John Stuart Mill

Biography

Early life and education

John Stuart Mill was born at 13 Rodney Street in Pentonville, then on the edge of the capital and now in central London, the eldest son of Harriet Barrow and the Scottish philosopher, historian, and economist James Mill. John Stuart was educated by his father, with the advice and assistance of Jeremy Bentham for whom he had worked as a ghostwriter and Francis Place. He was given an extremely rigorous upbringing and was deliberately shielded from association with children his own age other than his siblings. His father, a follower of Bentham and an adherent of associationism, had as his explicit aim to create a genius intellect that would carry on the cause of utilitarianism and its implementation after he and Bentham had died.

Mill was a notably precocious child. He describes his education in his autobiography. At the age of three he was taught Greek. By the age of eight, he had read Aesop's Fables, Xenophon's Anabasis, and the whole of Herodotus, and was acquainted with Lucian, Diogenes Laërtius, Isocrates and six dialogues of Plato. He had also read a great deal of history in English and had been taught arithmetic, physics and astronomy.

At the age of eight, Mill began studying Latin, the works of Euclid, and algebra, and was appointed schoolmaster to the younger children of the family. His main reading was still history, but he went through all the commonly taught Latin and Greek authors and by the age of ten could read Plato and Demosthenes with ease. His father also thought that it was important for Mill to study and compose poetry. One of his earliest poetic compositions was a continuation of the Iliad. In his spare time, he also enjoyed reading about natural sciences and popular novels, such as Don Quixote and Robinson Crusoe.

His father's work, The History of British India, was published in 1818; immediately thereafter, at about the age of twelve, Mill began a thorough study of the scholastic logic, at the same time reading Aristotle's logical treatises in the original language. In the following year, he was introduced to political economy and studied Adam Smith and David Ricardo with his father, ultimately completing their classical economic view of factors of production. Mill's comptes rendus of his daily economy lessons helped his father in writing Elements of Political Economy in 1821, a textbook to promote the ideas of Ricardian economics; however, the book lacked popular support. Ricardo, who was a close friend of his father, used to invite the young Mill to his house for a walk to talk about political economy.

Career

Mill's career as a colonial administrator at the East India Company spanned from when he was 17 years old in 1823 until 1858, when the company's territories in India were directly annexed by the Crown, establishing direct Crown control over India. In 1836, he was promoted to the company's political department, where he was responsible for correspondence pertaining to the company's relations with the princely states, and, in 1856, was finally promoted to the position of Examiner of Indian Correspondence. In On Liberty, A Few Words on Non-Intervention, and other works, he opined that "To characterize any conduct whatever towards a barbarous people as a violation of the law of nations, only shows that he who so speaks has never considered the subject." (However, Mill immediately added that "A violation of the great principles of morality it may easily be.") Mill viewed places such as India as having once been progressive in their outlook, but had now become stagnant in their development; he opined that this meant these regions had to be ruled via a form of "benevolent despotism...provided the end is improvement." When the Crown proposed to take direct control over the territories of the East India Company, Mill was tasked with defending Company rule and penned Memorandum on the Improvements in the Administration of India during the Last Thirty Years, among other petitions. He was offered a seat on the Council of India, the body created to advise the new Secretary of State for India, but declined, citing disapproval of the new system of administration in India.

Between the years 1865 and 1868 Mill served as Lord Rector of the University of St Andrews. At his inaugural address, delivered to the university on 1 February 1867, he made the now-famous (but often wrongly attributed) remark that "Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing." That Mill included that sentence in the address is a matter of historical record, but it by no means follows that it expressed a wholly original insight.

During the same period, 1865–68, he was also a Member of Parliament (MP) for City of Westminster. He was sitting for the Liberal Party. During his time as an MP, Mill advocated easing the burdens on Ireland. In 1866, he became the second person in the history of Parliament, after Henry Hunt, to call for women to be given the right to vote, vigorously defending this position in subsequent debate. He also became a strong advocate of such social reforms as labour unions and farm cooperatives. In Considerations on Representative Government, he called for various reforms of Parliament and voting, especially proportional representation, the single transferable vote, and the extension of suffrage. In April 1868, he favoured in a Commons debate the retention of capital punishment for such crimes as aggravated murder; he termed its abolition "an effeminacy in the general mind of the country". (It is said in 1868, when his first term ended, no party would nominate him due to his independent spirit.)

Death

Mill died on 7 May 1873, at the age of 66, of erysipelas in Avignon, where his body was buried alongside his wife's. He bequeathed his estate to his step-daughter, Helen Taylor, and designated her his literary executor.

Philosophy

Achieving happiness

Mill believed that for the majority of people (those with but a moderate degree of sensibility and of capacity for enjoyment) happiness is best achieved en passant, rather than striving for it directly. This meant no self-consciousness, scrutiny, self-interrogation, dwelling on, thinking about, imagining or questioning on one's happiness. Then, if otherwise fortunately circumstanced, one would "inhale happiness with the air you breathe."

A System of Logic

Mill joined the debate over the scientific method, which followed on from John Herschel's 1830 publication of A Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy, which incorporated inductive reasoning from the known to the unknown, discovering general laws in specific facts and verifying these laws empirically. William Whewell expanded on this in his 1837 History of the Inductive Sciences, from the Earliest to the Present Time, followed in 1840 by The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, Founded Upon their History, presenting induction as the mind superimposing concepts on facts. Laws were self-evident truths, which could be known without need for empirical verification.

Mill countered this in 1843 in A System of Logic (fully titled A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive, Being a Connected View of the Principles of Evidence, and the Methods of Scientific Investigation). In "Mill's Methods" (of induction), as in Herschel's, laws were discovered through observation and induction, and required empirical verification. Matilal remarks that Dignāga analysis is much like John Stuart Mill's Joint Method of Agreement and Difference, which is inductive. He suggested that it was very likely that during his stay in India he came across the tradition of logic, in which scholars started taking interest after 1824, though it is unknown whether it influenced his work.

Colonialism

Like his father James, Mill was a supporter of British colonialism. He was a member of Edward Gibbon Wakefield's Colonization Society, and in his own work, Principles of Political Economy (1848), he praised Wakefield for his "important writings on colonization". Later on in his essay On Liberty (1859) he stated that the principles of liberty espoused therein did not apply to "those backward states of society in which the race itself may be considered as in its nonage". Mill praised the colonies of ancient Greece for "flourishing so rapidly and so wonderfully", seeing them as a model to be emulated.

Mill, an employee of the East India Company from 1823 to 1858, argued in support of what he called a "benevolent despotism" with regard to the administration of overseas colonies. Mill argued:To suppose that the same international customs, and the same rules of international morality, can obtain between one civilized nation and another, and between civilized nations and barbarians, is a grave error. ... To characterize any conduct whatever towards a barbarous people as a violation of the law of nations, only shows that he who so speaks has never considered the subject.

For Mill, India was "a burden" for England and British colonialism "a blessing of unspeakable magnitude to the population" of India. He also stated his support for settler colonialism. Mill expressed general support for Company rule in India, but expressed reservations on specific Company policies in India which he disagreed with.

He also supported colonialism in other places, such as Australia. Mill was among the founding members of the South Australian Association in 1833, which was set up to lobby the government to establish colonies in Australia.

Mill saw federal systems of politics as a solution to contemporary political crises and as an ideal for the future organization of humanity.

Economic philosophy

Mill's early economic philosophy was one of free markets. However, he accepted interventions in the economy, such as a tax on alcohol, if there were sufficient utilitarian grounds. He also accepted the principle of legislative intervention for the purpose of animal welfare. He originally believed that "equality of taxation" meant "equality of sacrifice" and that progressive taxation penalized those who worked harder and saved more and was therefore "a mild form of robbery".

Given an equal tax rate regardless of income, Mill agreed that inheritance should be taxed. A utilitarian society would agree that everyone should be equal one way or another. Therefore, receiving inheritance would put one ahead of society unless taxed on the inheritance. Those who donate should consider and choose carefully where their money goes—some charities are more deserving than others. Considering public charities boards such as a government will disburse the money equally. However, a private charity board like a church would disburse the monies fairly to those who are in more need than others.

Later he altered his views toward a more socialist bent, adding chapters to his Principles of Political Economy in defence of a socialist outlook, and defending some socialist causes. Within this revised work he also made the radical proposal that the whole wage system be abolished in favour of a co-operative wage system. Nonetheless, some of his views on the idea of flat taxation remained, albeit altered in the third edition of the Principles of Political Economy to reflect a concern for differentiating restrictions on "unearned" incomes, which he favoured, and those on "earned" incomes, which he did not favour.

In his autobiography, Mill stated that in relation to his later views on political economy, his "ideal of ultimate improvement... would class [him] decidedly under the general designation of Socialists." His views shifted partly due to reading the works of utopian socialists, but also from the influence of Harriet Taylor. In his 1879 work Socialism, Mill argued that the prevalence of poverty in contemporary industrial capitalist societies was "pro tanto a failure of the social arrangements", and that attempts to condone this state of affairs as being the result of individual failings did not represent a justification of them but instead were "an irresistible claim upon every human being for protection against suffering".

Slavery and racial equality

In 1850, Mill sent an anonymous letter in rebuttal to Thomas Carlyle's letter to Fraser's Magazine for Town and Country (which came to be known under the title "The Negro Question"), in which Carlyle argued for slavery. Mill supported abolishing slavery in the United States, expressing his opposition to slavery in his essay of 1869, The Subjection of Women:

This absolutely extreme case of the law of force, condemned by those who can tolerate almost every other form of arbitrary power, and which, of all others, presents features the most revolting to the feeling of all who look at it from an impartial position, was the law of civilized and Christian England within the memory of persons now living: and in one half of Anglo-Saxon America three or four years ago, not only did slavery exist, but the slave trade, and the breeding of slaves expressly for it, was a general practice between slave states. Yet not only was there a greater strength of sentiment against it, but, in England at least, a less amount either of feeling or of interest in favour of it, than of any other of the customary abuses of force: for its motive was the love of gain, unmixed and undisguised: and those who profited by it were a very small numerical fraction of the country, while the natural feeling of all who were not personally interested in it, was unmitigated abhorrence.

Mill corresponded with John Appleton, an American legal reformer from Maine, extensively on the topic of racial equality. Appleton influenced Mill's work on such, especially swaying him on the optimal economic and social welfare plan for the Antebellum South. In a letter sent to Appleton in response to a previous letter, Mill expressed his view on antebellum integration:I cannot look forward with satisfaction to any settlement but complete emancipation—land given to every negro family either separately or in organized communities under such rules as may be found temporarily necessary—the schoolmaster set to work in every village & the tide of free immigration turned on in those fertile regions from which slavery has hitherto excluded it. If this be done, the gentle & docile character which seems to distinguish the negroes will prevent any mischief on their side, while the proofs they are giving of fighting powers will do more in a year than all other things in a century to make the whites respect them & consent to their being politically & socially equals.Unlike many of his peers, Mill supported the Union in the American Civil War, seeing it as a necessary evil that would deliver a vital "salutary shock" to the national conscience and help preserve liberal ideals while eradicating the "stain" of slavery in the United States. Mill expressed his views in an article for Fraser's Magazine, arguing against the defenders of the Confederate States of America.There are people who tell us that, on the side of the North, the question is not one of slavery at all. The North, it seems, have no more objection to slavery than the South have. [...] If this be the true state of the case, what are the Southern chiefs fighting about? Their apologists in England say that it is about tariffs, and similar trumpery. They say nothing of the kind. They tell the world, and they told their own citizens when they wanted their votes, that the object of the fight was slavery. [...] The world knows what the question between the North and South has been for many years, and still is. Slavery alone was thought of, alone talked of. Slavery was battled for and against, on the floor of Congress and in the plains of Kansas; on the slavery question exclusively was the party constituted which now rules the United States: on slavery Fremont was rejected, on slavery Lincoln was elected; the South separated on slavery, and proclaimed slavery as the one cause of separation.

Theory of liberty

Mill's On Liberty (1859) addresses the nature and limits of the power that can be legitimately exercised by society over the individual. Mill's idea is that only if a democratic society follows the Principle of Liberty can its political and social institutions fulfill their role of shaping national character so that its citizens can realise the permanent interests of people as progressive beings. (Rawls, Lectures on the History of Political Philosophy, p. 289)

Mill states the Principle of Liberty as: "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." "The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant."

One way to read Mill's Principle of Liberty as a principle of public reason is to see it as excluding certain kinds of reasons from being taken into account in legislation, or in guiding the moral coercion of public opinion. (Rawls, Lectures on the History of Political Philosophy, p. 291) These reasons include those founded in other persons' good; reasons of excellence and ideals of human perfection; reasons of dislike or disgust, or of preference.

Mill states that "harms" which may be prevented include acts of omission as well as acts of commission. Thus, failing to rescue a drowning child counts as a harmful act, as does failing to pay taxes, or failing to appear as a witness in court. All such harmful omissions may be regulated, according to Mill. By contrast, it does not count as harming someone if—without force or fraud—the affected individual consents to assume the risk: thus one may permissibly offer unsafe employment to others, provided there is no deception involved. He does, however, recognise one limit to consent: society should not permit people to sell themselves into slavery.

The question of what counts as a self-regarding action and what actions, whether of omission or commission, constitute harmful actions subject to regulation, continues to exercise interpreters of Mill. He did not consider giving offence to constitute "harm"; an action could not be restricted because it violated the conventions or morals of a given society.

Utilitarianism

The canonical statement of Mill's utilitarianism can be found in his book, Utilitarianism. Although this philosophy has a long tradition, Mill's account is primarily influenced by Jeremy Bentham and Mill's father James Mill.

John Stuart Mill believed in the philosophy of utilitarianism, which he would describe as the principle that holds "that actions are right in the proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness." By happiness he means, "intended pleasure, and the absence of pain; by unhappiness, pain, and the privation of pleasure". It is clear that we do not all value virtues as a path to happiness and that we sometimes only value them for selfish reasons. However, Mill asserts that upon reflection, even when we value virtues for selfish reasons we are in fact cherishing them as a part of our happiness.

Bentham's famous formulation of utilitarianism is known as the greatest-happiness principle. It holds that one must always act so as to produce the greatest aggregate happiness among all sentient beings, within reason. In a similar vein, Mill's method of determining the best utility is that a moral agent, when given the choice between two or more actions, ought to choose the action that contributes most to (maximizes) the total happiness in the world. Happiness, in this context, is understood as the production of pleasure or privation of pain. Given that determining the action that produces the most utility is not always so clear-cut, Mill suggests that the utilitarian moral agent, when attempting to rank the utility of different actions, should refer to the general experience of persons. That is, if people generally experience more happiness following action X than they do action Y, the utilitarian should conclude that action X produces more utility than action Y, and so is to be preferred.

Utilitarianism is a consequentialist ethical theory, meaning that it holds that acts are justified insofar as they produce a desirable outcome. The overarching goal of utilitarianism—the ideal consequence—is to achieve the "greatest good for the greatest number as the result of human action". In Utilitarianism, Mill states that "happiness is the sole end of human action." This statement aroused some controversy, which is why Mill took it a step further, explaining how the very nature of humans wanting happiness, and who "take it to be reasonable under free consideration", demands that happiness is indeed desirable. In other words, free will leads everyone to make actions inclined on their own happiness, unless reasoned that it would improve the happiness of others, in which case, the greatest utility is still being achieved. To that extent, the utilitarianism that Mill is describing is a default lifestyle that he believes is what people who have not studied a specific opposing field of ethics would naturally and unconsciously use when faced with a decision.

Women's rights

Mill's view of history was that right up until his time "the whole of the female" and "the great majority of the male sex" were simply "slaves". He countered arguments to the contrary, arguing that relations between sexes simply amounted to "the legal subordination of one sex to the other – [which] is wrong itself, and now one of the chief hindrances to human improvement; and that it ought to be replaced by a principle of perfect equality." Here, then, we have an instance of Mill's use of "slavery" in a sense which, compared to its fundamental meaning of absolute unfreedom of person, is an extended and arguably a rhetorical rather than a literal sense.

With this, Mill can be considered among the earliest male proponents of gender equality, having been recruited by American feminist John Neal during his stay in London circa 1825–1827. His book The Subjection of Women (1861, publ.1869) is one of the earliest written on this subject by a male author. In The Subjection of Women, Mill attempts to make a case for perfect equality.

In his proposal for a universal education system sponsored by the state, Mill expands benefits for many marginalized groups, especially for women. For Mill, a universal education held the potential to create new abilities and novel types of behaviour of which the current receiving generation and their descendants could both benefit from. Such a pathway to opportunity would enable women to gain "industrial and social independence" that would allow them the same movement in their agency and citizenship as men. Mill's view of opportunity stands out in its reach, but even more so for the population he foresees who could benefit from it. Mill was hopeful of the autonomy such an education could allow for its recipients and especially for women. Through the consequential sophistication and knowledge attained, individuals are able to properly act in ways that recedes away from those leading towards overpopulation. This stands directly in contrast with the view held by many of Mill's contemporaries and predecessors who viewed such inclusive programs to be counterintuitive. Aiming such help at marginalized groups, such as the poor and working class, would only serve to reward them with the opportunity to move to a higher status, thus encouraging greater fertility which at its extreme could lead to overproduction.

He talks about the role of women in marriage and how it must be changed. Mill comments on three major facets of women's lives that he felt are hindering them:

Personal life

He was godfather to the philosopher Bertrand Russell.

Marriage

On 21 April 1851, Mill married Harriet Taylor after 21 years of intimate friendship. Taylor was married when they met, and their relationship was close but generally believed to be chaste during the years before her first husband died in 1849. The couple waited two years before marrying in 1851. Upon marriage, he made a declaration to repudiate the rights conferred upon him over her by virtue of the marriage under Victorian law. John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor Mill were foundational figures in feminist economic thought. Their collaborative works, particularly The Subjection of Women (1869) and Taylor Mill's The Enfranchisement of Women (1851), argued that gender inequality was both a moral injustice and an economic inefficiency (Hansson, 2022; McCabe, 2021). Rejecting classical economic assumptions that marginalized women, they advocated for legal reforms, educational access, and women's autonomy. Their ideas laid the groundwork for modern feminist economists who critique unpaid labor, gender wage gaps, and structural oppression (Munte & Monica, 2023; Knüfer, 2023). Taylor Mill's Unitarian and rationalist views enriched this critique, while stylometric evidence supports her significant role in Mill's writings (Schmidt-Petri et al., 2021). Today, their arguments resonate in debates on digital capitalism, care work, and reproductive rights, offering a lens to assess economic justice through the interplay of gender, labor, and autonomy (Hampton, 2021; Smajdor, 2021).

Accomplished in her own right, Taylor was a significant influence on Mill's work and ideas during both friendship and marriage. His relationship with Taylor reinforced Mill's advocacy of women's rights. He said that in his stand against domestic violence, and for women's rights he was "chiefly an amanuensis to my wife". He called her mind a "perfect instrument", and said she was "the most eminently qualified of all those known to the author". He cites her influence in his final revision of On Liberty, which was published shortly after her death. Taylor died in 1858 after developing severe lung congestion, after only seven years of marriage to Mill.

Religious views

In his views on religion, Mill was an agnostic and a sceptic, though Mill believed, in terms of proof on the right answer to the question of God's existence, that it is 'a very probable hypothesis'. He also saw as perfectly rational and legitimate to believe in God as an act of hope or as the result of one's efforts to discern the meaning of life as a whole.

Interests

Like other philosophers of his time, Mill was interested in botany. It is believed that approximately 1,000 of his specimens are held by the Museum Requien in Avignon, France, and Mill's stepdaughter, Helen Taylor, donated specimens to the Kew Herbarium after his death. In the southern hemisphere, there are also specimens at the National Herbarium of Victoria, Royal Botanic Gardens Victoria, Australia.