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Making Sense of Mill*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 April 2010

Daniel M. Weinstock
Daniel M. Weinstock
Affiliation:
Université de Montréal
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Extract

Wendy Donner's The Liberal Self: John Stuart Mill's Moral and Political Philosophy is an important and thought-provoking addition to the growing body of literature seeking to rescue Mill's practical philosophy from the rather lowly place it occupied in the estimation of many philosophers earlier this century, and to present him as a philosopher whose views form a coherent, systematic whole that can still contribute significantly to numerous moral and political debates. The book proposes an interpretation of the whole of Mill's practical philosophy, and attempts to reveal how aspects of Mill's thought, hitherto considered incompatible, actually mutually support one another. At the same time, Donner sets many of Mill's positions in the context of contemporary moral and political philosophical debates, and finds that on a number of important issues, his thought stands up rather well against more recent work.

Type
Critical Notices/Études critiques
Information
Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review / Revue canadienne de philosophie , Volume 35 , Issue 4 , Fall 1996 , pp. 791 - 804
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Philosophical Association 1996

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References

Notes

1 Of note are three recent, book-length treatments of Mill's moral and political philosophy: Berger, Fred, Happiness, Justice and Freedom: The Moral and Political Philosophy of John Stuart Mill (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1984);Google ScholarTen, C. L., Mill on Liberty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980);Google Scholar and Gray, John, Mill on Liberty: A Defence (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983).CrossRefGoogle ScholarSkorupsi's, JohnJohn Stuart Mill contains two very thoughtful chapters on Mill's practical philosophy (London: Routledge, 1989), chaps. 9-10.Google Scholar The locus classicus of the attack on Mill's moral philosophy is of course Moore, G. E., Principia Ethica, rev. ed., edited by Baldwin, Thomas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 116ff.Google Scholar

2 Stuart Mill, John, Utilitarianism, edited by Sher, George (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1979), p. 8.Google Scholar

3 Ibid.

4 I take this to be the thrust of the passage on p. 15, where Donner writes that “although John Stuart Mill agrees with his father and Bentham that pleasures and satisfactions have intrinsic properties and also relational properties, including causal and intentional properties, he differs with them in regarding these latter as relevant to the evaluation of pleasurable experiences”; cf. p. 54.

5 Donner writes that “when competent agents express preferences for different pleasurable experiences, they are ranking these experiences on a scale of value. What is being measured is value of experience. The properties that contribute to value are quantity and quality” (p. 41).

6 This approach is detailed in Rawls, John, “Outline of a Decision Procedure in Ethics,” Philosophical Review, 60 (1951): 177–97.CrossRefGoogle Scholar It becomes the basis for the theory of reflective equilibrium in Rawls, John, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), pp. 46–48.Google Scholar

7 The statement of this second condition follows Onora O'Neill, “Constructivisms in Ethics,” in O'Neill, Onora, Constructions of Reason: Explorations of Kant's Practical Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 208–10.Google Scholar

8 Mill, Utilitarianism, p. 8.

9 Ibid., p. 10.

10 For a criticism of Mill's conception of human nature by an erstwhile defender, see John Gray, “Mill's and Other Liberalisms,” in Gray, John, Liberalisms: Essays in Political Philosophy (London: Routledge, 1989), pp. 224–28.Google Scholar

11 Mill himself thought that the science of “ethology,” that set of axiomata media concerning local conditions which, in combination with the invariant laws of the mind, produces human characters as we know them, did not yet possess a sufficient inductive base to generate many reliable generalizations. While he thought that the development of such a science was an important task for future scientific inquiry, he thought that the level of knowledge of the laws governing the formation of human character attainable by his contemporaries was still quite limited. See Stuart Mill, John, The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Vol. 8, A System of Logic, Book 4, chap. 5, par. 3 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1974).Google Scholar

12 I am thinking here of writings such as Peter Railton, “Realism, Moral,” Philosophical Review, 95 (April 1986): 163–207;Google ScholarBoyd, Richard, “How to Be a Moral Realist,” in Essays on Moral Realism, edited by Sayre-McCord, G. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988), pp. 181–228;Google Scholar and Brink, David, Moral Realism and the Foundations of Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 211–90.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

13 Stuart Mill, John, On Liberty (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1974), p. 120.Google Scholar

14 Ibid., p. 133.

15 Mill, Utilitarianism, p. 36.

16 CfDerek, Parfit, Reasons and Persons (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), pp. 23–24.Google Scholar

17 Mill, A System of Logic, Book 6, chap. 12, par. 7.

18 Mill, , Utilitarianism, p. 37.Google Scholar

19 Stuart Mill, John, Autobiography (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1989), p. 118.Google Scholar

20 Mill, , On Liberty, p. 70.Google Scholar

21 Ibid., p. 133.