John Stuart Mill

1806-1873 · English · Ethics, Political Philosophy, Logic, Epistemology, Political Economy

The worth of a state, in the long run, is the worth of the individuals composing it.

John Stuart Mill's education was an experiment his father James conducted like a proof of theory: Greek at three, Latin at eight, Aristotle's logic at twelve, Benthamite political economy by his early teens — no childhood, no fiction, no play. The crisis came at twenty: a depression his father's system could not explain, and that Wordsworth's poetry helped lift. Mill emerged a different kind of utilitarian, convinced the greatest happiness principle needed to account for what Bentham's pleasure calculus could not measure.

Topics John Stuart Mill addresses

• the harm principle
• utilitarianism
• the Greatest Happiness Principle
• higher and lower pleasures
• the proof of the principle of utility
• individuality
• experiments of living
• self-regarding versus other-regarding actions
• the tyranny of the majority
• the despotism of custom
• the subjection of women
• representative government
• plural voting
• proportional representation
• enumerative induction
• Mill's Methods
• the Method of Difference
• connotation and denotation
• phenomenalism
• permanent possibilities of sensation
• associationism
• the civilizational hierarchy
• liberalism and empire
• the stationary state

Converse with John Stuart Mill on Symposium. Every reply is grounded in John Stuart Mill's own writing and cites the page it came from. The corpus is public-domain text.