mill iv

His Doctrine as a Whole

§1. Introduction

1.Once again, I state the question we want to consider about Mill’s doctrine. I have supposed that his principles of the modern world, as he calls them, his principles of justice and liberty, have roughly the same content as the two principles of justice. Hence Mill’s well-ordered society would have, I think, basic institutions quite similar to those of the wellordered society of justice as fairness.

The name “the principles of the modern world” is taken from The Subjection of Women, IV: ¶2, where Mill says that “the law of servitude in marriage is a monstrous contradiction to all the principles of the modern world.” Elsewhere in Subjection, Mill uses other designations such as “the principles involved in modern society” in I: ¶23; “the principle(s) of the modern movement in morals and politics” in IV: ¶5. He speaks also of “the peculiar character of the modern world,” which is followed by a statement of the nature of modern institutions and social ideas, and the principles of an open society allowing freedom of movement and unfettered choice of individuals, and securing equality of opportunity, as opposed to the aristocratic orders of the past in which all were born to a fixed social position (I: ¶13).

2.The main principles of the modern world would seem to be the following, although Mill does not discuss their relative importance. All references are to The Subjection of Women.1

(a) The principle of equal justice and equality of (basic) rights.

II: ¶¶11–12, 16; IV: ¶¶3, 5, 9, 18 (see also Utilitarianism, V: ¶¶4–10)

1. As before, because there is no standard, readily available text, I have referred to paragraphs within each chapter. This necessitates numbering those paragraphs by hand.

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(b) The principle of liberty.

I: ¶13; IV: ¶¶9–20 (see also On Liberty, I: ¶¶9–12)

(c)Principles of open society and free choice of occupation and mode

of life.

I: ¶¶13–15

(d)Equality of opportunity.

I: ¶¶23–24

(e) The principle of free and fair competition, economic and social. I: ¶¶14–16

(f ) The principle of (social) cooperation as among equals. II: ¶¶7–12

(g)Principle of modern marriage as equality between husband and

wife.

I: ¶25; II: ¶¶12, 16; IV: ¶¶2, 15–16, 18

(h)True principle of public charity: to help people to help themselves. IV: ¶11

3. I comment that Mill’s feminism, as we might call it, is different from

much of the more radical feminism of the present day. His feminism simply means full justice and equality for women, and doing away with the subordination to which women had for so long been subject. The position of women in marriage Mill saw as intolerable. He had in mind, for example, the fact that at law, their property became their husband’s, and that they owed obedience to their husband. Leaving royalty aside, the social subordination of women stood out, for Mill, as “an isolated fact in modern social institutions, a solitary breach of what has become their fundamental law; a single relic of an old world of thought and practice exploded in everything else, but retained in the one thing of most universal interest” (I: ¶16).

Although this seems clear and perhaps even obvious to many today, it was not so in Mill’s time. His contemporaries thought him a fanatic on two subjects. One was the increase of population, which he thought depressed the well-being of the working classes; the other was the subordination of women. He was viewed as simply unbalanced on these topics; people shook their heads and stopped listening.

But Mill saw these topics as related. The well-being of the working classes required limiting the size of families; yet this was also required for the equality of women. Moreover, equality between husband and wife before the law was necessary if the family were not to be a school for despo-

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His Doctrine as a Whole

tism, “while the family, justly constituted, would be the real school of the virtues of freedom,” as he put it in II: ¶12. So long as the family is a school for despotism, the character of men is gravely corrupted and this weakens the desirable tendencies to equality in all the institutions of society. So while Mill’s feminism was certainly rooted in his conviction of the grave wrong of women’s subordination, it was also supported in his mind by the far-reaching social good of realizing equal justice for women.

§2. The Framework of Mill’s Doctrine

1.We now look at the framework of Mill’s doctrine—its basic moral and psychological assumptions—in order to see how it is that his utilitarianism, presented initially as that of Bentham and Mill’s father, should turn out to lead to his principles of the modern world.

In approaching this question we first examined his conception of utility with its decided preference criterion. Next we discussed his idea of the moral rights of justice and his apparent two-part criterion for identifying the basic rights of individuals. Then we considered his principle of liberty as a principle to govern public reason and its status as a principle subordinate to that of utility. All this leads us to ask:

First, why is Mill so confident that his principles of the modern world, his principles of justice and of liberty with the others listed above, are principles that would, if realized in basic institutions, maximize utility in the long run as defined by the permanent interests of humankind as a progressive being. Here, of course, utility is understood in the light of Utilitarianism, II: ¶¶3–10, and the idea of the permanent interests of humankind is from On Liberty, I: ¶11.

We need to know also how Mill’s doctrine deals with values other than happiness and in what specific ways his doctrine relies on a psychological account of human nature. This leads us to ask:

Second, whether Mill’s doctrine includes and gives weight to certain perfectionist values and ideals, falling under the admirable and the excellent, which are ideas he recognizes; or whether, once the conception of utility as happiness is granted, his doctrine rests solely on psychological principles that describe human nature at its deepest level.

2.Without being fully confident that this latter alternative is correct, I

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conclude our study of Mill by sketching (I can’t do more than that) a psychological reading of his utilitarianism as a whole formulated as a political and social doctrine to apply to the basic structure. This still allows that in other situations his view might take a different, though in general a subordinate form. The political and social permanent interests would normally override more particular and subordinate considerations.

This reading starts from the idea that happiness (as defined in Utilitarianism, II: ¶¶3–10) alone is good, and that happiness is to be maximized by political and social arrangements always looking to the long run. This gives the principle of utility in one of its political and social meanings. It is, I suggest, the supreme moral principle in Mill’s political doctrine. Or more safely, it is the supreme principle of his account of moral right and wrong, and of political and social justice.

3. As I have said, to get his more definite conclusions Mill relies on a quite specific psychological conception of human nature. He thinks this conception is determinate enough to yield his principles of basic justice and essential liberties given his conception of utility as the permanent interests of humankind (I abbreviate the phrase) and given the conditions of the modern world with its present tendencies. Our problem, then, is to indicate his psychological first principles and sketch how Mill might have thought they lead to that conclusion when combined with his other assumptions.

The main psychological principles seem to be these:

(a)The decided preference criterion: Utilitarianism, II: ¶¶5–8.

(b)The principle of dignity: ibid., II: ¶¶4, 6–7; Liberty, III: ¶6.

(c)The principle of living in unity with others: Utilitarianism, III: ¶¶8–11.

(d)The Aristotelian principle: ibid., II: ¶8 (see TJ, sec. 65).

(e)The principle of individuality: On Liberty, III: ¶¶1–9.

(f ) The recognition of our natural good: Utilitarianism, III: ¶¶10–11.

The first three we have discussed in lectures I and II.

The last principle is described as the capacity we have to recognize our natural good and to distinguish it from our apparent good as a mere artifact of social and associationist learning, often by some kind of reward and punishment. No doubt there are better ways to state these principles, but for the moment this list suffices.

My basic idea is that the role of these psychological principles in Mill’s doctrine is this: along with the normative principle of utility and other con-

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