19th Century
John Stuart Mill
1806–1873
“Among the foremost benefits of free government is that education of the intelligence and of the sentiments which is carried down to the very lowest ranks of the people when they are called to take a part in acts which directly affect the great interests of their country.”
John Stuart Mill was an English philosopher, economist, and Member of Parliament, raised for a life of reform and public argument. states the harm principle: society may coerce the individual only to prevent harm to others. measures right action by the greatest happiness of the greatest number. gives induction its classic modern form. Individuality is the prize he guards. Later liberals argue inside his frame of free speech, public opinion, and the limits of majority rule.
In the Conversation
37 of the Great Ideas
Ethics
Justice
Justice is the most important class of moral rules: those protecting the essentials of human welfare.
Good and Evil
The good is happiness: pleasure and the absence of pain. The right maximizes the greatest happiness of the greatest number.
Virtue and Vice
Virtue is a character disposed to promote general happiness: valued for its contribution to well-being.
Happiness
Happiness, the greatest happiness of the greatest number, is the sole criterion of right action.
Punishment
The desire to punish is natural, but only utility can determine when that desire should be indulged: punishment is justified solely by its consequences.
Duty
Duty is the obligation to promote the greatest happiness; moral rules derive their authority from utility, not from a priori reason.
Pleasure and Pain
Pleasure and freedom from pain are the only things desirable as ends, but pleasures differ in quality, and it is better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied.
Temperance
Temperance is a personal virtue, not a political program: the state has no right to coerce self-regarding conduct.
Custom and Convention
The despotism of custom is the standing hindrance to human advancement; individuality must resist the pressure of collective habit.
Politics
Liberty
Liberty is protected by the harm principle: each is free to act unless they harm others.
Government
Representative democracy is the best form of government, ideally for all, subject to conditions.
Democracy
Representative government is the best regime, provided individuality is protected against the tyranny of the majority.
State
The state must protect individual liberty from both governmental tyranny and the tyranny of public opinion.
Wealth
Production follows natural laws, but distribution is a matter of human choice; economic arrangements should maximize liberty and general welfare.
Family
The family as constituted is a school of tyranny — reformed as a partnership of equals, it becomes the school of the virtues of freedom.
Citizen
Universal citizenship is both a justice claim and a political necessity: participation in government educates and morally elevates those who practice it.
Labor
Economic justice for labor requires fair wages, worker participation in management, and the political recognition that labor and capital have opposed interests that democracy must mediate.
Slavery
The subjection of any person or people is unjust; freedom is the necessary condition of individual and social progress.
Constitution
The best constitution is representative government that balances competent administration with broad popular participation.
Aristocracy
Hereditary aristocracy is indefensible, but representative government must still solve the problem of competence.
Theology & Metaphysics
Epistemology
Rhetoric
Free speech and open debate are the conditions under which rhetoric can serve truth; suppressed opinion may contain truth that society needs.
Hypothesis
A hypothesis earns its place in science by predicting consequences that observation confirms and by surviving every honest attempt to destroy it.
Logic & Method
Dialectic
Truth advances only through the collision of opposing opinions in open discussion; the dialectical method is the logic of liberty itself.
Principle
All principles, including the axioms of mathematics, are empirical generalizations ultimately grounded in observation and induction.
Reasoning
All reasoning is from particulars to particulars; the syllogism registers results already obtained by induction.
Logic
Logic is the science of proof or evidence, embracing both deductive and inductive reasoning; all knowledge ultimately rests on observed experience, including the axioms of logic itself.
Induction
Induction is the master method of science; its five canons give the logical form of all causal inference from experience.
Definition
Definitions are of names, not of things; but 'real kinds' in nature impose constraints on which definitions are scientifically fruitful.
Universal and Particular
Real kinds in nature make some general classifications more than merely nominal; induction discovers real universals, but they exist only as uniformities in nature, not as independent entities.
Science
Science is organized common sense: it proceeds by the same inductive methods as ordinary observation, but with greater rigor, precision, and self-awareness about its own procedures.