John Stuart Mill (1806-1873)

John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) profoundly influenced the shape of
nineteenth century British thought and political discourse. His
substantial corpus of works includes texts in logic, epistemology,
economics, social and political philosophy, ethics, metaphysics,
religion, and current affairs. Among his most well-known and
significant are A System of Logic, Principles of Political Economy, On
Liberty, Utilitarianism, The Subjection of Women, Three Essays on
Religion, and his Autobiography.Mill's education at the hands of his
imposing father, James Mill, fostered both intellectual development
(Greek at the age of three, Latin at eight) and a propensity towards
reform. James Mill and Jeremy Bentham led the "Philosophic Radicals,"
who advocated for rationalization of the law and legal institutions,
universal male suffrage, the use of economic theory in political
decision-making, and a politics oriented by human happiness rather
than natural rights or conservatism. In his twenties, the younger Mill
felt the influence of historicism, French social thought, and
Romanticism, in the form of thinkers like Coleridge, the St.
Simonians, Thomas Carlyle, Goethe, and Wordsworth. This led him to
begin searching for a new philosophic radicalism that would be more
sensitive to the limits on reform imposed by culture and history and
would emphasize the cultivation of our humanity, including the
cultivation of dispositions of feeling and imagination (something he
thought had been lacking in his own education).

None of Mill's major writings remain independent of his moral,
political, and social agenda. Even the most abstract works, such as
the System of Logic and his Examination of Sir William Hamilton's
Philosophy, serve polemical purposes in the fight against the German,
or a priori, school otherwise called "intuitionism." On Mill's view,
intuitionism needed to be defeated in the realms of logic,
mathematics, and philosophy of mind if its pernicious effects in
social and political discourse were to be mitigated.

In his writings, Mill argues for a number of controversial principles.
He defends radical empiricism in logic and mathematics, suggesting
that basic principles of logic and mathematics are generalizations
from experience rather than known a priori. The principle of
utility—that "actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote
happiness; wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness"—was
the centerpiece of his ethical philosophy. On Liberty puts forward the
"harm principle" that "the only purpose for which power can be
rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against
his will, is to prevent harm to others." In The Subjection of Women,
he compares the legal status of women to the status of slaves and
argues for equality in marriage and under the law.

This article provides an overview of Mill's life and major works,
focusing on his key arguments and their relevant historical contexts.

1. Biography

Writing of John Stuart Mill a few days after Mill's death, Henry
Sidgwick claimed, "I should say that from about 1860-65 or thereabouts
he ruled England in the region of thought as very few men ever did: I
do not expect to see anything like it again." (Collini 1991, 178).
Mill established this rule over English thought through his writings
in logic, epistemology, economics, social and political philosophy,
ethics, metaphysics, religion, and current affairs. One can say with
relative security, looking at the breadth and complexity of his work,
that Mill was the greatest nineteenth century British philosopher.

This rule did not come about accidentally. It had been planned by his
father James Mill from the younger Mill's birth on May 20, 1806. The
elder Mill was a towering figure for his eldest child, and Mill's
story must be told through his father's. James Mill was born in
Scotland in 1773 to a family of modest means. Through the patronage of
Sir John and Lady Jane Stuart, he was able to attend the University of
Edinburgh, which at the time was one of the finest universities in
Europe. He trained for the Presbyterian ministry under the auspices of
admired teachers like Dugald Stewart, who was an effective popularizer
of Thomas Reid's philosophy.

After a brief and generally unsuccessful stint as a minister, James
Mill moved to London, where he began his career in letters. This was a
difficult path for a man of very modest resources to take; he and his
wife Harriet (married 1805) lived without financial security for well
over a decade. It was only with the publication of his The History of
British India in 1818—a work that took twelve years to write—that Mill
was able to land a stable, well paying job at the East India Company
that enabled him to support his large family (ultimately consisting of
his wife and nine children).

Throughout the years of relative poverty, James Mill received
assistance from friends including the great legal theorist and
utilitarian reformer Jeremy Bentham, whom he met in 1808. The two men
helped lead the movement of "Philosophic Radicals" that gave
intellectual heft to the British Radical party of the early to
mid-nineteenth century. Among their colleagues were David Ricardo,
George Grote, Sir William Molesworth, John Austin, and Francis Place.

This philosophically inspired radicalism of the early nineteenth
century positioned itself against the Whigs and Tories. The Radicals
advocated for legal and political reform, universal male suffrage, the
use of economic theory (especially Ricardo's) in political
decision-making, and a politics oriented by human happiness rather
than by conservatism or by natural rights (which Bentham famously
derided as "nonsense upon stilts"). Moreover, one aspect of their
political temperament that distinguished them from Whigs and Tories
was their rationalism—their willingness to recommend re-structuring
social and political institutions under the explicit guidance of
principles of reason (e.g. the principle of utility).

With Bentham's financial support, the Radicals founded the Westminster
Review (1824) to counter the Whig Edinburgh Review (1802) and the Tory
Quarterly Review (1809). While Whig intellectuals and Radicals tended
to align with each other on economic issues, both tending towards
pro-urban, pro-industrial, laissez-faire policies, Tory intellectuals
focused on defending traditional British social structures and ways of
life associated with aristocratic agrarianism. These alliances can be
seen in disputes over the Tory-supported Corn Laws, legislation meant
to protect domestic agriculture by taxing imported grains.

Though Whigs and Radicals were often allied (eventually forming the
Liberal party in the 1840s), some of the most acrimonious political
and intellectual rows of the period were over their differences (for
example, Macaulay's famous public disputes with James Mill over
political theorizing). James Mill saw the Whigs as too imbued with
aristocratic interests to be a true organ of democratic reform. Only
the Radicals could properly advocate for the middle and working
classes. Moreover, unlike the Radicals, who possessed a systematic
politics guided by the principle of utility (the principle that set
the promotion of aggregate happiness as the standard for legislation
and action), the Whigs lacked a systematic politics. The Whigs
depended instead on a loose empiricism, which the senior Mill took as
an invitation to complacency. Whigs, alternatively, took exception to
the rationalistic tenor of the Radicals' politics, seeing in it a
dangerous psychological and historical naiveté. They also reacted to
the extremity of the Radicals' reformist temperaments, which revealed
hostility to the Anglican church and to religion more generally.

The younger Mill was seen as the crown prince of the Philosophic
Radical movement and his famous education reflected the hopes of his
father and Bentham. Under the dominating gaze of his father, he was
taught Greek beginning at age three and Latin at eight. He read
histories, many of the Greek and Roman classics, and Newton by eleven.
He studied logic and math, moving to political economy and legal
philosophy in his early teens, and then went on to metaphysics. His
training facilitated active command of the material through the
requirement that he teach his younger siblings and through evening
walks with his father when the precocious pupil would have to tell his
father what he had learned that day. His year in France in 1820 led to
a fluency in French and initiated his life-long interest in French
thought and politics. As he matured, his father and Bentham both
employed him as an editor. In addition, he founded a number of
intellectual societies and study groups and began to contribute to
periodicals, including the Westminster Review.

The stress of his education and of his youthful activity combined with
other factors to lead to what he later termed, in his Autobiography,
his "mental crisis" of 1826. There have been a wide variety of
attempts to explain what led to this crisis—most of which center
around his relation to his demanding father—but what matters most
about the crisis is that it represents the beginning of Mill's
struggle to revise his father's and Bentham's thought, which he grew
to think of as limited in a number of ways. Mill claims that he began
to come out of his depression with the help of poetry (specifically
Wordsworth). This contributed to his sense that while his education
had fostered his analytic abilities, it had left his capacity for
feeling underdeveloped. This realization made him re-think the
attachment to the radical, rationalistic strands of Enlightenment
thought that his education was meant to promote.

In response to this crisis, Mill began exploring Romanticism and a
variety of other European intellectual movements that rejected
secular, naturalistic, worldly conceptions of human nature. He also
became interested in criticisms of urbanization and industrialization.
These explorations were furthered by the writings of (and frequent
correspondence with) thinkers from a wide sampling of intellectual
traditions, including Thomas Carlyle, Auguste Comte, Alexis de
Tocqueville, John Ruskin, M. Gustave d'Eichtal (and other St.
Simonians), Herbert Spencer, Frederick Maurice, and John Sterling.

The attempt to rectify the perceived deficiencies of the Philosophic
Radicals through engagement with other styles of thought began with
Mill's editing of a new journal, the London Review, founded by the two
Mills and Charles Molesworth. Molesworth quickly bought out the old
Westminster Review in 1834, to leave the new London and Westminster
Review as the unopposed voice of the radicals. With James Mill's death
in 1836 and Bentham's 1832 demise, Mill had more intellectual freedom.
He used that freedom to forge a new "philosophic radicalism" that
incorporated the insights of thinkers like Coleridge and Thomas
Carlyle. (Collected Works [CW], I.209). One of his principal goals was
"to shew that there was a Radical philosophy, better and more complete
than Bentham's, while recognizing and incorporating all of Bentham's
which is permanently valuable." (CW, I.221).

This project is perhaps best indicated by Mill's well-known essays of
1838 and 1840 on Bentham and Coleridge, which were published in the
London and Westminster Review. Mill suggested that Bentham and
Coleridge were "the two great seminal minds of England in their age"
and used each essay to show their strengths and weaknesses, implying
that a more complete philosophical position remained open for
articulation. Mill would spend his career attempting to carry that
out.

Harriet Taylor, friend, advisor, and eventual wife, helped him with
this project. He met Taylor in 1830 and she was to join James Mill as
one of the two most important people in Mill's life. Unfortunately for
Mill, Taylor was married. After two decades of an intense and somewhat
scandalous platonic relationship, they were married in 1851 after her
husband's death. Her death in 1858 left him inconsolable.

There has been substantial debate about the nature and extent of
Harriet Taylor's influence on Mill. Beyond question is that Mill found
in her a partner, friend, critic, and someone who encouraged him. Mill
was probably most swayed by her in the realms of political, ethical,
and social thought, but less so in the areas of logic and political
economy (with the possible exception of his views on socialism).

Mill's day-to-day existence was dominated by his work at the East
India Company, though his job required little time, paid him well, and
left him ample opportunity for writing. He began there in 1826,
working under his father, and by his retirement in 1857, he held the
same position as his father, chief examiner, which put him in charge
of the memoranda guiding the company's policies in India.

On his retirement and after the death of his wife, Mill was recruited
to stand for a Parliamentary seat. Though he was not particularly
effective during his one term as an MP, he participated in three
dramatic events. (Capaldi 2004, 326-7). First, Mill attempted to amend
the 1867 Reform Bill to substitute "person" for "man" so that the
franchise would be extended to women. Though the effort failed, it
generated momentum for women's suffrage. Second, he headed the Jamaica
Committee, which pushed (unsuccessfully) for the prosecution of
Governor Eyre of Jamaica, who had imposed brutal martial law after an
uprising by blacks. Third, Mill used his influence with the leaders of
the laboring classes to defuse a potentially dangerous confrontation
between government troops and workers who were protesting the defeat
of the 1866 Reform Bill.

After his term in Parliament ended and he was not re-elected, Mill
began spending more time in France, writing, walking, and living with
his wife's daughter, Helen Taylor. It was to her that he uttered his
last words in 1873, "You know that I have done my work." He was buried
next to his wife, Harriet.

Though Mill's influence has waxed and waned since his death, his
writings in ethics and social and political philosophy continue to be
read most often. Many of his texts—particularly On Liberty,
Utilitarianism, The Subjection of Women, and his
Autobiography—continue to be reprinted and taught in universities
throughout the world.
2. Works

Mill wrote on a startling number of topics. All his major texts,
however, play a role in defending his new philosophic radicalism and
the intellectual, moral, political, and social agendas associated with
it.
a. A System of Logic

Though Mill's biography reveals his openness to intellectual
exploration, his most basic philosophical commitment—to
naturalism—never seriously wavers. He is committed to the idea that
our best methods of explaining the world are those employed by the
natural sciences. Anything that we can know about human minds and
wills comes from treating them as part of the causal order
investigated by the sciences, rather than as special entities that lie
outside it.

By taking the methods of the natural sciences as the only route to
knowledge about the world, Mill sees himself as rejecting the "German,
or a priori view of human knowledge," (CW, I.233) or, as he also calls
it, "intuitionism," which was espoused in different ways by Kant,
Reid, and their followers in Britain (e.g. Whewell and Hamilton).
Though there are many differences among intuitionist thinkers, one
"grand doctrine" that Mill suggests they all affirm is the view that
"the constitution of the mind is the key to the constitution of
external nature—that the laws of the human intellect have a necessary
correspondence with the objective laws of the universe, such that
these may be inferred from those." (CW, XI.343). The intuitionist
doctrine conceives of nature as being largely or wholly constituted by
the mind rather than more or less imperfectly observed by it. One of
the great dangers presented by this doctrine, from the perspective of
Mill's a posteriori school, is that it supports the belief that one
can know universal truths about the world through evidence (including
intuitions or Kantian categories of the understanding) provided by the
mind alone rather than by nature. If the mind constitutes the world
that we experience, then we can understand the world by understanding
the mind. It was this freedom from appeal to nature and the lack of
independent (i.e. empirical) checks to the knowledge claims associated
with it that Mill found so disturbing.

For Mill, the problems with intuitionism extend far beyond the
metaphysical and epistemological to the moral and political. As Mill
says in his Autobiography when discussing his important treatise of
1843, A System of Logic:

The notion that truths external to the mind may be known by intuition
or consciousness, independently of observation and experience, is, I
am persuaded, in these times, the great intellectual support of false
doctrines and bad institutions. By the aid of this theory, every
inveterate belief and every intense feeling, of which the origin is
not remembered, is enabled to dispense with the obligation of
justifying itself by reason, and is erected into its own
all-sufficient voucher and justification. There never was such an
instrument devised for consecrating all deep-seated prejudices. And
the chief strength of this false philosophy in morals, politics, and
religion, lies in the appeal which it is accustomed to make to the
evidence of mathematics and of the cognate branches of physical
science. To expel it from these, is to drive it from its stronghold.
(CW, I.233)

This charge against intuitionism, that it frees one from the
obligation of justifying one's beliefs, has strong roots in
philosophic radicalism. We find Bentham, in his 1789 An Introduction
to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, attacking non-utilitarian
moral systems for just this reason: "They consist all of them in so
many contrivances for avoiding the obligation of appealing to any
external standard, and for prevailing upon the reader to accept of the
author's sentiment or opinion as a reason and that a sufficient one
for itself." (IPML, II.14). Mill thus saw his own commitment to the
naturalism and empiricism of the "a posteriori school" of thought as
part of a broader social and political agenda that advocated for
reform and also undercut traditional foundations of conservatism.

Intuitionism, however, is often taken to be on much firmer ground than
empiricism when it comes to accounting for our knowledge of
mathematics and logic. This is especially true if one rejects the
idea, found in people like Hobbes and Hume, that mathematical
propositions like 2 + 3 = 5 are true merely because of the meaning of
the constituents of the proposition, or, as Hume puts it, because of
the proposition's "relations of ideas." Mill agrees with those
(including Kant) who maintain that logical and mathematical truths are
not merely linguistic—that they contain substantive, non-linguistic
information. But this leaves Mill with the problem of accounting for
the apparent necessity of such truths—a necessity which seems to rule
out their origin in experience. To successfully attack intuitionism in
"its stronghold," the System of Logic needs to provide alternative
grounds for basic principles of logic and mathematics (e.g. the
principle of non-contradiction). In particular, Mill needs to show how
"that peculiar character of what are called necessary truths" may be
explained from experience and association alone.

The object of logic "is to ascertain how we come by that portion of
our knowledge (much the greatest portion) which is not intuitive: and
by what criterion we can, in matters not self-evident, distinguish
between things proved and things not proved, between what is worthy
and what is unworthy of belief." (A System of Logic [System], I.i.1).
It should be noted that logic goes beyond formal logic for Mill and
into the conditions of truth more generally.

The text has the following basic structure. Book I addresses names and
propositions. Books II and III examine deduction and induction,
respectively. Book IV discusses a variety of operations of the mind,
including observation, abstraction and naming, which are presupposed
in all induction or instrumental to more complicated forms of
induction. Book V reveals fallacies of reasoning. Finally, in Book VI,
Mill treats the "moral sciences" and argues for the fundamental
similarity of the methods of the natural and human sciences. In fact,
the human sciences can be understood as themselves natural sciences
with human objects of study.
i. Names, Propositions, and the Principles of Logic and Mathematics

Mill's argument that the principles of mathematics and logic are
justified by appeal to experience depends upon his distinction between
verbal and real propositions, that is, between propositions that do
not convey new information to the person who understands the meaning
of the proposition's terms and those propositions that do convey new
information. The point of the distinction between verbal and real
propositions is, first, to stress that all real propositions are a
posteriori. Second, the distinction emphasizes that verbal
propositions are empty of content; they tell us about language (i.e.
what words mean) rather than about the world. In Kantian terms, Mill
wants to deny the possibility of synthetic a priori propositions,
while contending that we can still make sense of our knowledge of
subjects like logic and mathematics.

This distinction between verbal and real propositions depends, in
turn, upon Mill's analysis of the meaning of propositions, i.e. how
the meanings of constituents of propositions determine the meaning of
the whole. A proposition, in which something is affirmed or denied of
something, is formed by putting together two "names" or terms (subject
and predicate) and a copula. The subject is the name "denoting the
person or thing which something is affirmed or denied of." (System,
I.i.2). The predicate is "the name denoting that which is affirmed or
denied." The copula is "the sign denoting that there is an affirmation
or denial," which thereby enables "the hearer or reader to distinguish
a proposition from any other kind of discourse." In the proposition
'gold is yellow' for example, the copula 'is' shows that the quality
yellow is being affirmed of the substance gold.

Mill divides names into general and singular names. All names, except
proper names (e.g. Ringo, Buckley, etc) and names that signify an
attribute only (e.g. whiteness, length), have a connotation and a
denotation. That is, they both connote or imply some attribute(s) and
denote or pick out individuals that fall under that description. The
general name "man," for example, denotes Socrates, Picasso, Plutarch
and an indefinite number of other individuals, and it does so because
they all share some attribute(s) (e.g. rational animal, featherless
biped, etc.) connoted by man. The name "white" denotes all white
things and implies or connotes the attribute whiteness. The word
"whiteness," by contrast, denotes or signifies an attribute but does
not connote an attribute. Instead, it operates like a proper name in
that its meaning derives entirely from what it denotes.

The meaning of a typical proposition is that the thing(s) denoted by
the subject has the attribute(s) connoted by the predicate. In
sentences like "Eleanor is tired" and "All men are mortal," though the
subjects pick out their objects differently (through a proper name and
through an attribute, respectively), Mill's basic story about the
meaning of propositions holds.

Things become much more difficult with identity statements like
"Hesperus is Phosphorus." In this case, we have two proper names that
pick out the same object (the planet Venus). Under Mill's view, these
proper names should have the same meaning because they denote the same
object. But this appears untenable because the statement seems
informative. It doesn't seem plausible that the proposition merely
states that an object is identical with itself, which would be the
proposition's meaning if Mill's views on the meaning of proper names
were correct. (See Frege and Russell's attack on Mill's account of the
meaning of proper names; but see Kripke's sophisticate defense of Mill
on this in Naming and Necessity).

This discussion of the nature of names or terms enables us to
understand Mill's treatment of verbal and real propositions. Verbal
propositions assert something about the meaning of names rather than
about matters of fact. This means that, "(s)ince names and their
signification are entirely arbitrary, such propositions are not,
strictly speaking, susceptible of truth or falsity, but only of
conformity or disconformity to usage or convention." (System, I.vi.1).
This kind of proposition simply "asserts of a thing under a particular
name, only what is asserted of it in the fact of calling it by that
name; and which, therefore, either gives no information, or gives it
respecting the name, not the thing." (I.vi.4). As such, verbal
propositions are empty of content and they are the only things we know
a priori, independently of checking the correspondence of the
proposition to the world.

Real propositions, in contrast, "predicate of a thing some fact not
involved in the signification of the name by which the proposition
speaks of it; some attribute not connoted by that name." (I.vi.4).
Such propositions convey information that is not already included in
the names or terms employed, and their truth or falsity depends on
whether or not they correspond to relevant features of the world.
Thus, "George is on the soccer team" predicates something of the
subject George that is not included in its meaning (in this case, the
denotation of the individual person) and its being true or not depends
upon whether George is, in fact, on the team.

Mill's great contention in the System of Logic is that logic and
mathematics contain real, rather than merely verbal, propositions. He
claims, for example, that the law of contradiction (i.e. the same
proposition cannot at the same time be false and true) and the law of
excluded middle (i.e. either a proposition is true or it is false) are
both real propositions. They are, like the axioms of geometry,
experimental truths, not truths known a priori. They represent
generalizations or inductions from observation—very well-justified
inductions, to be sure, but inductions nonetheless. This leads Mill to
say that the necessity typically ascribed to the truths of mathematics
and logic by his intuitionist opponents is an illusion, thereby
undermining intuitionist argumentative fortifications at their
strongest point.

A System of Logic thus represents the most thorough attempt to argue
for empiricism in epistemology, logic, and mathematics before the
twentieth century (for the best discussion of this point, see
Skorupski 1989). Though revolutionary advances in logic and philosophy
of language in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have
rendered many of Mill's technical points about semantics and logic
obsolete, the basic philosophical vision that Mill defends is very
much a live option (see, for example, the work of Quine).
ii. Other Topics of Interest

There are some other topics covered in the System of Logic that are of
interest. First is Mill's treatment of deduction (in the form of the
syllogism). His discussion is driven by one basic concern: Why
wouldn't a deduction simply tell us what we already know? How can it
be informative? Mill discounts two common views about the syllogism,
namely, that it is useless (because it tells us what we already know)
and that it is the correct analysis of what the mind actually does
when it discovers truths. To understand why Mill discounts these ways
of thinking about deduction, we need to understand his views on
inference.

The key point here is that all inference is from particular to
particular. When we infer that the Duke of Wellington is mortal from
"All men are mortal," what we are really doing is inferring the Duke's
mortality from the mortality of the individual people with whose
mortality we are familiar. What the mind does in making a deductive
inference is not to move from a universal truth to a particular one.
Rather, it moves from truths about a number of particulars to a
smaller number (or one). The general statement that "All men are
mortal" only allows us to more easily register what we know—it
reflects neither the true inference being made nor the warrant or
evidence we have for making the inference. Though general propositions
are not necessary for reasoning, they are heuristically useful (as are
the syllogisms that employ them). They aid us in memory and
comprehension.

Mill's famous treatment of induction reveals the a posteriori grounds
for belief. He focuses on four different methods of experimental
inquiry that attempt to single out from the circumstances that precede
or follow a phenomenon the ones that are linked to the phenomenon by
an invariable law. (System, III.viii.1). That is, we test to see if a
purported causal connection exists by observing the relevant phenomena
under an assortment of situations. If we wish, for example, to know
whether a virus causes a disease, how can we prove it? What counts as
good evidence for such a belief? The four methods of induction or
experimental inquiry—the methods of agreement, of difference, of
residues, and of concomitant variation—provide answers to these
questions by showing what we need to demonstrate in order to claim
that a causal law holds. Can we show, using the method of difference,
that when the virus is not present the disease is also absent? If so,
then we have some grounds for believing that the virus causes the
disease.

Another issue addressed in A System of Logic that is of abiding
interest is Mill's handling of free will. Mill's commitment to
naturalism includes treating the human will as a potential object of
scientific study: "Our will causes our bodily actions in the same
sense, and in no other, in which cold causes ice, or a spark causes an
explosion of gunpowder. The volition, a state of our mind, is the
antecedent; the motion of our limbs in conformity to the volition, is
the consequent." (System, III.v.11). The questions that readily arise
are how, under this view, can one take the will to be free and how can
we preserve responsibility and feelings of choice?

In his Autobiography, Mill recounts his own youthful, melancholy
acceptance of the doctrine of "Philosophical Necessity" (advocated by,
among others, Robert Owen and his followers): "I felt as if I was
scientifically proved to be the helpless slave of antecedent
circumstances; as if my character and that of all others had been
formed for us by agencies beyond our control, and was wholly out of
our own power." (CW, I.175-7). But it is precisely the idea that our
character is formed for us, not by us, that Mill thinks is a "grand
error." (System, VI.ii.3). We have the power to alter our own
character. Though our own character is formed by circumstances, among
those circumstances are our own desires. We cannot directly will our
characters to be one way rather than another, but we can will actions
that shape those characters.

Mill addresses an obvious objection: what leads us to will to change
our character? Isn't that determined? Mill agrees. Our desire to
change our character is determined largely by our experience of
painful and pleasant consequences associated with our character. For
Mill, however, the important point is that, even if we don't control
the desire to change our character, we are still left with the feeling
of moral freedom, which is the feeling of being able to modify our own
character "if we wish." (System, VI.ii.3). What Mill wants to save in
the doctrine of free will is simply the feeling that we have "real
power over the formation of our own character." (CW, I.177). If we
have the desire to change our character, we find that we can. If we
lack that desire it is "of no consequence what we think forms our
character," because we don't care about altering it. For Mill, this is
a thick enough notion of freedom to avoid fatalism.

One of the basic problems for this kind of naturalistic picture of
human beings and wills is that it clashes with our first-person image
of ourselves as reasoners and agents. As Kant understood, and as the
later hermeneutic tradition emphasizes, we think of ourselves as
autonomous followers of objectively given rules (Skorupski 1989, 279).
It seems extremely difficult to provide a convincing naturalistic
account of, for example, making a choice (without explaining away as
illusory our first-person experience of making choices).

The desire to treat the will as an object, like ice or gunpowder, open
to natural scientific study falls within Mill's broader claim that the
moral sciences, which include economics, history, and psychology among
others, are fundamentally similar to the natural sciences. Though we
may have difficulty running experiments in the human realm, that realm
and its objects are, in principle, just as open to the causal
explanations we find in physics or biology.

Perhaps the most interesting element of his analysis of the moral
sciences is his commitment to what has been called "methodological
individualism," or the view that social and political phenomena are
explicable by appeal to the behavior of individuals. In other words,
social facts are reducible to facts about individuals: "The laws of
the phenomena of society are, and can be, nothing but the laws of the
actions and passions of human beings united together in the social
state. Men, however, in a state of society, are still men; their
actions and passions are obedient to the laws of individual human
nature. Men are not, when brought together, converted into another
kind of substance with different properties." (System, VI.vii.1).

This position puts Mill in opposition to Auguste Comte, a founding
figure in social theory (he coined the term "sociology") and an
important influence on, and correspondent with, Mill. Comte takes
sociology rather than psychology to be the most basic of human
sciences and takes individuals and their conduct to be best understood
through the lens of social analysis. To put it simplistically, for
Comte, the individual is an abstraction from the whole—its beliefs and
conduct are determined by history and society. We understand the
individual best, on this view, when we see the individual as an
expression of its social institutions and setting. This naturally
leads to a kind of historicism. Though Mill recognized the important
influences of social institutions and history on individuals, for him
society is nevertheless only able to shape individuals through
affecting their experiences—experiences structured by universal
principles of human psychology that operate in all times and places.
(See Mandelbaum 1971, 167ff).
b. An Examination of Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy

Mill's attacks on intuitionism continued throughout his life. One
notable example is his 1865 An Examination of Sir William Hamilton's
Philosophy, which revisits much of the same ground as A System of
Logic in the guise of a thorough-going criticism of Hamilton, a
thinker influenced by Reid and Kant whom Mill took as representing
"the great fortress of the intuitional philosophy in this country."
(CW, I.270). The rather hefty volume explores "some of the disputed
questions in the domain of psychology and metaphysics." (CW, I.271).

Among the doctrines given most attention is that of the "relativity of
knowledge," something to which Mill takes Hamilton as insufficiently
committed. It is the idea that we have no access to
"things-in-themselves" (thus, the relativity versus absoluteness of
knowledge) and that we are limited to analyzing the phenomena of
consciousness. Mill, who accepts this basic principle, counts himself
as a Berkeleian phenomenalist and famously defines matter in the
Examination as "a Permanent Possibility of Sensation," (CW, IX.183),
thinks that Hamilton accepts this doctrine in a confused manner. "He
affirms without reservation, that certain attributes (extension,
figures, etc.) are known to us as they really exist out of ourselves;
and also that all our knowledge of them is relative to us. And these
two assertions are only reconcileable, if relativity to us is
understood in the altogether trivial sense, that we know them only so
far as our faculties permit." (CW, IX.22). Hamilton therefore seems to
want to have his cake and eat it too when it comes to knowledge of the
external world. On the one hand, he wants to declare that we have
access to things as they are, thereby aligning himself with Reid's
project of avoiding the fall into (Humean) skepticism—a fall prompted
by the Lockean "way of ideas." On the other hand, he wants to follow
Kant in limiting our knowledge of things-in-themselves, thereby
reigning in the pretensions of metaphysical speculation. Mill avoids
this dilemma by rejecting Hamilton's position that we know things
outside as they really are.

One point of historical interest about the Examination is the impact
that it had on the way that the history of philosophy is taught.
Mill's demolition of Hamilton's reputation led to the removal of Reid
and the school of Scottish "common sense" philosophy from the
curriculum in Britain and America. As Kuklick puts it, the success of
Mill's Examination "is the crucial event in understanding the
development of the contemporary view of Modern Philosophy in America."
By destroying "the credibility of the entire Scottish reply to Hume,"
Mill's Examination led Anglo-American philosophers to turn to Kant in
the later part of the nineteenth century in order to find more
satisfactory response to Humean skepticism (Kuklick 1984, 128). Thus,
the standard course in Modern Philosophy that includes all or some of
Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, and Kant, is
partly an unintended consequence of the publication of Mill's attack
on Hamilton and on intuitionism more broadly.
c. Psychological Writings

As noted in the discussion of A System of Logic, Mill's commitment to
"methodological individualism" makes psychology the foundational moral
science. Though he never wrote a work of his own on psychology, he
edited and contributed notes to an 1869 re-issue of his father's 1829
work in psychology, Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind, and
reviewed the work of his friend and correspondent, Alexander Bain. All
three were proponents of the associationist school of psychology,
whose roots go back to Hobbes and especially Locke and whose members
included Gay, Hartley, and Priestly in the eighteenth century and the
Mills, Bain, and Herbert Spencer in the nineteenth century.

Mill distinguishes between the a posteriori and a priori schools of
psychology. The former "resolves the whole contents of the mind into
experience." (CW, XI.341). The latter emphasizes that "in every act of
thought, down to the most elementary, there is an ingredient which is
not given to the mind, but contributed by the mind in virtue of its
inherent powers." (CW, XI.344). In the a priori or intuitionist
school, experience "instead of being the source and prototype of our
ideas, is itself a product of the mind's own forces working on the
impressions we receive from without, and has always a mental as well
as an external element." (CW, XI.344).

The associationist version of a posteriori psychology has two basic
doctrines: "first, that the more recondite phenomena of the mind are
formed out of the more simple and elementary; and, secondly, that the
mental law, by means of which this formation takes place, is the Law
of Association." (CW, XI.345). The associationist psychologists, then,
would attempt to explain mental phenomena by showing them to be the
ultimate product of simpler components of experience (e.g. color,
sound, smell, pleasure, pain) connected to each other through
associations. These associations take two basic forms: resemblance and
contiguity in space and/or time. Thus, these psychologists attempt to
explain our idea of an orange or our feelings of greed as the product
of simpler ideas connected by association.

Part of the impulse for this account of psychology is its apparent
scientific character and beauty. Associationism attempts to explain a
large variety of mental phenomena on the basis of experience plus very
few mental laws of association. It therefore appeals to those who are
particularly drawn to simplicity in their scientific theories.

Another attraction of associationist psychology, however, is its
implications for views on moral education and social reform. If the
contents of our minds, including beliefs and moral feelings, are
products of experiences that we undergo connected according to very
simple laws, then this raises the possibility that human beings are
capable of being radically re-shaped—that our natures, rather than
being fixed, are open to major alteration. In other words, if our
minds are cobbled together by laws of association working on the
materials of experience, then this suggests that if our experiences
were to change, so would our minds. This doctrine tends to place much
greater emphasis on social and political institutions like the family,
the workplace, and the state, than does the doctrine that the nature
of the mind offers strong resistance to being shaped by experience
(i.e. that the mind molds experience rather than being molded by it).
Associationism thereby fits nicely into an agenda of reform, because
it suggests that many of the problems of individuals are explained by
their situations (and the associations that these situations promote)
rather than by some intrinsic feature of the mind. As Mill puts it in
the Autobiography in discussing the conflict between the intuitionist
and a posteriori schools:

The practical reformer has continually to demand that changes be made
in things which are supported by powerful and widely spread feelings,
or to question the apparent necessity and indefeasibleness of
established facts; and it is often an indispensable part of his
argument to shew, how these powerful feelings had their origin, and
how those facts came to seem necessary and indefeasible. There is
therefore a natural hostility between him and a philosophy which
discourages the explanation of feelings and moral facts by
circumstances and association, and prefers to treat them as ultimate
elements of human nature…I have long felt that the prevailing tendency
to regard all the marked distinctions of human character as innate,
and in the main indelible, and to ignore the irresistible proofs that
by far the greater part of those differences, whether between
individuals, races, or sexes, are such as not only might but naturally
would be produced by differences in circumstances, is one of the chief
hindrances to the rational treatment of great social questions, and
one of the greatest stumbling blocks to human improvement. (CW,
I.269-70).
d. Utilitarianism

Another maneuver in his battle with intuitionism came when Mill
published Utilitarianism (1861) in installments in Fraser's Magazine
(it was later brought out in book form in 1863). It offers a candidate
for a first principle of morality, a principle that provides us with a
criterion distinguishing right and wrong. The utilitarian candidate is
the principle of utility, which holds that "actions are right in
proportion as they tend to promote happiness; wrong as they tend to
produce the reverse of happiness. By happiness is intended pleasure
and the absence of pain; by unhappiness, pain and the privation of
pleasure." (CW, X.210).
i. History of the Principle of Utility

By Mill's time, the principle of utility possessed a long history
stretching back to the 1730's (with roots going further back to
Hobbes, Locke, and even to Epicurus). In the eighteenth and early
nineteenth centuries, it had been explicitly invoked by three British
intellectual factions. Though all may have agreed that an action's
consequences for the general happiness were to dictate its rightness
or wrongness, the reasons behind the acceptance of that principle and
the uses to which the principle was put varied greatly.

The earliest supporters of the principle of utility were the religious
utilitarians represented by, among others, John Gay, John Brown, Soame
Jenyns, and, most famously, William Paley, whose 1785 The Principles
of Moral and Political Philosophy was one of the most frequently
re-printed and well read books of moral thought of the late eighteenth
and early nineteenth centuries (to Mill's dismay, Bentham's
utilitarianism was often conflated with Paley's). Religious
utilitarianism was very popular among the educated classes and
dominated in the universities until the 1830's. These thinkers were
all deeply influenced by Locke's empiricism and psychological hedonism
and often stood opposed to the competing moral doctrines of
Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, Clarke, and Wollaston.

The religious utilitarians looked to the Christian God to address a
basic problem, namely how to harmonize the interests of individuals,
who are motivated by their own happiness, with the interests of the
society as a whole. Once we understand that what we must do is what
God wills (because of God's power of eternal sanction) and that God
wills the happiness of his creatures, morality and our own
self-interest will be seen to overlap. God guarantees that an
individual's self-interest lies in virtue, in furthering the happiness
of others. Without God and his sanctions of eternal punishment and
reward, it would be hard to find motives that "are likely to be found
sufficient to withhold men from the gratification of lust, revenge,
envy, ambition, avarice." (Paley 2002 [1785], 39). As we shall see in
a moment, another possible motivation for caring about the general
happiness—this one non-religious—is canvassed by Mill in Chapter Three
of Utilitarianism.

In contrast to religious utilitarianism, which had few aspirations to
be a moral theory that revises ordinary moral attitudes, the two
late-eighteenth century secular versions of utilitarianism grew out of
various movements for reform. The principle of utility—and the
correlated commitments to happiness as the only intrinsically
desirable end and to the moral equivalency of the happiness of
different individuals—was itself taken to be an instrument of reform.

One version of secular utilitarianism was represented by William
Godwin (husband of Mary Wollstonecraft and father of Mary Shelley),
who achieved great notoriety with the publication of his Political
Justice of 1793. Though his fame (or infamy) was relatively
short-lived, Godwin's use of the principle of utility for the cause of
radical political and social critique began the identification of
utilitarianism with anti-religiosity and with dangerous democratic
values.

The second version of secular utilitarianism, and the one that
inspired Mill, arose from the work of Jeremy Bentham. Bentham, who was
much more successful than Godwin at building a movement around his
ideas, employed the principle of utility as a device of political,
social, and legal criticism. It is important to note, however, that
Bentham's interest in the principle of utility did not arise from
concern about ethical theory as much as from concern about legislative
and legal reform.

This history enables us to understand Mill's invocation of the
principle of utility in its polemical context—Mill's support of that
principle should not be taken as mere intellectual exercise. In the
realm of politics, the principle of utility served to bludgeon
opponents of reform. First and foremost, reform meant extension of the
vote. But it also meant legal reform, including overhaul of the common
law system and of legal institutions, and varieties of social reform,
especially of institutions that tended to favor aristocratic and
moneyed interests. Though Bentham and Godwin intended it to have this
function in the late eighteenth century, utilitarianism became
influential only when tied with the political machinery of the Radical
party, which had particular prominence on the English scene in the
1830's.

In the realm of ethical debate, Mill took his opponents to be the
"intuitionists" led by Sedgwick and Whewell, both Cambridge men. They
were the contemporary representatives of an ethical tradition that
understood its history as tied to Butler, Reid, Coleridge, and turn of
the century German thought (especially that of Kant). Though
intuitionists and members of Mill's a posteriori or "inductive" school
recognize "to a great extent, the same moral laws," they differ "as to
their evidence and the source from which they derive their authority.
According to the one opinion, the principles of morals are evident a
priori, requiring nothing to command assent except that the meaning of
the terms be understood. According to the other doctrine, right and
wrong, as well as truth and falsehood, are questions of observation
and experience." (CW, X.206).

The chief danger represented by the proponents of intuitionism was not
from the ethical content of their theories per se, which defended
honesty, justice, benevolence, etc., but from the kinds of
justifications offered for their precepts and the support such a view
lent to the social and political status quo. As we saw in the
discussion of the System of Logic and with reference to Mill's
statements in his Autobiography, he takes intuitionism to be dangerous
because it allegedly enables people to ratify their own prejudices as
moral principles—in intuitionism, there is no "external standard" by
which to adjudicate differing moral claims (for example, Mill
understood Kant's categorical imperative as getting any moral force it
possesses either from considerations of utility or from mere prejudice
hidden by hand-waving). The principle of utility, alternatively,
evaluates moral claims by appealing to the external standard of pain
and pleasure. It presented each individual for moral consideration as
someone capable of suffering and enjoyment.
ii. Basic Argument

Mill's defense of the principle of utility in Utilitarianism includes
five chapters. In the first, Mill sets out the problem, distinguishes
between the intuitionist and "inductive" schools of morality, and also
suggests limits to what we can expect from proofs of first principles
of morality. He argues that "(q)uestions of ultimate ends are not
amenable to direct proof." (CW, X.207). All that can be done is to
present considerations "capable of determining the intellect either to
give or withhold its assent to the doctrine; and this is equivalent to
proof." (CW, X.208). Ultimately, he will want to prove in Chapter Four
the basis for the principle of utility—that happiness is the only
intrinsically desirable thing—by showing that we spontaneously accept
it on reflection. (Skorupski 1989, 8). It is rather easy to show that
happiness is something we desire intrinsically, not for the sake of
other things. What is hard is to show that it is the only thing we
intrinsically desire or value. Mill agrees that we do not always value
things like virtue as means or instruments to happiness. We do
sometimes seem to value such things for their own sakes. Mill
contends, however, that on reflection we will see that when we appear
to value them for their own sakes we are actually valuing them as
parts of happiness (rather than as intrinsically desirable on their
own or as means to happiness). That is, we value virtue, freedom, etc.
as things that make us happy by their mere possession. This is all the
proof we can give that happiness is our only ultimate end; it must
rely on introspection and on careful and honest examination of our
feelings and motives.

In Chapter Two, Mill corrects misconceptions about the principle of
utility. One misconception is that utilitarianism, by endorsing the
Epicurean view "that life has…no higher end than pleasure" is a
"doctrine worthy only of swine." (CW, X.210). Mill counters that "the
accusation supposes human beings to be capable of no pleasures except
those of which swine are capable." (CW, X.210). He proffers a
distinction (one not found in Bentham) between higher and lower
pleasures, with higher pleasures including mental, aesthetic, and
moral pleasures. When we are evaluating whether or not an action is
good by evaluating the happiness that we can expect to be produced by
it, he argues that higher pleasures should be taken to be in kind
(rather than by degree) preferable to lower pleasures. This has led
scholars to wonder whether Mill's utilitarianism differs significantly
from Bentham's and whether Mill's distinction between higher and lower
pleasures creates problems for our ability to know what will maximize
aggregate happiness.

A second objection to the principle of utility is that "it is exacting
too much to require that people shall always act from the inducement
of promoting the general interest of society." (CW, X.219). Mill
replies that this is to "confound the rule of action with the motive
of it." (CW, X.219). Ethics is supposed to tell us what our duties
are, "but no system of ethics requires that the sole motive of all we
do shall be a feeling of duty; on the contrary, ninety-nine hundredths
of all our actions are done from other motives, and rightly so done if
the rule of duty does not condemn them." (CW, X.219). To do the right
thing, in other words, we do not need to be constantly motivated by
concern for the general happiness. The large majority of actions
intend the good of individuals (including ourselves) rather than the
good of the world. Yet the world's good is made up of the good of the
individuals that constitute it and unless we are in the position of,
say, a legislator, we act properly by looking to private rather than
to public good. Our attention to the public well-being usually needs
to extend only so far as is required to know that we aren't violating
the rights of others.

Chapter Three addresses the topic of motivation again by focusing on
the following question: What is the source of our obligation to the
principle of utility? What, in other words, motivates us to act in
ways approved of by the principle of utility? With any moral theory,
one must remember that 'ought implies can,' i.e. that if moral demands
are to be legitimate, we must be the kind of beings that can meet
those demands. Mill defends the possibility of a strong utilitarian
conscience (i.e. a strong feeling of obligation to the general
happiness) by showing how such a feeling can develop out of the
natural desire we have to be in unity with fellow creatures—a desire
that enables us to care what happens to them and to perceive our own
interests as linked with theirs. Though Chapter Two showed that we do
not need to attend constantly to the general happiness, it is
nevertheless a sign of moral progress when the happiness of others,
including the happiness of those we don't know, becomes important to
us.

Finally, Chapter Five shows how utilitarianism accounts for justice.
In particular, Mill shows how utilitarianism can explain the special
status we seem to grant to justice and to the violations of it.
Justice is something we are especially keen to defend. Mill begins by
marking off morality (the realm of duties) from expediency and
worthiness by arguing that duties are those things we think people
ought to be punished for not fulfilling. He then suggests that justice
is demarcated from other areas of morality, because it includes those
duties to which others have correlative rights, "Justice implies
something which it is not only right to do, and wrong not to do, but
which some individual person can claim from us as his moral right."
(CW, X.247). Though no one has a right to my charity, even if I have a
duty to be charitable, others have rights not to have me injure them
or to have me repay what I have promised.

Critics of utilitarianism have placed special emphasis on its
inability to provide a satisfactory account of rights. For Mill, to
have a right is "to have something which society ought to defend me in
the possession of. If the objector goes on to ask why it ought, I can
give no other reason than general utility." (CW, X.250). But what if
the general utility demands that we violate your rights? The intuition
that something is wrong if your rights can be violated for the sake of
the general good provoked the great challenge to utilitarian
conceptions of justice, leveled with special force by twentieth
century thinkers like John Rawls.
e. On Liberty

The topic of justice received further treatment at Mill's hands in his
famous 1859 book On Liberty. This work is the one, along with A System
of Logic, that Mill thought would have the most longevity. It concerns
civil and social liberty or, to look at it from the contrary point of
view, the nature and limits of the power that can legitimately be
exercised by society over the individual.

Mill begins by retelling the history of struggle between rulers and
ruled and suggests that social rather than political tyranny is the
greater danger for modern, commercial nations like Britain. This
social "tyranny of the majority" (a phrase Mill takes from
Tocqueville) arises from the enforcement of rules of conduct that are
both arbitrary and strongly adhered to. The practical principle that
guides the majority "to their opinions on the regulation of human
conduct, is the feeling in each person's mind that everybody should be
required to act as he, and those with whom he sympathizes, would like
them to act." (On Liberty [OL], 48). Such a feeling is particularly
dangerous because it is taken to be self-justifying and self-evident.

There is a need, therefore, for a rationally grounded principle which
governs a society's dealings with individuals. This "one very simple
principle"—often called the "harm principle"—entails that:

[T]he sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or
collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of
their number, is self-protection. That the only purpose for which
power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized
community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own
good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant. He cannot
rightfully be compelled to do or forbear because it will be better for
him to do so, because it will make him happier, because, in the
opinion of others, to do so would be wise, or even right. These are
good reasons for remonstrating with him, or reasoning with him, or
persuading him, or entreating him, but not for compelling him, or
visiting him with any evil in case he do otherwise. (OL, 51-2)

This anti-paternalistic principle identifies three basic regions of
human liberty: the "inward domain of consciousness," liberty of tastes
and pursuits (i.e. of framing our own life plan), and the freedom to
unite with others.

Mill, unlike other liberal theorists, makes no appeal to "abstract
right" in order to justify the harm principle. The reason for
accepting the freedom of individuals to act as they choose, so long as
they cause minimal or no harm to others, is that it would promote
"utility in the largest sense, grounded on the permanent interests of
man as a progressive being." (OL, 53). In other words, abiding by the
harm principle is desirable because it promotes what Mill calls the
"free development of individuality" or the development of our
humanity.

Behind this rests the idea that humanity is capable of progress—that
latent or underdeveloped abilities and virtues can be actualized under
the right conditions. Human nature is not static. It is not merely
re-expressed in generations and individuals. It is "not a machine to
be built after a model, and set to do exactly the work prescribed for
it, but a tree, which requires to grow and develop itself on all
sides, according to the tendency of the inward forces which make it a
living thing." (OL, 105). Though human nature can be thought of as
something living, it is also, like an English garden, something
amenable to improvement through effort. "Among the works of man, which
human life is rightly employed in perfecting and beautifying, the
first in importance surely is man himself." (OL, 105). The two
conditions that promote development of our humanity are freedom and
variety of situation, both of which the harm principle encourages.

A basic philosophical problem presented by the work is what counts as
"harm to others." Where should we mark the boundary between conduct
that is principally self-regarding versus conduct that involves
others? Does drug-use cause harm to others sufficient to be prevented?
Does prostitution? Pornography? Should polygamy be allowed? How about
public nudity? Though these are difficult questions, Mill provides the
reader with a principled way of deliberating about them.
f. The Subjection of Women and Other Social and Political Writings

Many volumes of Mill's writings deal with topics of social and
political concern. These include writings on specific political
problems in India, America, Ireland, France, and England, on the
nature of democracy (Considerations on Representative Government) and
civilization, on slavery, on law and jurisprudence, on the workplace,
and on the family and the status of women. The last subject was the
topic of Mill's well-known The Subjection of Women, an important work
in the history of feminism.

The radical nature of Mill's call for women's equality is often lost
to us after over a century of protest and changing social attitudes.
Yet the subordination of women to men when Mill was writing remains
striking. Among other indicators of this subordination are the
following: (1) British women had fewer grounds for divorce than men
until 1923; (2) Husbands controlled their wives personal property
(with the occasional exception of land) until the Married Women's
Property Acts of 1870 and 1882; (3) Children were the husband's; (4)
Rape was impossible within a marriage; and (5) Wives lacked crucial
features of legal personhood, since the husband was taken as the
representative of the family (thereby eliminating the need for women's
suffrage). This gives some indication of how disturbing and/or
ridiculous the idea of a marriage between equals could appear to
Victorians.

The object of the essay was to show "(t)hat 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." (CW,
XXI.261). This shows how Mill appeals to both the patent injustice of
contemporary familial arrangements and to the negative moral impact of
those arrangements on the people within them. In particular, he
discusses the ways in which the subordination of women negatively
affects not only the women, but also the men and children in the
family. This subordination stunts the moral and intellectual
development of women by restricting their field of activities, pushing
them either into self-sacrifice or into selfishness and pettiness.
Men, alternatively, either become brutal through their relationships
with women or turn away from projects of self-improvement to pursue
the social "consideration" that women desire.

It is important to note that Mill's concern for the status of women
dovetails with the rest of his thought—it is not a disconnected issue.
For example, his support for women's equality was buttressed by
associationism, which claims that minds are created by associative
laws operating on experience. This implies that if we change the
experiences and upbringing of women, then their minds will change.
This enabled Mill to argue against those who tried to suggest that the
subordination of women to men reflected a natural order that women
were by nature incapable of equality with men. If many women were
incapable of true friendship with noble men, says Mill, that is not a
result of their natures, but of their faulty environments.
g. Principles of Political Economy

Another work that addresses issues of social and political concern is
Mill's Principles of Political Economy of 1848. The book went through
numerous editions and served as the dominant British textbook in
economics until being displaced by Alfred Marshall's 1890 Principles
of Economics. Mill intended the work as both a survey of contemporary
economic thought (highlighting the theories of David Ricardo, but also
including some contributions of his own on topics like international
trade) and as an exploration of applications of economic ideas to
social concerns. It was "not a book merely of abstract science, but
also of application, and treated Political Economy not as a thing by
itself, but as a fragment of a greater whole." (CW, I.243). These two
interests nicely divide the text into the first three more technical
books on production, distribution, and exchange and the last two
books, which address the influences of societal progress and of
government on economic activity (and vice versa). The technical work
is largely obsolete. Mill's relating of economics and society,
however, remains of great interest.

In particular, Mill shared concerns with others (e.g. Carlyle,
Coleridge, Southey, etc.) about the moral impact of industrialization.
Though many welcomed the material wealth produced by
industrialization, there was a sense that those very cornerstones of
British economic growth—the division of labor (including the
increasing simplicity and repetitiveness of the work) and the growing
size of factories and businesses—led to a spiritual and moral
deadening.

Coleridge expressed this in his contrast of mere "civilization" with
"cultivation":

The permanency of the nation…and its progressiveness and personal
freedom…depend on a continuing and progressive civilization. But
civilization is itself but a mixed good, if not far more a corrupting
influence, the hectic of disease, not the bloom of health, and a
nation so distinguished more fitly to be called a varnished than a
polished people, where this civilization is not grounded in
cultivation, in the harmonious development of those qualities and
faculties that characterize our humanity. We must be men in order to
be citizens. (Coleridge 1839, 46).

"Civilization" expresses central features of modernization, including
industrialism, cosmopolitanism, and increasing material wealth. But,
for Coleridge, civilization needed to be subordinated to cultivation
of our humanity (expressed in terms similar to those later found in On
Liberty).

This concern for the moral impact of economic growth explains, among
other things, his commitment to a brand of socialism. In an essay on
the French historian Michelet, Mill praises the monastic associations
of Italy and France after the reforms of St. Benedict: "Unlike the
useless communities of contemplative ascetics in the East, they were
diligent in tilling the earth and fabricating useful products; they
knew and taught that temporal work may also be a spiritual exercise."
(CW, XX.240). It was the desire to transform temporal work into a
spiritual and moral exercise that led Mill to favor socialist changes
in the workplace.

In order to transform the workplace from a setting filled with
antagonism into a "school of sympathy" that would enable workers to
feel a part of something greater than themselves—thereby mitigating
the rampant selfishness encouraged by industrial society—Mill
recommends "industrial co-operatives." Mill thought that these
co-operatives had the advantage over communes or other socialist
institutions because they were able to compete against traditional
firms (his complaint against many other socialists is that they
undervalued competition as a morally useful stimulus to activity).
These co-operatives can take two forms: a profit-sharing system in
which worker pay is tied to the success of the business or a worker
co-operative in which workers share ownership of capital. The latter
was preferable because it turned all the workers into entrepreneurs,
calling upon many of the faculties that mere labor for pay left to
atrophy.

Though Mill contended that laborers were generally unfit for socialism
given their current level of education and development, he thought
that modern industrial societies should take small steps towards
fostering co-operatives. Included among these steps was the
institution of limited partnerships. Up to Mill's time, partners
shared full liability for losses, including any personal property they
owned—obviously a strong deterrent to the founding of worker
co-operatives.

Mill's recommendations for the economic organization of society, like
his political and social policies, always paid careful attention to
how institutions, laws, and practices impacted the intellectual,
moral, and affective well-being of the individuals operating under or
within them.
h. Essays on Religion

Mill's criticism of traditional religious doctrines and institutions
and his promotion of the "Religion of Humanity," also depended largely
on concerns about human cultivation and education. Though the
Benthamite "philosophic radicals," including Mill, took Christianity
to be a particularly pernicious superstition that fostered
indifference or hostility to human happiness (the keystone of
utilitarian morality), Mill also thought that religion could
potentially serve important ethical needs by supplying us with "ideal
conceptions grander and more beautiful than we see realized in the
prose of human life." (CW, X.419). In so doing, religion elevates our
feelings, cultivates sympathy with others, and imbues even our
smallest activities with a sense of purpose.

The posthumously published three Essays on Religion (1874)—on
"Nature," the "Utility of Religion," and "Theism"—criticized
traditional religious views and formulated an alternative in the guise
of the Religion of Humanity. Along with the criticism of religion's
moral effects that he shared with the Benthamites, Mill was also
critical of the intellectual laziness that permitted belief in an
omnipotent and benevolent God. He felt, following his father, that the
world as we find it could not possibly have come from such a God given
the evils rampant in it; either his power is limited or he is not
wholly benevolent.

Beyond attacking arguments concerning the essence of God, Mill
undermines a variety of arguments for his existence including all a
priori arguments. He concludes that the only legitimate proof of God
is an a posteriori and probabilistic argument from the design of the
universe – the traditional argument (stemming from Aristotle) that
complex features of the world, like the eye, are unlikely to have
arisen by chance, hence there must be a designer. (Mill acknowledges
the possibility that Darwin, in his 1859 The Origin of Species, has
provided a wholly naturalistic explanation of such features, but he
suggests that it is too early to judge of Darwin's success).

Inspired by Comte, Mill finds an alternative to traditional religion
in the Religion of Humanity, in which an idealized humanity becomes an
object of reverence and the morally useful features of traditional
religion are supposedly purified and accentuated. Humanity becomes an
inspiration by being placed imaginatively within the drama of human
history, which has a destination or point, namely the victory of good
over evil. As Mill puts it, history should be seen as "the unfolding
of a great epic or dramatic action," which terminates "in the
happiness or misery, the elevation or degradation, of the human race."
It is "an unremitting conflict between good and evil powers, of which
every act done by any of us, insignificant as we are, forms one of the
incidents." (CW, XXI.244). As we begin to see ourselves as
participants in this Manichean drama, as fighting alongside people
like Socrates, Newton, and Jesus to secure the ultimate victory of
good over evil, we become capable of greater sympathy, moral feeling,
and an ennobled sense of the meaning of our own lives. The Religion of
Humanity thereby acts as an instrument of human cultivation.
3. Conclusion

Mill's intellect engaged with the world rather than fled from it. His
was not an ivory tower philosophy, even when dealing with the most
abstract of philosophical topics. His work is of enduring interest
because it reflects how a fine mind struggled with and attempted to
synthesize important intellectual and cultural movements. He stands at
the intersections of conflicts between enlightenment and romanticism,
liberalism and conservatism, and historicism and rationalism. In each
case, as someone interested in conversation rather than pronouncement,
he makes sincere efforts to move beyond polemic into sustained and
thoughtful analysis. That analysis produced challenging answers to
problems that still remain. Whether or not one agrees with his
answers, Mill serves as a model for thinking about human problems in a
serious and civilized way.
4. References and Further Reading

* = works of note.
Primary Texts
Bentham, Jeremy. Deontology together with A Table of the Springs of
Action and The Article on Utilitarianism. Edited by Amnon Goldworth.
Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983.
Bentham, Jeremy. An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and
Legislation. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996.
Bentham, Jeremy. The Works of Jeremy Bentham. Edited by John Bowring.
10 vols. New York: Russell and Russell, 1962.
Carlyle, Thomas. A Carlyle Reader. Edited by G.B. Tennyson. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1984.
Carlyle, Thomas. Critical and Miscellaneous Essays. Philadelphia:
Casey and Hart, 1845.
Carlyle, Thomas. Past and Present. London: Ward, Lock, and Bowden, Ltd., 1897.
Coleridge, S.T.C. On the Constitution of the Church and State
According to the Idea of Each (3rd Edition), and Lay Sermons (2nd
Edition). London: William Pickering, 1839.
Comte, Auguste. A General View of Positivism. 1848. Reprint. Dubuque,
Iowa: Brown Reprints, 1971.
Mill, James. An Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind. Edited
and with Notes by John Stuart Mill. London: Longmans, Green and Dyer,
1869.
*Mill, John Stuart. The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill. Gen. Ed.
John M. Robson. 33 vols. Toronto: University of Toronto Press,
1963-91.
The standard scholarly editions including Mill's published works,
letters, and notes; an outstanding resource.
Mill, John Stuart. A System of Logic. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1874.
Mill, John Stuart. On Liberty. Peterborough, Canada: Broadview Press, 1999.
Paley, William. The Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy.
Indianapolis: Liberty Press, 2002 [1785].
Secondary Texts
Britton, Karl. 'John Stuart Mill on Christianity.' In James and John
Stuart Mill: Papers of the Centenary Conference, John Robson and
Michael Laine (eds.). Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1976.
*Capaldi, Nicholas. John Stuart Mill: A Biography. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2004.
A recent and very thorough treatment of Mill's life and work.
Carlisle, Janice. John Stuart Mill and the Writing of Character.
Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1991.
Collini, Stefan. 'The Idea of "Character" in Victorian Political
Thought.' Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th series, 35
(1985), 29-50.
*Collini, Stefan. Public Moralists, Political Thought and Intellectual
Life in Great Britain 1850-1930. Oxford: Clarendon, 1991.
A useful history that includes discussion of Mill's intellectual and
institutional context.
*Collini, Stefan, Donald Winch, and John Burrow. That Noble Science of
Politics: A Study in Nineteenth-century Intellectual History.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983.
Very valuable work on nineteenth century British political discourse;
includes discussion of the Philosophic Radicals.
Donner, Wendy. The Liberal Self: John Stuart Mill's Moral and
Political Philosophy. Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1991.
Harrison, Brian. 'State Intervention and Moral Reform in
nineteeth-century England.' In Pressure from Without in Early
Victorian England, edited by Patricia Hollis, 289-322. New York: St.
Martin's Press, 1974.
*Halevy, Elie. The Growth of Philosophical Radicalism. Translated by
Mary Morris. Boston: The Beacon Press, 1955.
Though originally published in 1904, this is still a seminal work in
the history of utilitarianism.
Hamburger, Joseph. 'Religion and "On Liberty."' In A Cultivated Mind:
Essays on J.S. Mill Presented to John M. Robson, edited by Michael
Laine, 139-81. Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1961.
Harrison, Ross. Bentham. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983.
Hedley, Douglas. Coleridge, Philosophy and Religion: Aids to
Reflection and the Mirror of the Spirit. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2000.
Heydt, Colin. 'Narrative, Imagination, and the Religion of Humanity in
Mill's Ethics.' Journal of the History of Philosophy, vol. 44, no. I
(Jan. 2006), 99-115.
Heydt, Colin. 'Mill, Bentham, and "Internal Culture".' British Journal
for the History of Philosophy, vol. 14, no. 2 (May 2006), 275-302.
Heydt, Colin. Rethinking Mill's Ethics: Character and Aesthetic
Education. London: Continuum Press, 2006.
*Hollander, Samuel. The Economics of John Stuart Mill (Toronto: UTP
and Oxford: Blackwell), 1985: Volume I, Theory and Method. Volume II,
Political Economy, 482-1030.
The seminal work on Mill's economics.
Jenkyns, Richard. The Victorians and Ancient Greece. Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1980.
Jones, H. S. 'John Stuart Mill as Moralist.' Journal of the History of
Ideas 53 (1992): 287-308.
Kuklick, Bruce. 'Seven thinkers and how they grew: Descartes, Spinoza,
Leibniz; Locke, Berkeley, Hume; Kant.' In Philosophy in History,
Rorty, Schneewind, Skinner (eds.). Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1984.
*Mandelbaum, M. History, Man and Reason. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
Univ. Press, 1971.
An excellent intellectual history of Europe in the nineteenth century;
contains very valuable discussions of Mill.
Matz, Lou. 'The Utility of Religious Illusion: A Critique of J.S.
Mill's Religion of Humanity.' Utilitas 12 (2000): 137-154.
Millar, Alan. 'Mill on Religion.' In The Cambridge Companion to Mill,
John Skorupski (ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
*Packe, Michael. The Life of John Stuart Mill. New York: MacMillan
Company, 1954.
Prior to Capaldi's, the standard life; still contains useful
biographical detail.
Raeder, Linda C. John Stuart Mill and the Religion of Humanity.
Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2002.
Robson, John M. The Improvement of Mankind: The Social and Political
Thought of John Stuart Mill. Toronto: Toronto Univ. Press, 1968.
Robson, John. 'J.S. Mill's Theory of Poetry.' In Mill: A Collection of
Critical Essays, J. B. Schneewind, (ed.). London: MacMillan, 1968.
Ryan, Alan. The Philosophy of John Stuart Mill. London: MacMillan, 1970.
*Ryan, Alan. J.S. Mill. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974.
A nice introduction to Mill's writings and central arguments.
*Schneewind, J. B. Sidgwick's Ethics and Victorian Moral Philosophy.
Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977.
Still easily the best extant treatment of Victorian moral philosophy;
includes extremely valuable examination of the conflict between
utilitarianism and intuitionism.
Sen, Amartya, and Bernard Williams, eds. Utilitarianism and Beyond.
Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1982.
Shanely, Mary Lyndon. 'Marital Slavery and Friendship: John Stuart
Mill's The Subjection of Women.' Political Theory, Vol. 9, No. 2 (May
1981), 229-247.
Shanley, Mary Lyndon. 'Suffrage, Protective Labor Legislation, and
Married Women's Property Laws in England.' Signs, Vol. 12, No. 1
(1986).
*Skorupski, John. John Stuart Mill. London: Routledge, 1989.
Unquestionably, the best single book on Mill's general philosophy.
Skorupski, John. 'Introduction.' In The Cambridge Companion to Mill,
edited by John Skorupski. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
*Skorupski, John (editor). The Cambridge Companion to Mill. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1998.
Includes a number of important articles and an extensive (though by
now a little dated) bibliography.
Smart, J.J.C. 'Extreme and Restricted Utilitarianism.' The
Philosophical Quarterly, (October 1956), 344-354.
*Thomas, William. The Philosophic Radicals: Nine Studies in Theory and
Practice 1817-1841. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979.
Very good resource for Philosophic Radicalism.
Turner, Michael J. "Radical Opinion in an Age of Reform: Thomas
Perronet Thompson and the Westminster Review," History, Vol. 86
(2001), Issue 281, 18-40.
Williams, Raymond. Culture and Society 1780-1950. New York: Columbia
University Press, 1983.
*Wilson, Fred. Psychological Analysis and the Philosophy of John
Stuart Mill. Toronto: Toronto Univ. Press, 1990.
Most thorough treatment of Mill's psychological views.