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Was Mill a Moral Scientist?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 January 2009

S. J. Heans
S. J. Heans
Affiliation:
Lancing College
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Extract

In The Philosophy of John Stuart Mill, Alan Ryan suggests there is an underlying unity of conception in Mill's philosophical writing. He identifies this single idea as ‘inductivism’ and, in the first of the two chapters devoted to Mill's ethics, he states that ‘once we understand how this concept of rationality holds together his views on mathematics and justice’, we will find that much ‘light can be shed on the dark places of Mill's philosophy’. No mention will be made in the present essay of Mill's opinions on mathematics, and it is only incidentally concerned with his ideas about justice. However, it shares Ryan's premise that an inductivist interpretation of Mill's moral philosophy is likely to be most enlightening. In particular, our aim is to show how this approach can brighten up two undeniably murky spots in Utilitarianism: the ‘proof passage’ of chapter 4, and the distinction between higher and lower pleasures in chapter 2.

Type
Articles
Information
Philosophy , Volume 67 , Issue 259 , January 1992 , pp. 81 - 101
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1992

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References

1 Ryan, Alan, The Philosophy of John Stuart Mill (2nd edition, Macmillan, 1987), 187.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2 Ibid.

3 Utilitarianism, On Liberty, and Considerations on Representative Government (ed. Acton, H. B., Dent, 1972), 40.Google Scholar

4 For Williams's critique of the aspiration towards objectivity in ethics see his remarks on Sidgwick's ambition to adopt ‘the standpoint of the universe’ in Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (Fontana, 1985)Google Scholar. The argument here is that, pace Williams, Mill's ethics combine universalism with subjectivism.

5 Op. cit., note 1, 204.

6 Ibid., 201.

7 Ibid., 198.

8 Ibid., 197.

9 Ibid., 199.

10 Ibid., 197.

11 Ibid., 200.

12 Ibid., 201.

13 Op. cit. note 3, 28.

14 Auguste Comte and Positivism (Ann Arbor, 1961), 145.Google Scholar

15 Leviathan (Pelican, 1968), 161.Google Scholar

16 Op. cit. note 14, 141. I find unhelpful the interpretation of Hobbes as an egoist concerned to reconcile morality and self-interest. (This has been stated most recently by Kavka, Gregory, Hobbesian Moral and Political Philosophy (Princeton University Press, 1986)Google Scholar. Hobbes does base morality on self-interest, but what sort of self do we mean? What is its interest? There are two egos in Leviathan: one is passion driven, selfish and bellicose; the other is governed by reason, considerate of others and pacific. Morality and political obligation are only reconcilable with the higher of these selves.

17 Op. cit. note 3, 55. Ryan ignores the universalism implicit in Mill's conception of utility. He therefore derives Mill's theory of justice from the quasi-Kantian ‘principle of impartiality’ (op. cit. note 1, 224–227).

18 Ibid., 32, 3. Thus Mill's doctrine of moral progress and his theory of justice are both versions of transcendental sentimentalism.

19 Ibid., 30.

20 Ibid., 34.

21 Op. cit. note 1, 201.

22 Op. cit. Note 3, 33.

23 Op. cit. note 1, 201.

24 Op. cit. note 3, 34.

25 Op. cit. note 1, 201.

26 Cowling, Maurice, Religion and Public Doctrine in Modern England, vol. 2 (Cambridge University Press), 108.Google Scholar

27 See the Introduction to Cowling, Maurice, Mill and Liberalism, 2nd ed. (Cambridge University Press, 1989)Google Scholar. Cowling's assault on academic liberalism seems itself rather academic given his failure to discuss the work of academic liberals (Ryan, Gray, Ten et al.) on Mill.

28 This is not the place to comment on the dialogue of the deaf which is the debate between Cowling and his liberal critics except to say that both are, in their way, right. Cowling is right to emphasize Mill's commitment to a humanist metaphysic; his critics are right to insist on the genuineness of Mill's belief in liberty of thought and conduct. But since when have humanism and liberalism been incompatible? See also note 47 below.

29 Op. cit. note 1, 187.

30 Ibid., 196.

31 Op. cit. note 3, 4.

32 Op. cit. note 1, 41.

33 Ibid., 195.

34 Ibid., 198.

35 Ibid., 197.

36 Op. cit. note 3, 4.

37 Op. cit. note 1, 187, 8.

38 John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham: Utilitarianism and Other Essays, Ryan, Alan (ed.) (Penguin 1987), 249.Google Scholar

39 Ibid., 234.

40 See Wollheim, R. ‘John Stuart Mill and Isaiah Berlin: The Ends of Life and the Preliminaries of Morality’, The Idea of Freedom, Ryan, Alan (ed.) (Oxford University Press, 1979).Google Scholar

41 The phrase is Sidgwick, 's in The Methods of Ethics.Google Scholar

42 Autobiography of John Stuart Mill, Laski, Harold J. (ed.) (Oxford University Press, 1924), 120.Google Scholar

43 Op. cit. note 3, 40.

44 Op. cit. note 1, 216.

45 See the final two pages of The Philosophy of John Stuart Mill. On the other hand, John Gray places aesthetics within Mill's utilitarianism: it is the top tier of the ontological hierarchy (beginning with ‘any sentient creature, jelly fish, lower mammal or human being’) he finds there. But Gray does not go far enough in the ontological direction: elsewhere, particularly in his definition of utility (‘an axiological principle’), he treats Mill as a moral scientist. He does so despite rejecting the moral science tradition of Mill criticism (Sidgwick, Moore et al.) and recognizing that Mill views ethics as an art, concerned with the ends of life, what human being may become, rather than a science, concerned with what human being is (Mill on Liberty: A Defence (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983, 10–14, 46)).Google Scholar

46 Urmson, J. O., ‘The Interpretation of the Moral Philosophy of J. S. Mill’, Philosophical Quarterly, 1954, 33–39.Google Scholar

47 Mill, J. S., The Logic of the Moral Sciences (Book VI of A System of Logic, ed. Ayer, A. J.) (Duckworth, 1987), 143Google Scholar. There is not space to go into what I call Mill's humanist metaphysic except to say that his critique of Comtean altruism (the ethical form in which traditional religious discipline most compelled Mill's attention) seems to revolve around what he calls ‘the religion of positive worthiness’ which he places ‘between the region of duty and that of sin’ of theist metaphysics. This is the basis of his defence of individualism against the ‘“systemization”’ involved in Comtean ethics., But this rather modest, bürgerlich, conception of higher human being is but the springboard for something more idealistic, even aristocratic. (See op cit. note 14, 146).

48 Op. cit. note 1, 217.

49 Op. cit. note 3, xiv.

50 Ibid., 9.

51 Op. cit. note 42, 125.