John Stuart Mill

Key ideas

1. The greatest happiness principle. Actions are right in proportion as they promote happiness and wrong as they produce its reverse, where happiness means pleasure and the absence of pain. The happiness that counts is that of all concerned, and the agent must be as impartial as a disinterested and benevolent spectator.
2. Higher and lower pleasures. Pleasures differ in quality as well as quantity. Where nearly all who have experienced two pleasures decidedly prefer one, that one is the more desirable, hence Mill’s line that it is “better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied”.
3. The harm principle. The only purpose for which power can rightfully be exercised over a member of a civilised community, against his will, is “to prevent harm to others”. His own good, physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant, and over himself the individual is sovereign.
4. Free discussion. An opinion should not be silenced because it may be true, because it may be partly true, and because even a true opinion, if it is never challenged, is held as “a dead dogma, not a living truth”.
5. Individuality. A person’s character develops only by choosing for themselves, so society gains from variety. Mill asks for “experiments of living” and treats custom as a danger as serious as the law.
6. Experience as the source of knowledge. In A System of Logic Mill held that all knowledge about the world comes from observation and experience, arithmetic and geometry included, and he set out methods of agreement, difference, residues and concomitant variations for finding causes.
7. The equality of women. In The Subjection of Women Mill argued that the legal subordination of one sex to the other is wrong and a hindrance to human improvement, and that no one can know women’s nature while it has been shaped by law and custom.

John Stuart Mill (1806–1873), usually cited as J. S. Mill, was an English philosopher, economist and politician. He made utilitarianism a more humane and more defensible doctrine, wrote the best-known modern defence of freedom of thought and individual liberty in On Liberty (1859), and argued in The Subjection of Women (1869) for the equality of the sexes. His System of Logic (1843) gave an empiricist account of knowledge and scientific method.

Who was John Stuart Mill?

Mill was born in London and educated at home by his father James Mill, a close associate of Jeremy Bentham. At seventeen he joined the East India Company, where he worked until 1858.

In the autumn of 1826 he fell into a deep depression. He had asked himself whether he would be happy if all his aims for reform were achieved, and “an irrepressible self-consciousness distinctly answered, ‘No!’” He recovered partly through Wordsworth’s poetry and came to qualify the strict Benthamism of his training. He met Harriet Taylor in 1830 and married her in 1851, two years after her first husband’s death; she died in 1858. He credited her with the best ideas in their joint writings; scholars still debate her part (Harriet Taylor Mill). He sat as a Member of Parliament for Westminster from 1865 to 1868 and died at Avignon in May 1873.

What is Mill’s utilitarianism?

In Utilitarianism Mill holds that actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness and wrong as they tend to produce the reverse. “By happiness is intended pleasure, and the absence of pain.” This is the principle of utility. The happiness that counts is that of all concerned, and the agent must be “as strictly impartial as a disinterested and benevolent spectator”.

His departure from Bentham is over quality. If nearly all who have experienced two pleasures decidedly prefer one, it is the more desirable, and so, in his words, “better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied”. Critics ask whether this is still hedonism, and Robert Nozick’s experience machine later put the question to hedonists directly.

Mill’s “proof” that happiness is desirable, because it is what people desire, is one of the most debated arguments in the book. To the complaint that consequences cannot be calculated in advance he replies that “we require subordinate principles to apply it by”: the rules of common morality record what people have learnt about the effects of actions on happiness. It is a consequentialism that makes room for rules.

What does On Liberty argue?

The book’s single principle, the harm principle, is that “the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others”. His own good is “not a sufficient warrant”. Over himself, “over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.”

Free discussion matters because a silenced opinion may be true, or partly true, and because even a true opinion, if never challenged, is held as “a dead dogma, not a living truth”. Mill also defends “experiments of living” and warns that custom can crush individuality as surely as law. He grounds this in utility “in the largest sense, grounded on the permanent interests of man as a progressive being”, and whether that supports such firm liberties is much discussed.

The principle has stated limits. It applies to people “in the maturity of their faculties”, not to children, and Mill adds: “Despotism is a legitimate mode of government in dealing with barbarians, provided the end be their improvement, and the means justified by actually effecting that end.” Mill, like his father, supported British colonial rule, and critics read this passage as a limit his liberalism put on self-government outside Europe.

How did Mill think about knowledge?

The System of Logic opposes the view, held by William Whewell, that the basic laws of science are self-evident. For Mill all knowledge of the world rests on experience, and even arithmetic is inductive: “there is in every step of an arithmetical or algebraical calculation a real induction, a real inference of facts from facts”. This puts him in the line of Locke and Hume, the empiricists. His methods of agreement, difference, residues and concomitant variations are still discussed in introductions to induction.

Women, democracy and economics

In The Subjection of Women Mill held that the “legal subordination of one sex to the other” was “wrong in itself”, and denied that “any one knows, or can know, the nature of the two sexes, as long as they have only been seen in their present relation to one another”. It is an influential text of feminist philosophy and an attack on patriarchy in law and marriage. Considerations on Representative Government (1861) argues for proportional representation and a wider suffrage, and in later life Mill was sympathetic to socialism while fearing its tyranny over the individual.

Influence and how to read Mill

On Liberty is the usual starting point for debates on free speech and the limits of state power, and utilitarian ethics was developed after him by Henry Sidgwick. The UGC NET syllabus pairs Bentham, Mill and Sidgwick; see the UGC NET guide.

Begin with Mill on Liberty, chapter 2, then Utilitarianism and The Subjection of Women. The fifth chapter of the Autobiography tells the story of his crisis; the guide to reading philosophy helps with texts of this age.