Trent
Dillihay Final project post 2:
The
Politics of John Stuart Mill
[Installment 1: http://cophilosophy.blogspot.com/2015/11/trent-dillihay-11-final-project-post-1.html
While it may seem strange initially to discuss
politics in a project about a philosopher, the fact is that Mill and his Utilitarian
ideals were intrinsically linked to politics, with Mill even serving as an MP
for a term. As you might expect, Mill’s political ideology was based on his
Utilitarianism, to the point that he believed that all forms of government
ought to be judged by how much they promoted utility and the human development
Mill believed would result from it. Mill believed that utility and human
development depended on individual liberty, which he believed was an essential
right, especially in the realm of freedom of thought and discussion, and
individuality. The best form of government, in Mill’s view, was one that
actively encouraged those values, and for Mill, that government was a
representative democracy. He hated authoritarian and aristocratic systems, and
openly despised the elements of those systems still present in the Britain of
his day. However, he also argued that it would take time to develop an ideal
system properly, and that some dictatorial forms of governance were sometimes necessary
to pave the way for an ideal system. He particularly advocated this in the
British colonies, but openly spoke out against colonialism when he felt it had
gone too far, a practice which eventually cost him his seat in Parliament. At
the same time, Mill thought that democracies had a potentially fatal weakness in
that they can sometimes suppress opinions held by the minority and become in
the process tyrannical. Mill’s answer to this was that a system of local government,
organized in a federal style system, where elected, well-educated officials
were chosen based on merit and experience by an equally well-educated
population of voters. Mill also had views on the rapid industrialization in
Britain during his lifetime, which he thought had created an economic system
that hindered human happiness and development due to the constant pursuit of
wealth by factory owners at the expense of workers. Mill thought there was a
need to balance economic growth with human development, and advocated reforms that
would give workers a shared ownership of their company’s wealth, so that
economic growth more directly benefited and motivated them into further
development. Finally, one of Mill’s more unexpected viewpoints is that he was
what we might now call an early environmentalist. He argued that, in addition
to balancing growth with human well-being, it also needed to be balanced for its
environmental effect, as it could have a serious negative impact on people
otherwise. As part of this, Mill believed in controlling population growth, to
the point of controversially advocating birth control, and believed that if
this was not properly controlled it would inevitably cause serious harm and
starvation to the worst-off as resources were strained.
Sources:
A
Little History of Philosophy by Nigel Warburton
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