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Mill on Liberty of Self-Development

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 April 2010

Wendy Donner
Wendy Donner
Affiliation:
University of Regina
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Extract

John Stuart Mill's commitment to liberty and individual development is one of the most exoteric themes of his moral and political philosophy. But the linkages between this commitment to liberty and development and Mill's conception of utility and principles of the good are not as commonly recognized. As part of a more general transformation of his utilitarianism, Mill repudiated Bentham's principles of the good and instead adopted a more sophisticated form of hedonism. While Bentham admits only the total quantity of pleasure as contributing to value, Mill expands the circle to admit quality or kind of pleasure as well into the value reckoning. I have elsewhere interpreted and defended Mill's qualitative hedonism, and in this paper I can offer only a brief overview of that account and must largely assume its plausibility. Bentham and Mill agree that only pleasurable experiences and the absence of painful experiences have value and so both are called hedonists. But they have very different views about what properties of pleasures makes them valuable, or in other words what are the good-making properties of pleasure. Bentham thinks that only intensity and duration, or quantity, are good-making properties of pleasures, and thus he includes only these properties in measuring value. As a consequence, in the context of value measurement he is not interested in the kinds of things in which people take pleasure. But Mill is a qualitative hedonist, and thinks that the quality or kind of pleasure is also a good-making characteristic and thus should be included in value measurement. The things that are sources of pleasure matter to Mill.

Type
Articles
Information
Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review / Revue canadienne de philosophie , Volume 26 , Issue 2 , Summer 1987 , pp. 227 - 238
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Philosophical Association 1987

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References

1 Donner, Wendy, “John Stuart Mill's Concept of Utility”, Dialogue 12/3 (09 1983), 479–494CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 Rem Edwards makes this error. See Edwards, Rem, Pleasures and Pains (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1979), 32Google Scholar.

3 Mill, John Stuart, The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, ed. Robson, John M. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962–1986). See vol. 10, Utilitarianism, 211Google Scholar.

4 Wendy Donner, “John Stuart Mill's Doctrine of Development”, chapter 4 of John Stuart Mill's Concept of Utility (unpublished manuscript). See also: Robson, John M., The Improvement of Mankind (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1968)Google Scholar; Sharpless, F. Parvin, The Literary Criticism of John Stuart Mill (The Hague: Mouton, 1967)Google Scholar; Garforth, F. W., John Stuart Mill's Theory of Education (Oxford: Martin Robertson, 1979)Google Scholar; Garforth, F. W., Educative Democracy: John Stuart Mill on Education in Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980)Google Scholar; Thompson, Dennis, John Stuart Mill and Representative Government (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976)Google Scholar.

5 John Stuart Mill edited the 1868 edition of his father's Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind; see James Mill, An Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind, 2 vols., ed. John Stuart Mill (reprinted; New York: Augustus M. Kelly, 1967).

6 This is a very common criticism. Two recent examples: Brenkert, G. G., “Marx's Critique of Utilitarianism”, in Nielsen, Kai and Patten, Steven C., eds., Marx and Morality, Canadian Journal of Philosophy Supplementary Vol. 7 (1981), 203–204;Google ScholarDuncan, Graeme and Gray, John, “The Left Against Mill”, in Cooper, Wesley E., Nielsen, Kai and Patten, Steven C., eds., New Essays on John Stuart Mill and Utilitarianism, Canadian Journal of Philosophy Supplementary Vol. 5 (1979), 206Google Scholar.

7 , Mill, Collected Works, vol. 18, On Liberty, 260–275Google Scholar. A similar argument is found in Duncan and Gray, “The Left Against Mill”, 215–216Google Scholar.

8 Mill, , Collected Works, vol. 18, On Liberty, 266Google Scholar.

9 Ibid., 260–263.

10 MacPherson, C. B., Democratic Theory: Essays in Retrieval (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973)Google Scholar; MacPherson, C. B., The Life and Times of Liberal Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980)Google Scholar; Gutmann, Amy, Liberal Equality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980)Google Scholar.

11 There is a growing literature on this question. See Lyons, David, “Mill's Theory of Morality”, Nous 10 (1976), 101–120;Google ScholarLyons, David, “Human Rights and the General Welfare”, Philosophy and Public Affairs 6(1977), 113–129;Google ScholarLyons, David, “Liberty and Harm to Others”, in , Cooper and , Patten, eds., New Essays, 1–21;Google ScholarBrown, D. G., “Mill on Liberty and Morality”, Philosophical Review 81 (1972), 133–158;CrossRefGoogle ScholarBrown, D. G., “What is Mill's Principle of Utility?”, Canadian Journal of Philosophy 3 (1973–1974), 1–12;CrossRefGoogle ScholarBrown, D. G., “Mill's Criterion of Wrong Conduct”, Dialogue 21/1 (1982), 27–44;CrossRefGoogle ScholarCopp, David, “The Iterated-Utilitarianism of J. S. Mill”, in , Cooper and , Patten, eds., New Essays, 75–98Google Scholar; L. W. Sumner, “The Good and the Right”, Ibid., 99–114; Narveson, Jan, Morality and Utility (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins, 1967)Google Scholar.

12 Mill, , Collected Works, vol. 18, On Liberty, 252–254Google Scholar.

13 Ibid., 258.

14 Mill, , Collected Works, vol. 19, Representative Government, 405, 424–425, 433Google Scholar.

15 This comes from a superficial reading of the relevant passage in Collected Works, vol. 10, Utilitarianism, 211.

16 Ibid., 213–216.

17 Mill, , Collected Works, vol. 19, Representative Government, 473Google Scholar.

18 Ibid., 436.

19 Mill, , Collected Works, vol. 10, Utilitarianism, 250Google Scholar.

20 Ibid.

21 Ibid., 250–251.

22 Ibid., 251.

23 Ibid., 255.

24 Ibid., 256.

25 See also Gray, John, Mill on Liberty: A Defence (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983), 48–57;CrossRefGoogle ScholarBerger, Fred, Happiness, Justice and Freedom: The Moral and Political Philosophy of John Stuart Mill (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1984), 168–169, 226–253Google Scholar.

26 John Gray interprets Mill as holding that there is only a negative right to autonomy. Mill on Liberty, 52.

27 Mill, , Collected Works, vol. 10, Utilitarianism, 251Google Scholar.

28 Shue, Henry, Basic Rights (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), 37Google Scholar.

29 Ibid., 17.

30 Work on this paper was supported by a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Florida and by a Research Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Versions were read at the Canadian Philosophical Association, Eastern American Philosophical Association, Trent University, University of Waterloo, University of Windsor, State University of New York at Buffalo, Bates College, University of Regina, Michigan State University, and the University of Florida. I am grateful to the members of those audiences, as well as to the following individuals for criticisms, comments and support: D. G. Brown; Douglas Den Uyl; Ray Frey; David Gauthier; Richard Hare; Ellen Haring; Michael Kubara; Jan Narveson; Roger Paden; L. W. Sumner; Henry West.