John Stuart Mill

Question 1

When was he born

Answer 1

1806 and died 1873

Question 2

Bentham argues that

Answer 2

Man is a pleasure seeking animal

Question 3

Nature has placed mankind under 2 master’s

Answer 3

Pleasure and pain

Question 4

At the age of 30 in 1836, J.S. Mill started preparing himself for the task before him.

Answer 4

He was expected to be the champion of the utilitarian principle

Question 5

Two famous mill books

Answer 5

Utiliritaianism and on Liberty

Question 6

According to him, the standard of an action is anchored on the Bentamite principle of utilitarianism- that is

Answer 6

the happiness of the greatest majority of the people that are affected or are to be affected by an action.

Question 7

What he disagreed with his father on

Answer 7

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”

Question 8

Quantitative and wuLitative happiness

Answer 8

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

Question 9

In On Liberty Mill argues that government must make action to promote the happiness of the people.

Answer 9

The greatest happiness government should provide for the people is the freedom or liberty of the people.

Question 10

Of all liberties, ??!are the most celebrated ones for Mill.

Answer 10

right to opinion and right to freedom of expression

Question 11

As he states in On Liberty (1858), Mill believed the individual should

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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.

Question 12

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 “

Answer 12

no”, and unsurprisingly he lost the happiness of striving towards this objective.

Question 13

Mill states that it is not a crime to harm oneself as long as

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the person doing so is not harming others

Question 14

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

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prevent harm to others.”

Question 15

He excuses those who are “incapable of self-government” from this principle, such as

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young children or those living in “backward states of society”.

Question 16

Mill explicitly states that “harms” may include acts of ? as well as acts of?.

Answer 16

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.)

Question 17

Mill believed that “the struggle between Liberty and Authority is the most

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conspicuous feature in the portions of history.

Question 18

Mill defined social liberty as protection from “

Answer 18

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.

Question 19

Worried about minority views being suppressed, he argued in support of freedom of speech on political grounds, stating that it is a

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critical component for a representative government to have in order to empower debate over public policy.

Question 20

the harm principle:states

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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]

Question 21

John Stuart Mill believed in the philosophy of utilitarianism, which he would describe as the principle that holds “

Answer 21

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”.

Question 22

What did he say happiness is

Answer 22

happiness is the sole end of human action”

Question 23

Utilitarianism Bentham and mill

Answer 23

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”.

Question 24

Utilitarianism is an effort to provide an answer to the practical question “

Answer 24

What ought a person to do?