Justice, Freedom of Speech, and Other Higher Pleasures

John Stuart Mill constructed a utilitarian defence of freedom of speech and of the press that turned on his associationist psychology: without free speech, you will be bored literally out of your mind. He likewise constructed a utilitarian defence of justice, one that made justice out to be a higher pleasure, and provided an associationist account of the higher pleasures to underwrite the argument.

Concluding Remarks

The default methodology in analytic philosophy is to survey intuitions, which are then brought into a reflective equilibrium. That method is suitable for reconstructing well-exercised concepts that are embedded in a successful practice; “the meaning of life” is not one of those concepts. Argument-by-biography—an analog of the focus on mechanism in recent philosophy of science—is offered as an alternative.

A Very Quiet Tragedy

A precondition on having a life project is that one stays ruthlessly on point. A second precondition is that one is ruthless in pressing forward in one’s intellectual explorations. These conditions cannot be jointly satisfied, and providing scaffolding or restricting the scope of a life project in order to make that possible undercuts the reasons to have one.

Logic and the Problem of Necessity

Auguste Comte was an early influence on John Stuart Mill, and Comte’s doctrine of the three phases through which sciences pass (the theological, the metaphysical, and the positive) explain what Mill was attempting to accomplish in his magnum opus, the System of Logic: namely, to move the science of logic to its terminal and ‘positive’ stage. Both Mill’s startling account of deduction and his unremarked solution to the Humean problem of induction were intended to eliminate the notions of necessity or force—in this case, the ‘logical must’—characteristic of a science’s metaphysical stage. Mill’s treatment had a further surprising payoff: his solution to the Problem of Necessity (what today we call the problem of determinism and freedom of the will).

Mill’s Postdoc

J. S. Mill’s famous ‘Mental Crisis’ is argued to have been prompted by editing Jeremy Bentham’s Rationale of Judicial Evidence. The Crisis, it is suggested, was brought on by Mill’s specifically aesthetic response to Bentham’s manuscripts.

Mill’s Epiphany

J. S. Mill’s emotional investment in the Utilitarian program is discussed, and accounted for as an aesthetic response to Benthamism. Associationist psychology is introduced, and it is argued that the young Mill lacked the theoretical resources to explain his own commitment to and identification with the Utilitarian agenda.

Taking Liberties with Utilitarianism

J. S. Mill’s argument for the Principle of Liberty is shaped by a concern with moral freedom. ‘Genius’—figuring things out for yourself—fosters moral freedom; Mill understands originality as a higher pleasure, because it will experienced as such by both ‘poetic’ and ‘analytic’ minds. However, the institutions Mill designed have failed to create the strong-willed individualists that he anticipated.

Mill’s Incubus

John Stuart Mill’s solution to the problem of freedom of the will distinguishes determinism from “moral unfreedom”. His psychology predicts that moral unfreedom will be a side-effect of a life built around a single lexical priority. It also predicts that as a morally unfree agent’s likes, dislikes and concerns evolve, his activities will cease to be enjoyable or to matter to him. These predictions jointly underwrite Mill’s understanding of his own "Mental Crisis".

Mill’s Aftermath

Mill’s resolution of his Mental Crisis was to reconceive his Utilitarian life project more flexibly; thus it could accommodate intellectual and emotional change. The resolution was however misconceived, since Mill’s first Mental Crisis was his last: there turned out to be no further dramatic intellectual and emotional changes to accommodate.

How to Write a Letter of Recommendation

J. S. Mill’s Mental Crisis has been explained by his instrumentalist view of practical rationality, and by his associationist psychology. While the argument is present in his Autobiography, the diagnosis cannot be squared with the three accounts of his recovery that he also gives. What the instrumentalism does explain is Mill’s lifelong need for authority figures.