremy Bentham. He was intensively educated by his father, receiving childhood instruction in Greek, Latin, and political economy. From an early age he was an avid reader of history, and as a teenager he acquired a profound understanding of logic and became familiar with the teachings of Adam Smith and David Ricardo. At the age of 14 he began a year's stay with a friend of his father's in France, where he made the acquaintance of the economist Jean-Baptiste Say; and on his return he turned his attention to the works of John Locke and Jeremy Bentham and became a convinced utilitarian. At the age of 17 he started work as a minor civil servant: a job that was sufficiently undemanding that he could do it and simultaneusly pursue his own thoughts. For a time he took the achievement of political reform to be his sole objective, but at the age of twenty he suffered a bout of depression, triggered by doubts about the merit of that objective. In 1830, at the age of 25, he formed "the most valuable friendship of my life" - with Mrs Harriet Taylor. Twenty years later, on the death of her husband, they were married - a marriage which ended with her death in 1858. In the meantime his outstanding intellectual reputation had been established by the publication in 1844 of his System of Logic that ran to eight editions. The succession of major works that followed (links to which are available on the works subpage) is recorded on the timelines subpage. In 1865 he started a three-year stint as a Member of Parliament, and he died in 1873 at the age of 66.

Mill's views

In matters of evidence, as in all other human things, we neither require, nor can attain, the absolute. We must hold even our strongest convictions with an opening left in our minds for the reception of facts which contradict them; and only when we have taken this precaution, have we earned the right to act upon our convictions with complete confidence when no such contradiction appears. Whatever has been found true in innumerable instances, and never found to be false after due examination in any, we are safe in acting on as universal provisionally, until an undoubted exception could scarcely have escaped notion.
A System of Logic[1] page 405.

Logic

John Stuart Mill was a proponent of induction at a time when the generally accepted method of reasoning was deduction from axioms that were taken to be self-evidently true (as practised by the classical philosophers). He expounded and expanded upon the work on induction by Francis Bacon, and Mill's "five canons of induction" [2][3] were accepted for teaching purposes by the major English universities. He maintained that induction from observations by the five senses was the only acceptable method of scientific enquiry, but he regarded it, not as a path to certainty but as a way of reaching a provisional conclusion with an acceptable degree of confidence (see box).

The creed which accepts as the foundation of morals, Utility, or the "Greatest Happiness Principle", holds that actins are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they promote the reverse of happiness

The utilitarian morality does recognise in human beings the power of sacrificing their own greatest good for the good of others. It only refuses to recognise that the sacrifice is itself a good. A sacrifice that does not ... tend to increase the sum total of happiness, it considers wasted.

Utilitarianism[2] Chapter II.

Utilitarianism

John Stuart Mill was a devoted exponent and defender of Jeremy Bentham's Utilitarianism. He sought develop the concept and to correct the misunderstandings that he attributed to its critics. In contrast to the deontist tradition of morality as conformance to given rules of conduct, he insisted that what is good contact depends solely upon its consequences for the welfare of those that it affects. In contrast to the paternalist tradition, he took it to mean that what matters is people's individual happiness (meaning their own assessment of their welfare) and not what is deemed to be good for them (see Liberty). He advocated the use of utilitarianism as the principal of justice, with implications that he carried over to his writings on government.

The ideally best form of government is that in which sovereignty ... is vested in the entire aggregate of the community; every citizen not only having a voice in the exercise of that ultimate sovereignty, but being, at least occasionally, called on to take an actual part in the government. Its superiority ... rests upon two principles... The first is, that the rights and interests of every or any person are only secure ... when the person interested is himself able .. to stand up for them. The second is, that the general prosperity attains a greater height, and is more widely diffused, in proportion to the amount and variety of the personal energies enlisted in promoting it.
Representative Government[3] Chapter 3

Representative government

The details of Mill's exposition of what he considered to be the ideal form of government, were clearly intended for an English readership, but its central thesis had a wider impact. It went beyond the principle of the sovereignty of the people, to advocate that people should also be called upon to participate in government (see box). He did not, however, suggest that elected representatives should engage directly in the conduct of government. He proposed instead to give the representative assembly the duties of ensuring that the administration of government is in competent hands, and of holding it to account for satisfactory performance. He also advocated a large but qualified extension of the franchise (at a time when only about a quarter of English adult males (and no females) were entitled to vote at parliamentary elections), and many other less significant changes to the British constitution.

As soon as ...a person's conduct affects prejudicially the interests of others, society has jurisdiction over it .... But there is no room for entertaining any such question when a person's conduct affects no persons besides himself...
On Liberty[4] Chapter 4

Liberty

John Stuart Mill's political creed is succinctly stated as "the only freedom that deserves the name is that of pursuing our own good in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs, or impede their efforts to obtain it. Each is the proper guardian of his own health, whether, bodily or mental and spiritual. Mankind are greater gainers by suffering each other to live as seems good to themselves, than by compelling each to live as seems good to the rest"[4]

Economics

Mill's Principles Of Political Economy[5] was a restatement and extension of the theoretical work of David Ricardo. It embodied the classical economics assumptions that prices are determined by the cost of production, and that wages are determined in the short term by the size of a savings-determined wage fund, and the acceptance of Malthus's population theory that the long-term supply of labour is determined by the level of subsistence.

Religion

Mill argued that, although the community's perceptions of right and wrong had, in the past, been based upon supernatural religious belief, that basis of belief was no longer socially necessary. He looked forward to a time when people would be motivated by a deep concern for the general good. This would be "a religion of humanity" (a concept that had been advanced by the philosopher Auguste Comte)[6][7] .

Sexual equality

Mill argued at length that "the principle which regulates the existing social relations between the two sexes—the legal subordination of one sex to the other—is wrong in itself, and now one of the chief hindrances to human improvement; and that it ought to be replaced by a principle of perfect equality, admitting no power or privilege on the one side, nor disability on the other" [8].

Mill's impact

John Stuart Mill has been best known for his advocacy of Utilitarianism, and in that connection his impact has been considerable. According to the philospher, Mary Warnock, Utilitarian principles had a major influence on the overhauling of the machinery of British government in the 19th century, by leading people to question whether its institutions provided an effective mechanism for the delivery of tangible benefits to the community[9]. In the 20th century its distributional implications have been criticised by, among others, John Rawls[10] on the grounds that it would sanction suffering by a minority if sufficiently offset by benefits to the majority. It has also been pointed out by Ronald Dworkin that it would, in principle, mean preferential treatment for people with expensive tastes[11]. The most durable of Mill's works may turn out to be "On Liberty", which has been continuously in print for over 150 years. It has almost certainly contributed to the trend away from paternalist legislation that has occurred in western countries during that period. Similarly, it may reasonably be presumed that his "The Subjection of Women" played a part in the major extension of female suffrage that has happened since its pubication. His "Principles of Political Economy" were well-received at the time, but were overtaken in the late-19th century by the marginal analysis of the economists of the neoclassical school.

References