John Stuart Mill was born in London, the eldest of James and Harriet Burrow Mill's nine children. His father, a well-known philosopher and follower of Jeremy Bentham, educated young John at home. Beginning with Greek at age three and Latin at age eight, the younger Mill had read six of Plato's dialogues by the age of ten. John spent most of the day in the study with his father, who was writing a history of India. Each morning, they would go on a walk and James would quiz his son on what he had learned the previous day. During these walks, James would often discourse on various topics and then expect his son to prepare a summary of his points for the following day. Given the severity of this schooling--and the fact that his father showed no "signs of feeling"--it is not surprising that John later concluded, "I never was a boy."
The publication of the elder Mill's work on India in 1818 resulted in his receiving a government post as an Assistant Examiner at the East India House. Five years later, James managed to arrange a similar position for his seventeen-year-old son. John worked for the East India House for the next thirty-four years, eventually becoming chief of his department. In his early years as a clerk, John was, like his father, a disciple of Bentham's utilitarianism. John established the Utilitarian Society, contributed articles to the Westminster Review, and was active in the London Debating Society. He was developing a reputation as a polemicist for the "philosophic radicals"--those who sought social changes along the lines of Bentham's theories.
But in 1826, at age twenty, Mill suffered a breakdown and went through a period of severe depression. He discovered to his horror that even if all the social changes he was advocating were enacted and all the ideas he had been taught about happiness were proven correct, it would not make him happy. As he later wrote in his Autobiography, "All my happiness was to have been found in the continual pursuit of this end. The end had ceased to charm, and how could there ever again be any interest in the means? I seemed to have nothing left to live for." He eventually came to the conclusion that his rigorous intellectual training had weakened his ability to feel emotion. Reading such writers as Wordsworth and Coleridge, he began to teach himself to feel as his father had taught him to think. During this period, he encountered divergent philosophies, such as those of socialist philosopher Claude-Henry Saint-Simon and positivist thinker Auguste Comte, and he began to see some of the inadequacies of the strict quantificational method of Bentham.
In 1831, Mill was introduced to Harriet Taylor, the wife of a successful merchant. They quickly developed a strong friendship and collaborated on a number of works, including Principles of Political Economy, On Liberty, and The Subjection of Women. Mill attributed to Taylor a number of his most important ideas, including his liberal feminism, and claimed that next to his father, she was the chief intellectual influence on his life. He even claimed she was the inspiration for his major epistemological work, A System of Logic (1843). Following her husband's death in 1849, they were finally married in 1851.
John and Harriet Mill moved to Avignon, France, in 1858, with neither of them in good health. Shortly after arriving Harriet Taylor Mill died, and her daughter came to take care of her stepfather. Over the next seven years, Mill published On Liberty (1859), Utilitarianism (1861), Considerations on Representative Government (1861), Auguste Comte and Positivism (1865), and The Subjection of Women (written 1861, published 1869). In 1865, Mill was surprised by an offer to run for Parliament. Without campaigning he was elected and spent two years working on behalf of women's suffrage, Irish land reform, and the rights of blacks in Jamaica. Returning once again to the south of France, he wrote his Autobiography just before dying in 1873.
BASIC THOUGHT
Although Mill wrote on a variety of topics and his work in induction is still used today, he is best known for his modification of Bentham's utilitarianism and his defense of individual liberty. Bentham had taught that ethics should be grounded on maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain, rather than on such abstractions as Kant's "duty" or conscience. Accordingly, Bentham developed a "hedonistic calculus," a mathematical method of determining which actions would most likely provide a greater quantity of pleasure over pain and hence yield happiness. Whereas this system might seem egoistic and individualistic, Bentham claimed that it would be to each individual person's advantage to seek the "greatest happiness of the greatest number."
In his Utilitarianism, Mill accepts Bentham's quantitative hedonism and argues that happiness, or pleasure, is the one thing that all people seek. But whereas Bentham's system merely measured quantities of pleasure and pain, Mill maintains that the quality of a given pleasure or pain has to be considered as well. Even though a pig might gain a great quantity of pleasure from wallowing in the mud, it would be a very low quality pleasure; and "It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied." According to Mill, the person best able to make a qualitative determination between rival pleasures is the one who has experienced both. Presumably anyone who has both wallowed in the mud and studied philosophy would prefer the difficult but fulfilling pleasures of the latter.
In On Liberty, Mill asserts that society should maximize individual liberty. In fact, he claims that "the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others." What an individual does in private does not concern society--even if such actions are not to that individual's own best interests. "Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign," and society should make no paternalistic rules.
On the Subjection of Women applies this liberal theory to women. This work points out that for centuries women have been subordinated to men and hence excluded from the kinds of individual choices that On Liberty extols. Such subjection is "one of the chief hindrances to human improvement" and only "a principle of perfect equality" will rectify the situation. This work was written in collaboration with Harriet Taylor Mill. Scholars are divided as to how much Mill relied on Taylor--some go so far as to suggest that the work was actually "ghost-written" by her. Whether or not one accepts that assertion, there is no question that her ideas greatly influenced Mill's version of feminism. Yet Mill never did accept her contention that women should be able to work outside the home after marriage.
Mill's contemporary critics pointed out that there seem to be discrepancies between the philosophy of Utilitarianism and that of On Liberty and On the Subjection of Women. For example, following the greatest happiness principle of Utilitarianism, wouldn't it make sense for society to increase general happiness by intruding on an individual's liberty? Mill countered this objection by arguing that on balance laissez-faire individualism will ultimately benefit society, that the diversity of individual choices is more conducive to general happiness than any socially imposed standard.
More recent critics have questioned Mill's distinction between private and public--for example, what you choose to do to yourself in the privacy of your home may cost the public money if you end up in a tax-supported hospital. Feminist critics have pointed out the potential oppression of the private/public distinction, questioned the possibility of "perfect equality" if paternalistic structures continue, and assailed Mill's "equal opportunity until marriage" doctrine. But there is no question that as a reforming impulse, Mill's beliefs--about the rights of the individual, the rights of women and minorities, freedom from societal intrusion into personal affairs, and utility rather than tradition--have had an enormous influence.
By Forrest Baird © 2000 by Prentice Hall from Philosophic Classics, Volume IV