Summary
Mill claimed, it is platitudinous to say, to be a utilitarian: so far as he locatedthe desirability of actions in their consequences, he most certainly was a utilitarian. It is difficult, however, to reconcile his use of the principle of utility with the use to which Bentham and James Mill had put it; any attempt to understand it on this basis is unlikely to penetrate its nebulous comprehensiveness. The principle of utility is used by Mill, not as his predecessors used it, but as a sort of pious slogan with which to convince himself that he was not departing too radically from the tradition in which he had grown up. No criticism need be made of Mill because he inserts into utility all the good ends to which human endeavour has aspired: but its meaning, nevertheless, and the part it plays in his doctrine, can best be understood, not by approaching it in a narrow political spirit, but by asking, in the first place—what sort of life and what sort of conduct is it to which the aspirations of mankind should be directed? For, once the question is put in this form, the answer will be seen to entail, not a circumscribed account of governmental and political obligation, but a set of universally binding guides to individual and social action, a body of beliefs that relieve men, and society, from the disorders, imperfections and vulgarities which come from conformity to credulous, unelevated, unreflective habit.
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- Information
- Mill and Liberalism , pp. 27 - 50Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1990