John Stuart Mill Flashcards
When was he born
1806 and died 1873
Bentham argues that
Man is a pleasure seeking animal
Nature has placed mankind under 2 master’s
Pleasure and pain
At the age of 30 in 1836, J.S. Mill started preparing himself for the task before him.
He was expected to be the champion of the utilitarian principle
Two famous mill books
Utiliritaianism and on Liberty
According to him, the standard of an action is anchored on the Bentamite principle of utilitarianism- that is
the happiness of the greatest majority of the people that are affected or are to be affected by an action.
What he disagreed with his father on
J.S. Mill disagreed with Bentham and his father that pleasure is pleasure is pleasure and happiness is happiness and there is no better, nobler or greater happiness. Bentham had said “push-pin is a good as poetry”
Quantitative and wuLitative happiness
according to Mill, intellectual happiness is nobler than sexual happiness Specifically, Mill claims that
It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than to be a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied
In On Liberty Mill argues that government must make action to promote the happiness of the people.
The greatest happiness government should provide for the people is the freedom or liberty of the people.
Of all liberties, ??!are the most celebrated ones for Mill.
right to opinion and right to freedom of expression
As he states in On Liberty (1858), Mill believed the individual should
be free and the people should be wary of the state which was prone to ‘mischief’ through its interference in the individual’s everyday life. Government should work for the people, not the other way round.
According to the opening paragraphs of Chapter V of his autobiography, he had asked himself whether the creation of a just society, his life’s objective, would actually make him happy. His heart answered “
no”, and unsurprisingly he lost the happiness of striving towards this objective.
Mill states that it is not a crime to harm oneself as long as
the person doing so is not harming others
He favors the harm principle: “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.”
He excuses those who are “incapable of self-government” from this principle, such as
young children or those living in “backward states of society”.
Mill explicitly states that “harms” may include acts of ? as well as acts of?.
Omission and commission
Thus, failing to rescue a drowning child counts as a harmful act, as does failing to pay taxes, or failing to appear as a witness in court. All such harmful omissions may be regulated, according to Mill. By contrast, it does not count as harming someone if—without force or fraud—the affected individual consents to assume the risk: thus one may permissibly offer unsafe employment to others, provided there is no deception involved. (He does, however, recognise one limit to consent: society should not permit people to sell themselves into slavery.)
Mill believed that “the struggle between Liberty and Authority is the most
conspicuous feature in the portions of history.
Mill defined social liberty as protection from “
the tyranny of political rulers
Social liberty for Mill meant putting limits on the ruler’s power so that he would not be able to use that power to further his own wishes and thus make decisions that could harm society. In other words, people should have the right to have a say in the government’s decisions.
Worried about minority views being suppressed, he argued in support of freedom of speech on political grounds, stating that it is a
critical component for a representative government to have in order to empower debate over public policy.
the harm principle:states
That the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.”[46]
John Stuart Mill believed in the philosophy of utilitarianism, which he would describe as the principle that holds “
that actions are right in the proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness”. By happiness he means, “intended pleasure, and the absence of pain; by unhappiness, pain, and the privation of pleasure”.
What did he say happiness is
happiness is the sole end of human action”
Utilitarianism Bentham and mill
Mill’s major contribution to utilitarianism is his argument for the qualitative separation of pleasures. Bentham treats all forms of happiness as equal, whereas Mill argues that intellectual and moral pleasures (higher pleasures) are superior to more physical forms of pleasure (lower pleasures). He distinguishes between happiness and contentment, claiming that the former is of higher value than the latter, a belief wittily encapsulated in the statement that, “it is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, are of a different opinion, it is because they only know their own side of the question.”
Both thought that the moral value of an act was determined by the pleasure it produced. Bentham considered only quantity of pleasure, but Mill considered both quantity and quality of pleasure. … For Mill, higher pleasures are more valuable than lower pleasures, because of their “intrinsic superiority”.
Utilitarianism is an effort to provide an answer to the practical question “
What ought a person to do?
