Trent Dillihay (11): Final Project Post #1
John
Stuart Mill: Mill’s Utilitarianism and a brief overview of his life.
Post 2 link: http://cophilosophy.blogspot.com/2015/12/trent-dillihay-final-project-post-2.html
Post 3 link: http://cophilosophy.blogspot.com/2015/12/trent-dillihay-final-project-post-3.html
John Stuart Mill, the man
who would eventually become one of the most famous Utilitarians in history, was
born on May 20, 1806. For much of his early childhood, Mill and his family
lived in a state of relative financial insecurity, as his father James Mill
would not achieve a truly stable financial independence until 1818. However,
the Mill family was kept from poverty by the financial support of their longtime
family friend and fellow Utilitarian Jeremy Bentham, and James Mill wasted no
time using this to advance his son’s education. John Stuart Mill was pressed
hard by his father to learn as much as possible throughout his childhood, and
while this tactic did develop him into a genius, it unfortunately also resulted
in Mill having a mental breakdown at the age of 20. This “mental crisis”, as
Mill would later refer to it, ultimately proved to be a turning point for him.
In recovering from his breakdown, Mill used literature and poetry, as well as
reading the works of various Romantic era writers and philosophers who had
significant differences of opinion with the type Utilitarianism he had been
taught throughout his entire life up to that point. The end result was that
Mill decided that he needed something more in his philosophy than what his
father and Jeremy Bentham had taught him; this idea would push him to develop
his own unique brand of Utilitarianism that would earn him his fame as a
philosopher.
Mill’s
Utilitarianism was based on the ideas of previous philosophers like Bentham,
but was different in important ways. Like previous incarnations of the
philosophy, it was based on the idea of Utility, which says essentially that
the basic good or evil of an action is whether or not that action leads to
happiness or pain, and that moral actions are those that lead to the greatest
amount of happiness and pleasure. Mill shared this basic view with other
Utilitarians like Bentham, but had different views on what exactly constituted
the best form of happiness. Unlike Bentham, Mill drew a line between different
orders of pleasure based on their quality, with mentally or aesthetically
stimulating things like poetry or art taking a higher precedence and being
better than other forms of enjoyment. Mill also added a principle concerning
individual liberty to the idea of Utility. This idea was first introduced in
his book Utilitarianism; there Mill
made the claim that Utilitarian thought had been focused too much on what it
thought was the good of society, and had ignored individual freedom and the
happiness of individual people too much in the process. He also thought that
while an interest in the public good was important, it did not need to be our
first concern; rather, it should be considered in most cases to the degree that
we as individuals can be sure we are not infringing on the rights and happiness
of others with our actions. This was an idea that Mill would build upon in what
is arguably his most famous book, On
Liberty, where he introduced one of his greatest additions to philosophy,
known as the Harm Principle. The Harm Principle builds on Mill’s view of
individual liberty and happiness by saying that a person should be free to act
as they choose so long as those actions do not cause harm, specifically harm to
others. Mill took a hardline stance against paternalism in government and
society, saying that the goal of trying to protect someone from themselves, or
doing something for a person’s own good, was in most cases a violation of their
liberty. In Mill’s view, following this principle and allowing people to act as
they choose was one of the ultimate ways of promoting Utility and the
development of humankind in general. This was the Utilitarianism of John Stuart
Mill, which served as the basic philosophical ideology upon which he based
almost all of his other views on the world. In later installments, I will discuss
these other views and how they were influenced by Utilitarianism. The second
post will concern Mill’s political views, and the third will concern Mill’s
views on women’s rights and on religion.
Sources:
A
Little History of Philosophy by Nigel Warburton
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