Copyright 1996, 1998, and 2000 by Tad Beckman, Harvey Mudd College
John Stuart Mill was born in London, England, on May 20, 1806. His father, James Mill, soon met Jeremy Bentham and became an advocate of Bentham's philosophical ideas for the remainder of his life. Mill was so very much devoted to Bentham, in fact, that he dedicated his son, John Stuart to Bentham's "utilitarianism" and embarked on a comprehensive and carefully managed program of instruction.
James Mill managed his son's entire formal education! This began, at the age of three with the study of Greek. He began Latin at eight and philosophy at twelve; he was already reading classics by that time. Mill's education also included law, travel, and the constant presence of great intellects who surrounded Bentham and James Mill. In 1823 Mill's formal education ended and he went to work as his father's assistant in the East India Company. Like his father, John Stuart became a lifetime employ of East India Company and worked his way upward to a high rank, until the company was dissolved, in 1865. At that point, Mill retired and spent the rest of his life living in both France and England. He died in Avignon, France, in 1873.
As a young man, John Stuart Mill was a radical Benthamite. He founded the Utilitarian Society, which met at Bentham's residence, and also established the Benthamite journal Westminster Review. Nevertheless, at the age of twenty, Mill's directions began to turn, prompted by a nervous breakdown and "a crisis in [his] mental history." His strict Benthamite education had, in his own view, left him devoid of feelings and emotions. His father had made reason into a religion; everything else had been completely neglected. So John Stuart set forth on a mission to educate his other side, studying music, poetry, and art. He was left with bitter feelings toward his father; the relationship remained difficult until his father's death in 1832.
By Mill's twenty-fifth year, his education in humanity took a new and crucial turn. He became "intimate and confidential" friends with the young, attractive wife of a prosperous merchant. Harriet Taylor was an intelligent woman and radical political writer in her own right; Mill praised her "meditative and poetic nature" and her "gifts of feeling and imagination." Max Lerner saw her as "the greatest shaping force of his mind." The two balanced each other well and Mill liberally credited her with her humane and social contributions to his works. In the dedication to his On Liberty Mill wrote, "To the beloved and deplored memory of her who was the inspirer, and in part the author, of all that is best in my writings."
Harriet's husband tolerated their intimate relationship over a period of twenty years; though London society took a dimmer view of it. Ironically, Harriet and John Stuart were Victorians to the end and the relationship, as disclosed in their extensive correspondence, was completely Platonic. Eventually, however, Harriet separated from her husband and lived alone, until his death in 1849. In 1851, John Stuart and Harriet were married and began a quiet and secluded relationship that lasted until Harriet's sudden death, in 1858, on a holiday in Avignon. It was in this way that Mill had brought together the two necessary ingredients of a balanced life --- logic and emotion, his father and his wife.
Mill's writing covered the entire span of his lifetime even though it was entirely by way of an avocation. Until his retirement, at the age of fifty-two, he wrote during evenings, weekends, and on holidays; only after retirement could he devote full time to his projects. Mill's first argumentative essay was published when he was sixteen; from that time onward, he was a regular contributor to radical Benthamite journals. In 1827, at the age of twenty-one, he published an edition of Bentham's five-volume treatise, The Rationale of Judicial Evidence. In his mid-twenties, he wrote a distinguished series of articles, later published as Essays on Some Unsettled Questions of Political Economy (1844). By 1843, he had also published his own first full work, A System of Logic. By 1848 and now under the influence of his relationship with Harriet Taylor, Mill produced another successful book, Principles of Political Economy. Mill's reputation is owed, however, to a succession of books that were evidently planned and extensively discussed with his wife throughout the 1850's. These all appeared after her death in 1858. The first of these were On Liberty (1859) and Thoughts on Parliamentary Reform (1859). Considerations on Representative Government followed in 1861 and Utilitarianism in 1863. An important piece that certainly bore the stamp of his life's love was The Subjection of Women (1869). Mill left behind a number of pieces that remained to be published after his death --- including his Autobiography, The Utility of Religion, and On Social Freedom.
Mill was caught up in a revolutionary period during which British society was being rapidly transformed. One should remember, in fact, that all of Europe was in revolution throughout Mill's life and that Karl Marx's earliest writings date from 1843-4, when Mill published his . . . Logic. By 1849, Marx had fled to Mill's England where he lived and wrote on political economy and revolution for the rest of his life. Yet Mill knew nothing of Marx and was, indeed, caught up in an entirely different millieu. His world was a radical middle class that was fully steeped in classical Liberalism and scientifically enlightened. Mill's essays stripped away at the veneers of mysticism and aristocratic privilege. But Mill eventually found himself at the rational, materialistic, and democratic bottomland, where he was heavily influenced by Alexis de Tocqueville's analysis of Democracy in America. In Mill's later life he became skeptical that shear numbers of people mattered and struggled to identify the forces that erect and maintain a sense of quality. He had, by the publication of Utilitarianism, gone far beyond Bentham's simplistic quantitative assessments of the pleasures and had asserted, instead, the concept of the qualitative differences in the pleasures that must guide people. Of course, this did nothing but re-open all the classic questions and arguments that seek to understand how judgments of quality arise and how they can fare in critical discussion. When it came to judgments of quality, Mill was unwilling to believe that the common man would have much to say; instead, he looked to wealth, position, and intellect. Ironically, Marx and other revolutionaries of the political economy suffered the same fate. Once the proletariat had been released from oppression, they were never entirely happy to have intellectual "theorists" dictate the future "practice" of the revolution.
Sources: Shields, Currin V. "Introduction" in Mill, John Stuart. On Liberty (Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1956), Lerner, Max. "Introduction" in Essential Works of John Stuart Mill (Bantam Books, 1961), and W. T. Jones. A History of Western Philosophy, Vol. 4, Kant and the 19th Century (Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1975).
Perhaps the most important and pressing issue in philosophy is the question, How can we live well? For Aristotle, we must first learn to behave well as a matter of habit, and then we can begin the development of conscious ethical living. Aristotle left no doubt that happiness is the final end of human development, but he also devoted considerable attention to arguments against accepting pleasure as definitive of happiness. Instead, Aristotle believed that happiness is achieved in the development of character that comes from the deliberate practice of reason engaged with concepts of virtue, as determined by the rule of the mean. The final cause of human development was the human telos, or perfection. Aristotle was no simple hedonist.
Mill's ethical philosophy shared certain points in common with Aristotle's. The adoption of happiness as the obvious final end of human action is one of these. Of deeper significance, however, Mill shared Aristotle's belief that we are guided by the beliefs of the society in which we develop. For Mill, the whole history of society is an empirical basis from which we can draw useful judgments about pleasures and pains, especially about the "higher pleasures." When it comes to an understanding of happiness, however, Kant seems to have been closer to Aristotle than Mill, since Kant judged that the practical reason is crucial to the moral life. Mill frequently employed the terms 'happiness' and 'pleasure' as though they were synonymous. He was separated from pure hedonists only by the fact that he discriminated between higher and lower pleasures, clearly viewing happiness as something built out of the ascent into an experience of higher pleasures, and the fact that he took the moral life to seek happiness for the greatest number.
When asked to defend Utilitarianism, Mill was an empiricist through and through. If you want to know to what end people aspire, you need only look at the people. The answer does not lie in reason or intuition or in metaphysics. It lies in actual practice. Thus, for Mill, the law of living well was simply the law of increasing pleasure and decreasing pain in all our acts. That, clearly, is the way that all people want to live and see as the final end, the achievement of happiness. This would be pure hedonism, but it is not Mill's doctrine. In fact, Mill defines Utilitarianism, always, as the pursuit of pleasure for the greatest number and reduction of pain for the greatest number. We should act, then, so far as we can, for the greatest happiness of all. This, of course, is a very different doctrine than pure hedonism and it is also very unlikely that we would find this has empirical validity. How, then, can we explain Mill's confidence in the doctrine of utility, as interpreted in this universal sense?
Mill seems to believe that Utilitarianism is empirically true because we can observe that all people believe this for themselves. That is, because each person wants his/her pleasure, we all collectively want pleasure; hence, we should act in such a way as to increase pleasure for all. Unfortunately, the logic does not seem to be there. If there is some justification to be found, it would seem to lie in traditional English political theories. Thus, the final long chapter on justice is actually quite relevant to the argument as a whole. When one acts, one acts within political society; inherently, this means that no act can be entirely for oneself alone. In some sense, having committed oneself to life in society, it would be inconsistent to act in such a way as to harm others, hence to harm society itself. That is, one's own happiness is fundamentally tied to the collective happiness. Justice, as Mill seems to define it, would seem to be a matter of always leaving others free to experience and develop their own happiness. That is, justice is appreciating the rights held by others. This, then, is how we should understand (empirically) a people's sense that they must act in such a way as to increase the collective happiness.
In the end, Mill's interests go beyond merely encouraging individuals to secure their own happiness. Mill was a social reformer who recognized that the individual's happiness is connected with the collective happiness. We must all act in such a way as at least to make happiness available to all, while genuinely seeking the higher forms of happiness ourselves.
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