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make him never think of, or desire, any beneficial condition for himself, in the benefits of which they are not included.”

So our fourth permanent interest is our interest in the social conditions and institutions that specify the natural state of society as a state of equality, and make this state one of possible steady equilibrium.

3. To sum up: the four permanent interests are these:

(a)First, the permanent interest in the institutions that guarantee the basic rights of equal justice (as these are discussed in Utilitarianism, V). These rights protect the “essentials of our well-being” and “make safe for us the very groundwork of our existence,” and they are necessary for progress. This interest we have in all stages of civilization.

(b)Second, the permanent interest in the free institutions and in public attitudes of moral opinion that affirm freedom of thought and liberty of conscience. These institutions and attitudes are necessary for progress to the natural state of society as one of equality, as well as necessary to maintain that state.

(c)Third, the permanent interest in the free institutions and public attitudes that allow for individuality, and so protect and encourage the liberty of tastes and our choice of a mode of life suitable to our character, all of which enables us to make our mode of life our own. And paired with this, freedom of association to give individuality effect.

(d)Fourth, the permanent interest in just and free institutions and the attitudes required to realize the natural and normal state of society as a state of equality.

§5. Relation to the Decided Preference Criterion

1. This completes our survey of four permanent interests of man as a progressive being. I don’t claim that the survey is complete; there may be other permanent interests in Mill’s view, and admittedly the distinctions drawn are somewhat artificial. But they are useful, I think, in setting out how his doctrine fits together.

Mill wants to hold, as I have said, that once we adopt his conception of utility (Utilitarianism, II: 3–10), then his principles of justice and of liberty, complemented by common moral opinion that endorses those principles, specify the political and social order most effective in fulfilling our perma-

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nent interests. Given the conditions of the modern world and the principles of human psychology, there is no better way to arrange political and social institutions. But why, on Mill’s assumptions, should this be true? How does he see the details?

2.Crucial to Mill’s entire doctrine is the idea that only under just and free social arrangements can the decided preference criterion be properly applied. Keep in mind that this criterion involves making a judgment that one pleasure, or activity, is higher than another in terms of quality and more appropriate (and in this sense better) for a being with the higher faculties. This latter makes the connection with the principle of dignity. This has the striking consequence that in the absence of just and free arrangements, there is simply no way for society to acquire the specific knowledge and information it would need to maximize utility in Mill’s sense. And this for two reasons:

(i) First, it is only under those institutions that individuals, either singly or together with others, can educate and develop their faculties in ways that best suit their character and inclination. Thus those institutions are needed for us to know which activities would be endorsed by people’s decided preferences. And:

(ii) Second, there is no central agency in society—no central information office or planning board—that could possess the information required to maximize utility and therefore could know what more specific and detailed laws and regulations might advance the four permanent interests.

3.Consider an analogy: Mill assumes, let’s say, that each person is somewhat like a firm in a perfectly competitive market. In such a market the firm decides what to produce given the prices of its inputs and outputs. There is no central planning agency that tells it what to do. Under certain conditions, which economic theory lays out, when each firm maximizes its profits, the total social product is efficiently produced (in the sense of Pareto).

The analogy is this: it is only under the conditions of a competitive market that firms are assumed to know best what to produce and how. The prices set on competitive markets contain the needed information for a firm’s decisions to be efficient. Hence, they are left free to make their production decisions independently of one another.

In Mill’s view, it is only when properly educated and given the opportunity to develop their faculties under conditions of equal justice and free in-

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stitutions, that individuals can know which higher activities best answer to their nature and character.

The upshot is that to maximize utility in Mill’s sense, it is necessary to set up just and free institutions, and to educate people’s abilities. This establishes the background conditions under which the decided preference criterion can work. If society uses institutions other than these, hoping to maximize utility, it simply operates in the dark. Only persons raised and educated under the social conditions of free institutions can have, each in that person’s own case, the necessary information.

4. Here let me make a few remarks in comment. First, I believe, as we noted already, that Mill does not make a fine-grained distinction within the class of higher pleasures or within the class of lower pleasures. Baseball is a higher activity, and why not? He is in part concerned to rebut Carlyle’s doctrine that utilitarianism is a “doctrine worthy only of swine” (Utilitarianism, II: ¶3) and to stress that the distinction between the higher and the lower pleasures, and the higher and lower faculties, can be made—this by the decided preference criterion. For his purposes a rough distinction suffices.

A second remark is that this lack of fine-grained distinctions means that Mill holds all normal persons to be equally capable of enjoying and exercising their higher faculties, even granting that some are more talented than others. We might put this more precisely by saying: for each normal person (properly educated, and the rest) there is a range of higher activities they would want to make central to their life. He holds also that given decent opportunities, they will actually do so, barring special explanations. (Of course, these ranges of activities differ from person to person.) All this is borne out by the kind of explanations Mill mentions in Utilitarianism, II: ¶7, when he explains the apparent deviations from the principle of dignity, the basic psychological principle supporting the decided preference criterion. The idea that the higher activities and faculties are exclusively intellectual, aesthetic, and academic is just rubbish.

A third remark is that the higher pleasures of the more talented (granting there are such people) are not greater in value than the higher pleasures of the less talented. All activities decidedly preferred by normal people, properly educated and living under just and free institutions, count the same. Indeed, I think it will turn out that there is no occasion when as a matter of practice they need to be compared in value at all. But this would need to be shown. Offhand it seems the differences in quality of pleasures

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may, and indeed should, affect social policies. Can we admit this without the necessity of making a fine-grained distinction? Here we come to cases.2 Finally, a fourth remark: for Mill there is no general psychological theory of human nature that can be used by society, or by a central planning agency, to tell us, say by the use of certain psychological tests, which particular mode of life is best for this or that particular individual. The best information we can obtain is to look at the decisions of free individuals: we let them decide on their mode of life for themselves under the requisite free conditions. They are to determine which family of higher activities it is best to make the focus of their life. There exists no general psychological theory

that could give us this information in advance.

5. To conclude: the equal rights of justice and the three kinds of liberties specify the institutional conditions necessary for equal citizens in a democratic society of the present age to be in the best position for each of them to find the mode of life that is most suitable. This helps to explain why Mill thinks—as it seems he does—that these just and free institutions are necessary to maximize utility understood in terms of our permanent interest as a progressive beings.

§6. Relation to Individuality

1.We have seen that the principle of individuality is connected with the decided preference criterion. So we need to consider the meaning of this principle as a basic psychological principle. In On Liberty, III: ¶1, Mill says the following: “It is desirable . . . that in things which do not primarily concern others, individuality should assert itself. Where, not a person’s own character, but the traditions or customs of other people are the rule of conduct, there is wanting one of the principal ingredients of happiness, and quite the chief ingredient of individual and social progress.” That this is a psychological principle is shown by individuality being one of the ingredients of happiness. (All of On Liberty, III: ¶¶1–9 is important on this.)

Mill thinks of individuality as having two components:

(a) One is the Greek ideal of self-development of our various natural powers, including the development and exercise of our higher faculties (III: ¶8).

2.This question was pressed by Jeffrey Cohen of Columbia.

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(b) The second is the Christian ideal of self-government, and this includes, among other things (as I read Mill), the recognition of the limits on our conduct imposed by the basic rights of justice (III: ¶¶8–9).

2.Mill says in III: ¶8 that if it is any part of religion to think we were created by a good being, it is consistent with religion to believe that we have higher faculties in order that these faculties may be cultivated and unfolded, and not rooted out and consumed. It is also consistent with religion that God delights in our approaching the realization of the ideal conception embodied in our faculties. Mill rejects here what he calls the “Calvinistic conception of humanity,” in which “all the good of which humanity is capable, is comprised in obedience” and the human faculties, capacities, and susceptibilities are to be crushed out (III: ¶7).

Mill’s view seems presented as a perfectionist ideal. Later we consider how far it is to be read it as a psychological doctrine. For now I merely comment that Mill talks about ideals here because he views them as characterizing ways of life that would be adopted and followed by people under the conditions required for the decided preference criterion to work with the principle of dignity. These ideals characterize ways of life that most accord with our free and fully developed nature.

3.One feature of Mill’s idea of individuality comes out when we compare it to an older view. When Locke discusses toleration in his “Letter on Toleration” (1689), he is concerned in large part with the problem of how to overcome the wars of religion. He proposes the solution of the church as a voluntary association within the state, while the state is to respect liberty of conscience within certain limits. During the wars of religion it was taken for granted that the content of belief was above all important. One must believe the truth, the true doctrine, otherwise one put one’s salvation in jeopardy. Religious error was feared as a terrible thing; and those who spread error aroused dread.

By Mill’s time, however, the view of the question has obviously changed. The struggle over the principle of toleration has long since been settled. And while the content of belief is not, of course, unimportant, it is also important how we believe. It now matters to what extent we have made our beliefs our own; how far we have tried to understand them, sought to ascertain their deeper meaning; and to give our beliefs a central role in our lives, and not, as it were, simply to mouth them.

This attitude is modern, though it arose in the course of the wars of re-

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ligion. It is not, of course, original with Mill, who explicitly acknowledges it in William Humboldt (1792); and Milton had already said in Areopagitica, §49: “. . . if a man believes things only because his pastor says so, or the assembly so determines, without knowing other reason, though his belief be true, yet the very truth he holds becomes heresy.” Rousseau was a major influence on this way of thought as well, with his emphasis on the self and the intrinsic value of one’s interior life cultivated by self-observation. Whatever its origins, Mill gives an important statement of it in On Liberty, III: ¶¶1–9.

Part of this modern attitude is that belief in error is no longer feared in the same way. Feared certainly, because error can do great harm; but not feared as leading inevitably to damnation. Sincerity and conscientiousness are also significant. Clearly Mill doesn’t entertain the possibility that those who have mistaken religious beliefs will thereby, for that reason, be damned. He takes for granted that error will not have that consequence. This belief is required, I surmise, for the value of individuality to become a central one, as it does in Mill. The idea of the significance of making our beliefs and aspirations our own would seem simply irrational if error, as such, might well mean damnation.

4. I have noted that part of Mill’s idea of individuality is the idea of making what we believe our own beliefs. This is an aspect of free selfdevelopment. But other aspects which Mill emphasizes are: making our plan of life our own; making our desires our own; and bringing our desires and impulses into balance and setting an order of priorities that is also our own.

I don’t think Mill means that we are to make ourselves different from other people for the sake of being different. Rather, he means that however similar or different our plan of life may be from the plans of others, we should have made our plan our own: that is, we understand its meaning and have appropriated it in our thought and character. We need not choose our life at all, as a so-called chooser of ends. We may rather affirm our way of life after due reflection, and do not follow it simply as custom. We have come to see the point of it, penetrated to its deeper meaning by the full and free use of our powers of thought, imagination, and feeling. In that way we have made our way of life our own, even if that way of life itself is of long standing, and in that sense traditional.

I mention this matter because Mill is sometimes said to put emphasis on eccentricity, on doing one’s own thing. This I think a misreading. Cer-

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