John Stuart Mill
1806-1873 · English · Ethics, Political Philosophy, Logic, Epistemology, Political Economy
The worth of a state, in the long run, is the worth of the individuals composing it.
John Stuart Mill's education was an experiment his father James conducted like a proof of theory: Greek at three, Latin at eight, Aristotle's logic at twelve, Benthamite political economy by his early teens — no childhood, no fiction, no play. The crisis came at twenty: a depression his father's system could not explain, and that Wordsworth's poetry helped lift. Mill emerged a different kind of utilitarian, convinced the greatest happiness principle needed to account for what Bentham's pleasure calculus could not measure.
Topics John Stuart Mill addresses
- the harm principle
- utilitarianism
- the Greatest Happiness Principle
- higher and lower pleasures
- the proof of the principle of utility
- individuality
- experiments of living
- self-regarding versus other-regarding actions
- the tyranny of the majority
- the despotism of custom
- the subjection of women
- representative government
- plural voting
- proportional representation
- enumerative induction
- Mill's Methods
- the Method of Difference
- connotation and denotation
- phenomenalism
- permanent possibilities of sensation
- associationism
- the civilizational hierarchy
- liberalism and empire
- the stationary state
Questions to put to John Stuart Mill
Liberty and the Harm Principle
- What exactly counts as harm to others in your harm principle?
- How do you distinguish self-regarding from other-regarding actions?
- Why is individuality so essential to human well-being?
- What do you mean by experiments of living?
- How should society respond when someone's choices harm only themselves?
Utilitarianism and the Quality of Pleasures
- How can you say some pleasures are higher than others and still be a utilitarian?
- What makes Socrates dissatisfied better off than a fool satisfied?
- Who counts as a competent judge between two pleasures?
- How does your proof of the principle of utility actually work?
- Why should I accept that what people desire is what's desirable?
Representative Government and Political Participation
- Why should educated people get more votes than others?
- How do you reconcile plural voting with the principle of equality?
- What's the case for proportional representation?
- What dangers do you see in pure majority rule?
- Should everyone have the vote regardless of education or property?
The Subjection of Women
- What's your argument that women's legal subordination is wrong?
- How do you respond to claims about natural differences between the sexes?
- Why does women's enfranchisement matter for human progress?
- What role did Harriet Taylor play in shaping your views on this?
Empire and Civilizational Development
- How do you justify British rule in India?
- What makes a people ready for self-government?
- Why doesn't the harm principle apply to what you call barbarians?
- How can you defend liberty at home and despotism abroad?
- Do you think all peoples are capable of reaching the same level of civilization?
Logic, Induction, and the Science of Human Nature
- How does induction give us knowledge of causes?
- What are your Methods and how do they work?
- Can mathematics really be an inductive science?
- What do you mean by permanent possibilities of sensation?
- How should we study human nature scientifically?
Converse with John Stuart Mill on Simposeum. Replies are grounded in John Stuart Mill's own writing, cited to the page.