John Stuart Mill E-Book

Dale E. Miller

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Classic Thinkers series
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 495

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

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.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Cover

Title page

Copyright page

Preface

Acknowledgements

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

1 A Singular Life

Early years

Philosophical radicalism

Mental crisis

Mrs Harriet Taylor

Blackheath Park

Remaining years

2 Mill’s Understanding of Human Nature

What can we know and how can we know it?

The fundamental laws of the mind

Sympathy and attention

The moral feelings

Habits and character

Race and gender

Part II: Mill’s Moral Philosophy

3 The ‘Proof’ of the Principle of Utility

Theories of well-being

Mill’s account of happiness: A first look

An overview of Mill’s proof

Some criticisms of the proof

Reconstructing the proof

An externalist reading of the proof

Evaluation of Mill’s argument

4 The Higher Pleasures

An overview of the higher pleasures doctrine

Further thoughts on the higher pleasures

Genuinely happy lives for all

5 Utilitarianism: The ‘Happiness Morality’

What is utilitarianism?

Act utilitarianism

Rule utilitarianism

6 Mill’s Theory of Right and Wrong

The art of life

Some further evidence for the act-utilitarian reading

Morality and punishment

Rules and happiness

The ideal code and moral reform

Justice

Moral intuitionism revisited

Part III: Mill’s Social and Political Thought

7 Mill on Liberty and Individuality

An overview of On Liberty

Mill’s conception of harm

Harm prevention versus harmful conduct prevention

Is harm all that matters?

The value of freedom

Conservative caveats

Paternalism

8 Millian Normative Political Economy

Nineteenth-century capitalism

Reforming capitalism

Socialism

The problem of the poor

The stationary state

9 Millian Democracy

Mill’s case for representative democracy

Elitism

Plural voting and proportional representation

Who gets to vote?

‘The ballot’

Public spirit and individuality

Part IV: Concluding Remarks

10 Mill’s Utopian Utilitarianism

References

Index

Copyright © Dale E. Miller 2010

The right of Dale E. Miller to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2010 by Polity Press

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Preface

This volume is a general survey of John Stuart Mill’s contributions to moral philosophy, including social and political philosophy. While this is a wide ambit for a comparatively slender volume, if one not so slender as its publisher would have preferred, it still means that little or nothing will be said about the important work that Mill did in other fields of inquiry, such as logic, epistemology, the philosophy of science, metaphysics and the scientific elements of political economy. In order to keep the length within some bounds, I have been forced to limit my engagement with Mill’s other interpreters. When offering readings of particular texts, I have often had to ignore divergent readings that have been defended by other commentators. Suffice it to say that my failure to discuss another scholar’s work should by no means be construed as reflecting a judgement that it is unworthy of discussion.

D. E. M.

Norfolk, Virginia, November 2009

Acknowledgements

This book has been a long time in the making. I am deeply indebted to Polity Press for their patience. I owe a particular debt to Polity’s Emma Hutchinson, who has been in charge of this project for the last several years, for her tolerance and support. I would also like to thank her predecessors, including Elizabeth Molinari and Rachel Kerr. And thanks as well to my able and agreeable copyeditor, Gail Ferguson.

Because I have been at work on the book for so long, the prospect of trying to remember everyone who offered help on a portion of it so that I can acknowledge them by name is daunting. I apologize in advance to anyone whom I should inadvertently omit. I owe a special debt of gratitude to Ben Eggleston, who read drafts of nearly every chapter and offered pages of comments and some much-needed encouragement. Roger Crisp and an anonymous reviewer also read a draft of the entire book, and I am grateful for their feedback. A number of other people offered assistance on one or more chapters, including Donald Bruckner, Jacob Busch, Dale Dorsey, Ashley Kennedy, Beth McHose, Stephen Medvic and John Skorupski. Students in my Mill seminars at Old Dominion University also read certain chapters.

Several people also offered help with earlier works on which portions of the book are based. There are too many of these to name all of them individually, but chapter 8 is based on an article that appeared in Politics, Philosophy and Economics, and I owe thanks for the help that I received on it from Jonathan Riley and Nicholas Capaldi. This article was in turn based on a master’s thesis written under the direction of the late Mark Perlman (for the University of Pittsburgh’s economics department). Chapter 9 makes heavy use of an article that was published in History of Political Thought and of my doctoral dissertation (written for Pittsburgh’s philosophy department). I would like to express my gratitude to my director David Gauthier and the other members of my dissertation committee: the late Tamara Horowitz, Nicholas Rescher and Frederick Whelan. Andrew Valls and I spent much time discussing both the thesis and the dissertation.

Some early work on the book was supported by a summer research fellowship from Old Dominion University’s Research Foundation. Additional work was done while I was a visiting fellow in the Centre for Ethics, Philosophy and Public Affairs at St Andrews University, and I would like to thank the Centre for this opportunity and Old Dominion University for the research leave that allowed me to take advantage of it. ODU’s College of Arts and Letters generously provided funds to help subsidize the cost of having the book indexed, and Robert Vinten produced said index.

Final words of thanks go to two people who served as mentors to me at formative stages in my career. The first is Kurt Baier, who initially ignited my interest in Mill. He was also my original dissertation supervisor, although he retired before I was prepared to defend. (That project was a long time in the making, too.) The other is Brad Hooker, whose enthusiasm for philosophy rekindled my own when he and his colleagues at the University of Reading welcomed me as an unofficial visiting graduate student. Special thanks go to Brad for having recommended me to Polity for this project.

The book is dedicated to my wife, Cindy.

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 lacked adequate justification, whatever their tradition or pedigree. In his essay ‘Bentham’, a companion piece to that on Coleridge, he writes in qualified defence of ‘one-eyed men’, who see deeply into what they see at all but overlook much: ‘Almost all rich veins of original and striking speculation have been opened by systematic half-thinkers.’15 Mill, though, intends to be a ‘complete thinker’, one who synthesizes the partial truths discovered by minds more innovative than his own.

During this period Mill travelled in realms of thought very different from that of his father and Bentham, although always with the attitude of a tourist looking for souvenirs to bring home rather than that of someone looking for a new place to live. That is to say, he was looking for new fragments of the truth that could not be found in his native utilitarian school of thought, but he was not looking to become part of a new school. He acquainted himself with both German Romanticism, whose celebration of the feelings was obviously congenial to his mental state at the time, and the French utopianism of Henri de Saint-Simon. Yet he fended off all attempts to recruit him as a disciple of these or other views.16

Mrs Harriet Taylor

John Mill met Mrs Harriet Taylor, the wife of wholesale druggist John Taylor, at a dinner party at the Taylors’ home in the summer of 1830. Harriet’s Unitarian minister, the Reverend W. J. Fox, apparently arranged their meeting after Harriet confessed to having intellectual needs that her husband was not able to satisfy.17 Soon the pair was deeply immersed in mutual admiration.

There is no overstating what Harriet meant to John. It is frankly difficult to imagine that any human being could live up to the praise that he lavishes on her. In his autobiography, he calls her ‘the most admirable person I had ever known’, possessed of ‘the qualities which in all other persons whom I had known I had been only too happy to find singly’.18 She combined the ‘general spiritual characteristics’ and ‘temperament and organisation’ of Shelley, but in intellect Shelley ‘was but a child compared with what she ultimately became’. Better still, ‘Her intellectual gifts did but minister to a moral character at once the noblest and the best balanced which I have ever met with in life.’19 Where practical philosophy is concerned, she was a master of the ‘two main regions of thought’, both ‘the region of ultimate aims; the constituent elements of the highest realizable ideal of human life’ and that of ‘the immediately useful and practically attainable’. In contrast, his own ‘own strength lay wholly in the uncertain and slippery intermediate region, that of theory, or moral and political science’.

Before long, John was spending most evenings at the Taylor home while Mr Taylor repaired to his club. By 1833, even the tolerant Mr Taylor was fed up with this arrangement and he sent Harriet to Paris for six months. John Mill, though, joined her there for six weeks. In 1834, Harriet effectively began to live apart from her husband. Behaviour that would be considered scandalous even today was obviously so by Victorian standards. The relationship even became a point of contention between John Stuart and James Mill, although the latter died in 1836.20 (Bentham died in 1832.) John and Harriet insisted, however, that their relationship during this period was strictly platonic.

The 1830s and 1840s were an intellectually fertile part of Mill’s life. His first book, the two-volume A System of Logic, appeared in 1843; it would go through eight editions. 1848 saw the publication of the Principles of Political Economy, of which seven editions would eventually appear. These works became standard textbooks in their respective fields.

Blackheath Park

John Taylor died of cancer in 1849. Harriet tended to him during his illness and even upbraided John Mill when he suggested that she write to him during an ‘odd time’ when she might find a ‘change of subject of thought a relief’: ‘Good God, sh[oul]d you think it a relief to think of something else some acquaintance or what not while I was dying?’21 The way being cleared, however, the two of them were married in 1851, and they settled just outside of London in Blackheath Park.

During the 1850s, John largely kept apart from the society he used to keep. He became, in fact, exceedingly prickly. Some former friends were dropped because they were suspected of having gossiped about his relationship with Harriet or, in the case of Roebuck, because they told him directly that they considered the relationship a mistake. He became estranged from many of his siblings and even his mother, on the grounds of their failing to accord Harriet what he considered to be the proper respect and civility. He made little time even for those associates with whom he remained on good terms.22

The Mills, as they now were, spent much time travelling in this period, separately or together, a necessity because of their health. They both suffered from ‘consumption’, that is, tuberculosis. It is quite possible that Harriet caught the disease from him, just as it is quite possible that he caught it from his father. The weather of southern Europe suited them better than cold, damp and smoky England. Neither could count on living much longer. He published relatively little new work on philosophy during much of the 1850s, although he and Harriet were making plans and composing drafts. They discussed various combinations of essays that might serve to convey what they considered to be the most important of their views ‘in the state of concentrated thought – a sort of mental pemican, which thinkers, when there are any after us, may nourish themselves with & then dilute for other people’.23

They worked on one of these essays in particular, on the subject of liberty. The essay would be published in 1859, but Harriet would not live to see its appearance. In 1858, John retired from the East India Company, which was being nationalized by the British government. He and Harriet headed south again, in pursuit of a healthier climate. They had intended to go to Montpellier, but made it only so far as Avignon when Harriet’s respiratory problems worsened severely. She died on 3 November.

It has been argued that Harriet is in fact the unacknowledged co-author of On Liberty, and even of the Principles of Political Economy.24 These questions about possible joint authorship shade into the larger question of Harriet’s influence on John’s thought over the course of their relationship, which some regard as negligible and others as substantial – with those in the latter group differing over whether this influence was beneficial or detrimental. The question about the extent of Harriet’s influence can probably never be answered with a high degree of certainty. Too much of their interaction took place behind closed doors, either in the Taylor home or at Blackheath, and too little of the correspondence from the periods when they were apart survives. We cannot even feel confident in any assessment of Harriet’s abilities. Mill’s testimony has already been recorded, but the other available accounts from her contemporaries register rather different opinions of Harriet, with the least charitable describing her as little more than a parrot of Mill and others judging her abilities to be admirable but entirely on a human scale.25 That the ensuing discussion treats John as the sole author of all works that were published in his name alone is not meant to prejudge Harriet’s claim to be the co-author of some of them. This study is ultimately concerned with the content of a body of work, not with its production or with John Stuart Mill the man, so entering speculation about the authorship of On Liberty or the Principles would be a digression. For the same reason, the larger question of Harriet’s influence will not be broached.

Remaining years

The years immediately after his wife’s death saw the publication of some of Mill’s best-known works. On Liberty has already been mentioned. 1861 marked both the initial appearance of the articles that would be collected together with the title Utilitarianism and the publication of Considerations on Representative Government. In 1865, Mill published book-length critiques of the work of two other thinkers, Auguste Comte and Sir William Hamilton. While Mill is writing as a respondent in these volumes, they contain important statements of his own views.

Mill bought a small house next to the cemetery where Harriet was buried, and for the rest of his life he would spend half of the year in Avignon. When in London, he renewed many of the social ties that he had earlier severed. He also derived companionship from Helen Taylor, the youngest of Harriet’s three children with her first husband, who gave up what seems to have been a career of some small promise on the stage in order to serve as Mill’s amanuensis cum collaborator. One issue that heavily engaged the attention of both during this period was women’s rights. Helen was an active campaigner in this movement. Mill’s The Subjection of Women, published in 1869, elaborates on themes first broached in ‘The Enfranchisement of Women’, which was published without attribution in the Westminster in 1851 but is today generally (although not universally) believed to have been written by Harriet. The absence of a chapter on women’s rights may seem like a major lacuna in this study of Mill’s thought. This is a deliberate choice, however, made on the grounds that Mill himself does not see the issue of women’s rights as sui generis. He believed that women ought to have the same rights as men for the same reasons that men ought to have them. From his perspective, therefore, the questions of women’s liberty to pursue the careers of their choice or of their right to the ballot do not demand separate treatment. (The real lacuna is a chapter on Mill’s views on the family.)

Mill also found another venue in which he could seek to advance women’s rights and otherwise put theory into practice. In 1865, he accepted an invitation to stand for Parliament for Westminster, and despite his making only a token effort to campaign he was returned. He served three years in Parliament, in which he was generally considered a successful speaker (after a rough start), although he was defeated in his bid for re-election.26 One of his most notable actions in Parliament was to propose, albeit unsuccessfully, an amendment to the Reform Bill of 1867 that would have given women the vote on equal terms with men.

Mill spearheaded another cause during this period, both in and out of Parliament. The British Governor of the colony of Jamaica, Edward James Eyre, had brutally suppressed a rebellion of former slaves. Mill headed the ‘Jamaica Committee’ that sought unsuccessfully to see Eyre prosecuted for murder – or, when that effort failed, for anything.27

Mill’s last years were spent in relative quiet. He worked on writings that were to be published posthumously. This included, in addition to his Autobiography, a work titled Three Essays on Religion. Mill is not a Christian, nor does he subscribe to any other recognized religion. In his Autobiography, he remarks that he ‘was brought up from the first without any religious belief, in the ordinary acceptation of the term’. In the essay ‘Theism’, included in the Three Essays, Mill claims that the design (or ‘teleological’) argument succeeds in supplying some evidence in favour of the claim that the ‘present order’ of the universe was created by an ‘Intelligent Mind’, although this evidence is ‘insufficient for proof’ and amounts ‘only to one of the lower degrees of personality’.28 This suggests that he might accept some sort of deism; he might believe, in other words, in a God who created the universe but then left it (including us) to its own devices. But he adds that if the then-nascent theory of the ‘survival of the fittest’ should be borne out by empirical investigation, then this would ‘greatly attenuate the evidence for’ creation.29 As Alan Millar claims, the evidence for evolutionary theory that has ‘accumulated since fatally weakens the argument from design in the form in which Mill considers it’.30

In 1873, John Stuart Mill died quickly of fever in Avignon. He was just short of his 67th birthday; the date is usually given as 7 May. He was, of course, buried next to Harriet. His last words, spoken to Helen, were ‘You know that I have done my work.’31

Notes

1 Michael St John Packe, The Life of John Stuart Mill, 9.

2Autobiography, I, 9–15. All references to Mill’s works will be to The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill and will include the title of the work (except when this is given in the text), the volume number, and the page number. Liberty Fund has purchased the rights to the Collected Works from the University of Toronto Press and generously made all 33 volumes available online in its Online Library of Liberty.

3Autobiography, I, 17.

4 Richard D. Altick, Victorian People and Ideas, 17–50.

5Autobiography, I, 67, 69.

6 Mill’s career in India House is discussed in depth by Lynn Zastoupil in John Stuart Mill and India.

7Autobiography, I, 137, 139. For more on this episode, see L. A. Paul, ‘The Worm at the Root of the Passions’.

8Autobiography, I, 151.

9Autobiography, I, 143.

10Autobiography, I, 147.

11Autobiography, I, 147.

12Autobiography, I, 145.

13Autobiography, I, 156.

14 ‘Coleridge’, X, 120.

15 X, 94.

16 See Mill’s letter to Carlyle, XII, 207, and his letters to Gustave d’Eichtal, XII, 46–7, 71.

17 Bain, John Stuart Mill, 164n.

18Autobiography, I, 193–9.

19Autobiography, I, 193–9.

20 Packe, The Life of John Stuart Mill, 128–52.

21The Complete Works of Harriet Taylor Mill, 360.

22 See Packe, The Life of John Stuart Mill, 348–57; Bain, John Stuart Mill, 93.

23 Letter to Harriet Taylor Mill, XIV, 141–2.

24 See Jo Ellen Jacobs, The Voice of Harriet Taylor Mill, 206–12, 245–51. For a fuller discussion of different views that have been advanced concerning Harriet’s influence and claims to authorship, see Dale E. Miller, ‘Harriet Taylor Mill.’

25 See Miller, ‘Harriet Taylor Mill.’

26 On Mill’s parliamentary career, see Bruce L. Kinzer, Ann P. Robson and John M. Robson, A Moralist In and Out of Parliament.

27 See Packe, The Life of John Stuart Mill, 466–72, and J. Joseph Miller, ‘Chairing the Jamaica Committee: J. S. Mill and the Limits of Colonial Authority.’

28 X, 482, but cf. 450, where he says that ‘the adaptations in Nature afford a large balance of probability in favour of creation by intelligence.’

29 ‘Theism’, X, 450.

30 ‘Mill on Religion’, 182.

31 Packe, Life of John Stuart Mill, 507. Packe’s biography of Mill, cited several times in this chapter, has long been the scholarly standard. Several new biographies have very recently appeared, perhaps due to the bicentennial of Mill’s birth. These include Nicholas Capaldi’s John Stuart Mill: A Biography, Bruce L. Kinzer’s J. S. Mill Revisited, and Richard Reeves’s John Stuart Mill: Victorian Firebrand.

2

Mill’s Understanding of Human Nature

One theme that will emerge very clearly over the course of this book is the strength of Mill’s conviction that only a few exceptional people realize anything approaching their full potential as human beings. He is dismayed by the selfishness, intellectual laxity and general lack of vigour in the pursuit of anything besides money that prevail in every part of even the most advanced societies. Mill believes that through better education these shortcomings could be overcome, although ‘education’ is being used here in what he calls ‘its largest acceptation’, in which ‘Whatever helps to shape the human being; to make the individual what he is, or hinder him from being what he is not – is part of his education.’1

But while Mill believes that people could be much improved, he also believes that there are some unalterable facts about human nature. These fixed elements are the raw materials with which any method of education has to work, and they limit what it is capable of accomplishing. This chapter will be a survey of some of the fixed elements that Mill believes can be found in our nature.

What can we know and how can we know it?

A discussion of Mill’s views on epistemology, or the theory of knowledge, might seem out of place in a chapter on his understanding of human nature. Many epistemological questions, though, can be framed as questions about us, most importantly that of what in our nature, if anything, enables us to acquire knowledge.

The history of epistemology in the modern period is standardly taught as an ebbing and flowing war between the doctrines of rationalism and empiricism.2 According to classical empiricism, the mind begins as a tabula rasa, ‘a blank slate’. This slate is ‘written on’ by experience. Against the rationalists, who maintain a belief in the existence of innate ideas, the empiricists contend that all of our ideas come from experience. The classical empiricists take our ideas to be nothing more than less ‘lively’ copies of what David Hume calls our ‘impressions’, a heading under which he includes not just sensations but also passions and emotions.3 Ideas can be simple or complex. John Locke, author of the first great statement of empiricism, defines simple ideas as ‘nothing but one uniform appearance or conception in the mind’.4 Complex ideas are composed of multiple simple ideas. To borrow an example from Mill, our idea of an orange is a complex idea that ‘consists of the simple ideas of a certain colour, a certain form, a certain taste and smell, etc … ’.5 Empiricists can allow that some of our knowledge, in particular knowledge of the relations between our ideas, is a priori, that is, not derived from experience. Empiricists, though, characteristically maintain that our knowledge of the external world is derived from experience or, in other words, that it is a posteriori.

Mill is an empiricist, and in many ways he is a more thoroughgoing empiricist than any of the other major figures in the tradition. He contends that even mathematical knowledge is a posteriori.6 He is willing to follow empiricist reasoning even when its implications strike many people as counter-intuitive. For example, he embraces ‘phenomenalism’, the view that we are not justified in believing in the existence of anything that exists independently of being perceived. The belief in matter is justified, he tells us, only if ‘matter’ is defined as nothing more than ‘a Permanent Possibility of Sensation’.7

A number of philosophers, including some of the classical British empiricists themselves, have maintained that empiricism entails that many of the beliefs that the average person would feel most confident about are unjustified. Empiricism threatens to lead us into scepticism, a denial of the possibility of knowledge. Hume, for one, is a forthright sceptic. His famous challenge to induction begins with the observation that inductive reasoning, which in this context means reasoning from particular observations to more general claims, depends on the assumption that nature is ‘uniform’ in the sense that the same fundamental regularities in nature that obtain when and where we make our observations will still obtain in all of the places, and at all of the times, to which our generalizations apply. Yet if we have made no observations in particular places and times, we have no way to know what if any regularities obtain there. This means that we have no justification for believing that the regularities that we have observed in the past will continue to obtain in the future, even for another moment, since by definition we have made no observations of the future. We cannot know that unsuspended objects will continue to fall towards the Earth, that the sun will continue to rise in the East and so on. Hume does not intend to convince us that we should not believe that the laws of physics will continue to operate in the future; indeed, he says that we cannot help but believe that they will. His point is that beliefs like this one are unjustified, however inescapable they are, so they cannot be counted among the things we know.8

As thoroughgoing as Mill’s empiricism is, though, he is no sceptic. His treatment of induction, as John Skorupski notes, anticipates the ‘naturalized epistemology’ that is today associated most closely with W. V. O. Quine. Quine argues that epistemology should be reconceptualized as a branch of empirical psychology that studies how people do in fact acquire beliefs and develop theories.9 Quine simply refuses to engage with wholesale scepticism of the Humean variety, and insofar as he offers a justification of induction at all, his answers presuppose scientific results arrived at via induction: ‘That there are or have been regularities [in nature] … is an established fact of science; and we cannot ask better than that.’10 From the standpoint of traditional epistemology, according to which refuting the sceptic is a central preoccupation, this is a viciously circular argument. It is this very conception of epistemology, though, that Quine rejects. Mill handles the problem of induction in a very similar manner. His view is that we can infer that nature is uniform by way of a ‘meta-induction’. The fact that so many inductions have been successful entitles us to infer inductively that ‘the course of nature is uniform’, an ‘induction by no means of the most obvious kind’.11 His treatment of induction in his System of Logic is intended to refine our understanding of what separates good inductive generalizations from bad ones, and to help us to make better use of inductive reasoning, and that is all.

On other points, though, Mill offers a more direct reply to the sceptic. The clearest instance of his doing this is his explanation of why we can regard the faculty of memory as generally reliable, which entails that the past is real, that is, that we were not all created this instant with a set of apparent memories. The explanation refers to the possibility of ‘intuitive knowledge’:

Dr Ward … challenges me to explain ‘where the distinction lies between acts of memory and other alleged intuitions’ which I do not admit as such. The distinction is, that as all the explanations of mental phenomena presuppose Memory, Memory itself cannot admit of being explained. Whenever this is shown to be true of any other part of our knowledge, I shall admit that part to be intuitive.12

Mill’s willingness to admit that we know intuitively that the memory is reliable may be a sign that he is willing to go a certain distance with another epistemological tradition, one that is usually seen as a competitor to empiricism. This is the so-called ‘Scottish common sense’ school. Thomas Reid is its best-known representative; others include Dugald Stewart and Sir William Hamilton. The common-sense view, like empiricism, says that experience is the primary source of our knowledge. It differs from empiricism, however, in being much freer in its claims about how much knowledge we can glean from this source. Roughly stated, the common-sense theorists assert that people share, not innate beliefs, but rather certain innate dispositions to form beliefs on the basis of experience. They maintain that ‘doxastic’ or belief-forming dispositions can be regarded as innate if – and only if – they satisfy certain conditions, such as being irresistible (that is, we feel such certainty about the beliefs to which they give rise that we cannot seriously doubt them), universally shared, and incapable of being explained as products of experience.13 Empiricists might say this much, but the common-sense theorists make a further assertion as well, which is that the beliefs generated by our innate doxastic dispositions are genuine items of intuitive knowledge. Keith Lehrer summarizes Reid’s defence of this outlook in terms of a series of claims: Without some reliance on our innate faculties, philosophical thought is impossible. Sceptics trust our faculty of reason, but they doubt our other innate faculties. There is no justification for supposing this one innate faculty to be any more trustworthy than the rest, though; if we trust one, we must trust all. So when we reason, we must take the deliverances of our other innate faculties as givens that cannot be called into question. They must serve as reason’s starting points.14 For instance, we do not know innately that matter exists independently of our own minds, according to common-sense philosophy. Nevertheless, those who hold this view maintain, given experiences that we all have, we cannot help but believe that it does. The disposition to believe this is irresistible, universally shared and the disposition itself is not one that could be acquired via experience. It is therefore an ‘original principle’ of our mind, and hence we must regard the belief to which it gives rise as a piece of intuitive knowledge.

In the passage in which he responds to Ward on the reliability of the memory, Mill implicitly concedes the converse of his final statement: Whenever anything is shown to be an intuition, he will admit that it is an item of knowledge.15 This suggests that he has one foot in the camp of common-sense philosophy, or at least a few toes. Skorupski emphasizes this affinity when he writes that ‘… Mill stands loosely in the tradition of Reid.’16 Yet on the whole Mill must still be regarded as a critic of the ‘intuitionists’, for he believes that most of those who assert that we have intuitive knowledge vastly overstate how much of it we have. The next section explains this point in more detail.

The fundamental laws of the mind

The classical British empiricists, Mill included, all accept some version of a psychological theory known as ‘associationism’. Empiricism and associationism developed together, inasmuch as both have historical roots that go back at least as far as Aristotle and both came into their own as theories in Britain during the modern period.17

Mill says that there are four basic categories of mental states: ‘Thoughts, Emotions, Volitions, and Sensations’.18 Thoughts are simply ideas, including beliefs. Volitions are ‘willings’, or in other words, choices about how to act. Because sensations are caused by ‘states of body’, the ‘laws of body’ that govern them ‘manifestly belong to the province of Physiology’. Psychology is concerned with the laws of mind that govern the production of the other three states of consciousness. In the System of Logic, Mill states what he takes to be two of the most fundamental and general principles of psychology (using Hume’s term ‘impression’). One, that ‘every mental impression has its idea’, is the converse of the empiricist contention that all of our ideas come from experience. The other is that

these ideas, or secondary mental states, are excited by our impressions, or by other ideas, according to certain laws. … Of these laws the first is, that similar ideas tend to excite one another. The second is, that when two impressions have been frequently experienced (or even thought of) either simultaneously or in immediate succession, then whenever one of these impressions, or the idea of it, recurs, it tends to excite the idea of the other. The third law is, that greater intensity in either or both of the impressions, is equivalent … to a greater frequency of conjunction.19

These laws of mental association purport to explain why ideas enter an individual’s consciousness or ‘come to mind’ when they do. The classical empiricists make subtle uses of association to explain how experience can give rise to all of our ideas, including the ideas that rationalists maintain must be innate. Ideas that are not obviously products of experience, at first glance, are shown to be complex ideas made up of simple ideas acquired by experience and compounded together by association. Mill’s approach is especially subtle because he believes that it is possible for a complex idea to be formed from simple ones in such a way that the constituent simple ideas are no longer recognizable within it. He contrasts the complex idea of an orange, in which ‘the original elements may still, by an ordinary effort of consciousness, be distinguished in the compound,’ with cases in which ‘mental phenomena, joined together by association, may form a still more intimate, and as it were chemical union – may merge into a compound, in which the separate elements are no more distinguishable as such, than hydrogen and oxygen in water. … ’20

Now we can say more about where Mill agrees and disagrees with the intuitionists. He agrees that if people universally share a disposition to form a particular belief after having ordinary human experiences, a disposition that is irresistible and that cannot be accounted for as a product of experience, then that belief can be counted among the things that we know. If there is a psychological explanation for why we are disposed to form beliefs of a certain kind that reveals that the disposition in question is acquired via experience, though, then the belief is not known intuitively to be true. In Mill’s opinion, the sorts of thinkers who are usually called intuitionists, including the devotees of common sense, are far too quick to assume that no psychological explanation can be given for the belief-forming dispositions that they treat as founts of intuitive knowledge. Mill believes that the existence of these dispositions can nearly always be accounted for in terms of the association of ideas, and hence he believes that there are at most a very few fundamental truths that can be known via intuition. (That the memory is reliable is the only item of intuitive knowledge that he explicitly acknowledges that we possess.) This explains why, for example, he disagrees with the common-sense philosophers when they say that we have intuitive knowledge of the existence of matter, where matter is conceived of as a substance that exists independently of minds. Association, he maintains, can account for why we are disposed to form this belief.21

The laws of association apply to more than ideas. In the Logic, Mill states that ‘A desire, an emotion, an idea of the higher order of abstraction, even our judgements and volitions when they have become habitual, are called up by association, according to precisely the same laws as our simple ideas.’22 This aspect of human nature plays a pivotal role in Mill’s moral philosophy. It means that by way of association we can come to have new desires, and chapter 3 will demonstrate that this is very important in the context of Mill’s conception of happiness. It also means that ways of thinking, feeling and acting can become habitual for us; we will return to this point later in this chapter.

Mill does not claim that association entirely explains human feelings and actions, however, for he accepts that there are some ‘primitive’ or pre-associational factors at work as well, factors that have their roots in physiology. This makes him more willing than his father to recognize inherent individual differences between people in terms of their abilities and their susceptibilities to different pleasures and pains. Mill’s biographer Michael St. John Packe reminds us that ‘According to James Mill’s theory, all minds started as much alike as all stomachs or all hands or any other physical organs. … Thus, minds differed only in so far as they recorded different chains of experiences, and from them formed different habits of association.’23

This is why James Mill did not seek any evidence of John’s superior ability before commencing with his demanding scheme of education; he assumed that any child could be made into a genius if the right instruction were supplied at an early age. John Mill, in contrast, is willing to recognize that there are organic (today we would say genetic) differences between people that may produce individual peculiarities in their mental make-ups. For example, he allows that differences in people’s nervous systems may affect how strongly they experience various sensations, and this in turn may affect what associations they form. Differences in the relative intensities with which people experience distinct physical pleasures may have significant effects on what they desire and how strongly they desire it.24 Furthermore, ‘mere differences in the intensity of the sensations generally’ may even produce ‘different qualities of mind, different types of mental character’.25

Mill recognizes too that at the level of the species as a whole there is a shared ‘animal’ element in human psychology and an ‘instinctive’ element in human behaviour. He hastens to add, though, that this claim ‘in no way conflicts with the indisputable fact that these instincts may be modified to any extent … by other mental influences, and by education’.26 Mill identifies the growth of civilization, in large part, with the overcoming of the instinctive behaviours that are characteristic of humans in a ‘savage’ condition.27

Sympathy and attention

Mill attaches tremendous importance to the human capacity for sympathy, for reasons that will emerge over the course of this study.28 His understanding of sympathy is generally similar to that of Hume, who takes it to be ‘a disposition we have to feel what others are feeling’.29 If it differs at all, Mill’s conception of sympathy is perhaps a bit broader; he refers approvingly to his friend and biographer Alexander Bain’s description of it as the disposition or capacity ‘of taking on the emotions, or mental states generally, of others’.30 The simplest form of sympathy is the one Mill describes when he writes that ‘The idea of the pain of another is naturally painful; the idea of the pleasure of another is naturally pleasurable.’31 Here is a motive for helping others: pleasing someone with whom you sympathize also pleases you.

Mill sees sympathy as a part of our ‘natural constitution’; even children possess it. Yet there is still a sense in which sympathy is acquired. In order for sympathy to operate we must make someone else’s feelings an object of our attention. This is why ‘There is no selfishness equal to that of children. … The pains of others, though naturally painful to us, are not so until we have realised them by an act of imagination, implying voluntary attention; and that no young child ever pays, while under the impulse of a present desire.’32 What children lack is the habit of paying attention to others’ feelings. Unless and until we develop the habit of focusing our attention on someone else’s feelings, it will be rare that we sympathize strongly with him or her.

What habits we form governing the bestowal of our attention on the sentiments of other people will depend on the extent to which our daily life forces us to do so. We all have a few people whose feelings we must pay attention to, because we cannot get what we need from them otherwise. As Mill recognizes, though, it is perfectly possible for someone’s sympathy and benevolence to be limited to a very tight circle of intimates: ‘[S]ympathetic characters, left uncultivated, and given up to their sympathetic instincts, are as selfish as others. … [T]hey may be very amiable and delightful to those with whom they sympathize, and grossly unjust and unfeeling to the rest of the world.’33

Whether you need to pay much attention to the feelings of any wider group of people will depend on how your society operates and your place in it. The question is whether there are people to whose feelings you are forced to pay attention. Mill thinks that one concomitant of increasing civilization is a widening of people’s sympathies: ‘Not only does all strengthening of social ties, and all healthy growth of society, give to each individual a stronger personal interest in practically consulting the welfare of others; it also leads him to identify his feelings more and more with their good, or at least with an even greater degree of practical consideration for it. … ’34 While Mill believes that civilization is ‘increasing’ in the West, in this sense and others, he does not believe that there is anything inevitable about this process continuing.

The moral feelings

We have seen that Mill is generally hostile to intuitionism, not because he denies that anything is known by intuition but because he believes that the so-called intuitionists tend to exaggerate wildly how much is known in this way.35 He reserves his deepest scorn for ‘moral intuitionism’, the doctrine that we can have intuitive knowledge of moral rules. Defenders of moral intuitionism like Adam Sedgwick, William Whewell and William Hamilton maintain that the moral feelings, the feelings of moral approval or disapproval that we experience towards our own actions and those of others, are a reliable source of moral knowledge.36 They typically depict these feelings as having been given to us by God for this purpose, making them an innate element of human nature. Mill’s critique of moral intuitionism comprises four claims:

1 Associationism better explains the existence of the moral feelings.

2 Moral intuitionism impedes moral progress by teaching that there is no need to call into question whatever moral views happen to be prevalent.

3 Moral intuitionism is pluralistic to the point of being indeterminate because it teaches that there are a number of general moral rules but gives us no guidance about how to act when these rules conflict (an oversight that you would hardly expect if humans came pre-equipped with a moral sense courtesy of an omniscient God).

4 Moral intuitionism by itself has no power to explain why the rules of morality are what they are and, on those few occasions when intuitionist philosophers have sought to provide such explanations, they have inevitably fallen back on utilitarian reasoning.

Discussion of the last three parts of this critique will need to wait until chapter 6. Mill’s dispute with the intuitionists over the nature and origin of the moral feelings, however, is a question about human nature. He employs the name ‘feeling of duty’ for the ‘mass of feeling which must be broken through in order to do what violates our standard of right, and which, if we do nevertheless violate that standard, will probably have to be encountered afterwards in the form of remorse.’37 The feeling of duty’s source is the conscience, which Mill describes as the ‘internal sanction of duty’.38 When experienced after the fact, this feeling also bears the more common names of guilt and self-reproach. The emotion of guilt occupies a central place in Mill’s distinctive moral theory, as will become clear in chapter 6. However, it is worth emphasizing that the conscience does more than make us feel guilty after we have acted. As the passage just quoted suggests, it can also act while a person is deliberating about what to do, with the result that ‘the idea of placing himself in such a situation is so painful, that he cannot dwell upon it long enough to have even the physical power of perpetrating the crime.’39

In opposition to the intuitionists, Mill holds that the feeling of duty is ‘implanted’, that is, acquired through experience, rather than innate.40