Mill at a Loss
On John Stuart Mill
by Philip Kitcher
Columbia University Press, 2023; 152 pp.
John Stuart Mill wasn’t Murray Rothbard’s favorite philosopher, and Philip Kitcher’s short book would confirm this dislike. Rothbard viewed Mill as a fuzzy thinker, overly prone to compromise and averse to firm principles. These qualities are among those that lead Kitcher to praise Mill, but Rothbardians nevertheless have much to learn from Kitcher, who is a leading analytic philosopher, especially notable for his work on Immanuel Kant and the pragmatists.
His book, the title of which evokes Mill’s famous essay On Liberty, includes a number of interesting arguments, many of them mistaken. But Kitcher also presents in the book a brilliant point about aggregative versions of utilitarianism, so good that it almost induces me to give the book a positive review (but not quite).
Many people read Mill as combining utilitarianism, which decides moral issues by appeal to the “greatest happiness of the greatest number” with a libertarian defense of autonomy, especially free speech. Mill defended the former doctrine in his book Utilitarianism, modifying the strict Benthamite calculus of pleasure and pain with an appeal to the distinction between “higher” and “lower” pleasures, and personal autonomy in the aforementioned On Liberty. It’s often suggested that the two views cannot easily be made consistent. Wouldn’t strict adherence to utilitarianism allow many more restrictions on individual freedom than Mill accepts in On Liberty? If this conflict exists, which view should be given priority?
In Kitcher’s opinion, these questions aren’t the best ones to ask; or, at any rate, they aren’t the ones on which he wishes to concentrate. He views Mill as a progressive thinker aiming to enhance people’s abilities to develop their potential through a program of humanistic education and character development:
When you start to look hard, a celebration of human progress is all over Mill’s corpus. . . . The progressive Mill doesn’t ground his thinking in utilitarian ethics or in a celebration of human freed
Article from Mises Wire
