John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) has given us his Autobiography, in which he describes his rigorous early classical education under the tutelage of his father James, an eminent author and philosopher in his own right. As a result of his hermetic upbringing, John suffered a mental breakdown at the age of 20. He recovered and had a productive life both in the world of commerce, as a career employee of the British East India Company, and the world of ideas, as author of numerous articles and books. He also served as a Member of Parliament and as Lord Rector of the University of St. Andrews. The irony of the latter is that as a young man Mill had foregone a traditional "Oxbridge" (Oxford/Cambridge) education.
A seldom appreciated aspect of Mill's work is that he advocated for equal rights for women. He did so in his essay "The Subjection of Women" (1869), and credited his wife Harriet Taylor Mill as a co-author. Mill was alone among the famous social theorists of his era -- all of them male -- in holding this position.
Our selection this month is taken from Mill's essay "Utilitarianism," first published as a series in three parts in Fraser's, a popular literary magazine. "Utilitarianism" was published in book form in 1863 by Parker, Son and Bourn of London in 1863.
The text begins, "The creed which accepts as the foundation of morals 'utility' or the 'greatest happiness principle' holds that actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness; wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness." The work can be profitably read either as a survey of the Utilitarian school of political philosophy of Jeremy Bentham and others OR as Mill's personal critique of that school. One of Mill's biographers has called him "a thinker who fuses logic and imagination to depict a vision of the world" (1).
(1) August, Eugene, John Stuart Mill, a Mind at Large, New York : Scribner's, 1975.
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