John Stuart Mill political philosophy

John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) was the most famous and influential British moral philosopher of the nineteenth century. He was one of the last systematic philosophers, making significant contributions in logic, metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, political philosophy and social theory. He was also an important public figure, articulating the liberal platform, pressing for various liberal reforms, and serving in Parliament. Mill's greatest philosophical influence was in moral and political philosophy especially his articulation and defence of utilitarian moral theory and liberal political philosophy.

Political and Economic Democracy grind opens Considerations on Representative Government with a powerful, twopronged vindication of widespread political participation. First he argues that peoples interests are only safe from abuse or neglect if they are empowered to protect them themselves. Second, Mill describes political participation as having an improving effect on citizens characters and helping to make them both more active and more public-spirited. At the same time Mills theory of political democracy contains several anti majoritarian mechanisms. He enthusiastically supports Thomas Hares system of proportional representation, which may not be anti-majoritarian, strictly speaking, but which is meant to ensure that minorities are represented in proportion to their size. In addition, he takes the job of drafting legislation away from elected representatives and assigns it instead to a committee of legal experts. The role of representatives is accordingly reduced to that of requesting that bills of particular sorts be written and voting aye or nay on the results. Finally, and most distinctively, Mill advocates a form of plural voting in which nearly everyone receives at least one vote. And those with more education receive additional votes .In an essay published two years before Representative Government, he ventures that university graduates might receive as many as five or six . It is worth pausing to ask precisely why Mill would support plural voting. One answer that might be given is that it is an expedient solution to the problem posed by the impending enfranchisement of the largely uneducated working class. Mill believes that it is desirable for

workers and their employers to have roughly equal numbers of representatives, so that neither class can dominate the other .A properly calibrated plural voting scheme might accomplish this. Mill makes it clear that he believes that those who know more are entitled to greater political power as a matter of moral principle. And insofar as there is a distinct group whom Mill hopes will benefit from plural voting, it is not capitalists per se. Mill believes in the existence of an intellectual elite .He also believes in the existence of a moral elite, characterised by their lack of selfishness and greater public spirit. He believes that these elites are by and large coextensive, that there are not two few but just one. Although Mills opinion of the formal education of his day, even at the Oxbridge universities, is too low for him to class most of the people who would benefit from plural voting as part of the elite would benefit. They could elect some of their number, which would let them act as swing votes when capital and labour are divided and give them a bully pulpit from which to disseminate their views. So Mills nuanced theory of political democracy combines egalitarian and elitist elements, with neither clearly predominating. Interpretations that claim that Mill intends for elites to dominate the rest of society ignore the fact that he says that plural voting should never put elites in a position to outvote everyone else and that any deference shown to them is to be the intelligent deference of those who know much to those who know still more. On the other hand, interpretations that contend that Mill gave up his support for plural voting after discovering the Hare Plan or intended it only as a temporary measure ignore his explicit statement to the contrary. Mill believes that as long as the moral and intellectual improvement that he perceives in his day of the working class continues, workers will someday no longer be willing to work for mere wages. They will demand first profit-sharing and then outright ownership of their firms. Mill considers this a welcome development, because bearing the responsibilities of ownership would accelerate their moral and intellectual development still further. However, he insists that for this transition to be legitimate workers must respect capitalists property rights; he calls for workers to buy their firms or start their own. The state has little to do with this spontaneous process. Mill also predicts that workers will experiment with the village-level socialism or communism described by writers like Charles Fourier and Henri de Saint-Simon; his optimism about the likely success of these experiments waxes and wanes at different points in his life. Mill is an implacable opponent of what he calls revolutionary socialism that is managed at the level of the nation-state. The most socialised economy that he contemplates with any pleasure

would still be one of small, internally governed enterprises that compete with one another and that workers can join or leave at their pleasure.

Mills Liberalism On Liberty is Mills most widely read work and a seminal contribution to social and political philosophy. The essay, Mill tells us, is a defence of one very simple principle. According to which the sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number, is self-protection. Mills description of this liberty or harm principle as very simple is disproved by the quantity of ink spilled in the name of explicating it. It is not even clear that it is one principle; later in the essay, it is restated in the form of two maxims. The single most pressing exegetical question about the essay is that of how the notion of harm is to be understood and more specifically how it is connected to that of interests. Another critical issue, debated in the 1970s by D. G. Brown and Lyons, is that of whether the liberty principle only permits social interference with behaviour that would cause harm to someone besides the agent or whether it also permits interference with behaviour that is not itself harmful when this would help to protect someone else. This issue bears on the question of whether Mill is being inconsistent when he says that we can legitimately be required to participate in harm-preventing social institutions (through serving as a witness or a juror in court, for instance) and to act as Good Samaritans by rescuing others from imminent harm on an ad hoc basis. Mills contemporary James Fitzjames Stephens complains that Mill nowhere offers an argument that is sufficient to establish a principle as sweeping as the liberty principle, and this objection cannot be lightly set aside. Mill does argue for the liberty principle and true to his word his arguments are grounded entirely on utility in the largest sense, grounded on the permanent interests of man as a progressive being. The claim that people who enjoy individual freedom are able to make choices that better satisfy their own existing preferences does figure in Mills case for the liberty principle. The line of argument on which he places the most emphasis says that an atmosphere of liberty fosters personal development. Freedom forces people to make choices and this requires them to exercise their distinctly human faculties, the faculties responsible for the higher quality pleasures. Moreover, it is only in an atmosphere of freedom that an individual can attain the harmony between her

character traits and the most deeply rooted elements of her own psychology that Mill calls individuality and considers to be essential to the enjoyment of a genuinely happy life .Through choosing how to act and what environments to inhabit a person exerts such control as he can over the constitution of her character. Mill believes no one can know better than the individual hisself what sort of character is the best fit for him, and so he requires personal liberty and diverse situations in order to fashion a bespoke character for himself. Mill goes so far as to suggest that each person should consider his character a work of art with herself as artist, which implies that the appreciation of harmoniously developed characters can be a source of aesthetic .Admittedly, as desirable as Mill considers it for each person to tailor-make her own character, he does allow that there are numerous traitsthe virtues, which range from cleanliness to the civic virtue or public spirit that makes citizens active and disinterested participants in public affairsthat everyone should possess . Nevertheless, this leaves ample room for individual variation. Some recent liberal philosophers have adopted a view according to which the state must remain neutral between different ideas about what sort of life is best, over some wide range of possibilities . Mills liberalism, though, is not neutral in this sense. Skorupski has helpfully distinguished between permissive neutrality, which forbids compelling people to adopt certain forms of life and avoid others, and persuasive neutrality, which forbids advocating some forms of life in preference to others . Mills liberalism is permissively but not persuasively neutral. In the Principles of Political Economy, he draws a distinction between authoritative government intervention whereby the state requires or forbids particular conduct and unauthoritative intervention whereby it limits itself to activities such as giving advice and promulgating information . The liberty principle restricts only the states power to get involved authoritatively, leaving it free to inform, advise, and even press citizens to prefer a way of life that includes the development of their distinctly human faculties, the cultivation of their individuality, and the acquisition of the virtues.

Mill as a Utopian As a way to draw together some of the disparate threads running through this

discussion, I will close by calling attention to the utopian aspect of Mills moral, social, and political philosophy. There are two standards by which a persons life could be said to be happy, Mill suggests in the System of Logic. The lower of these is the comparatively humble standard of containing more pleasure than pain. A life could be happy in this sense, Mill writes, and yet still be immature and insignificant. The higher standard is that of a lifes being one such as human beings with highly developed faculties can care to have, which could clearly only be true of a life that involves a considerable amount of higher quality pleasure. Although the phrase is not Mills, we could describe lives that are happy in this higher sense as being genuinely happy. Mill is a utopian in as much as he believes that it is possible that in the future it will be possible for virtually everyoneeveryone who is not the victim of some rare individual bad fortuneto lead a genuinely happy life. Bringing this day about is what we must do, he believes, if aggregate happiness is to be at a maximum. What this will take is the continuation of a process that Mill believes has already begun in the West in his day, in which peoples increasing moral and intellectual development facilitates the creation of morally superior institutions and practices, which then in turn stimulate further personal development, and so on. Skorupski rightly describes this process as virtuous spiral . From the standpoint of social institutions and practices, its culmination would be the establishment of a Religion of Humanity, albeit one shorn of Comtes frivolous excesses . While Mill does not consider it certain that this process will continue, he is optimistic. The many social reforms that he proposes are meant to show how the spiral can be made to continue to turn. While Mill recognises that the Religion of Humanity and the day when nearly everyone has a genuinely happy life lie in the distant future, he would no doubt be disappointed with how little we have progressed toward these ends since his day. One of the chief reasons for this lack of progress is surely the fact that we still lack a science of ethology; we still do not know much about how to make people better. But this is not to say that Mills vision of the future is to be dismissed as fantasy; while some might consider this side of Mill excessively romantic, I do not mean to call him a utopian in this critical sense. And if we cannot share his optimism, then at least we can find the idea of a future peopled with highly developed individuals leading lives rich in the best sorts of pleasure to be a worthy object of hope. Refrences:

Baum, Bruce, 2000. Rereading Power and Freedom in Mill, University of Toronto Press, Toronto. Bentham, Jeremy, 1830. The Rationale of Reward, Heward, London. Berger, Fred R., 1984. Happiness, Justice, and Freedom: The Moral and Political Philosophy of John Stuart Mill, University of California Press, Berkeley. Berkowitz, Peter, 1998. Mill, Liberty, and the Virtue of Individuality, Mill and the Moral Character of Liberalism, ed. Eldon Eisenach, pp. 1347.