John Stuart Mill

Ashli Trammell PSR#4 RE-WRITE John Stuart Mill was a philosopher that wanted to justify the freedom of an individual under state control. He wanted to make a contribution to the progress of human individuality and freedom. Mill believed that people had no control over their own political power. The people had all the power once their will progressed and the majority had all the power. But the people made sure that majority would never abuse their power again. Mill was able to help the people…

When we think of the political theorists Hobbes, Rousseau, John Stuart Mill, and Marx we often tend to catagorize them as one thing, undemocratic. In each one of their political theories they either criticize or lay out their concerns for being against democracy, some more severe on the opinion than others. Each laid out various explanations in their writings for why democracy isn 't the feasible way to run a government. While all of these theorists use democracy as a defense for why their…

John Stuart Mill and Progressive Retrogression On Liberty, one of the principle works of esteemed English author and philosopher John Stuart Mill, attempts to illustrate how “the struggle between Liberty and Authority” has been a recurring theme in civilizations for millennia, explicitly stating its presence in the historical cities of Greece, Rome, and England (Mill 2). Mill continues on to make the assertion that, while the current state of society was largely shaped due to historically…

human beings? The value of life varies greatly from culture to religion to an individual. Philosophers have been debating this question for centuries with many coming to different conclusions. John Stuart Mill and Arthur Schopenhauer are two philosophers who attempted to define the significance of human life. Mill was a strong advocate of utilitarianism and had quite the optimistic view on human life by seeing its goal as attaining happiness. On the other hand, Schopenhauer was a renowned…

John Stuart Mill was a philosopher who believed in the principle of utility. Utility, as used in the text, is the principle that states morality comes from happiness and pleasure. Also known as the greatest happiness principle, utility seeks to find the greatest happiness for the greatest amount of people. Although some philosophers might not agree with Mill, he believed that progression and experience plays a huge role in morality. To begin with, lets discuss the basic model for Mill. We are…

Coming in many forms and permutations, utilitarianism is an approach to ethics that emphasizes providing the most happiness to the greatest number. It is an approach perhaps most famously advanced by scholars Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill. Although both Bentham and Mill believed strongly in utilitarianism, each man brought his own ideas and interpretations to the subject. In part due to the work of both men, utilitarian ideas have…

In “Utilitarianism,” John Stuart Mill argues that consequences of an action are all that really matter. Defining utilitarianism at its core, is a theory holding that the moral rightness and/or wrongness of an action depends entirely on the consequences of that action. Thereby agreeing that an action or decision is considered good if it generates happiness and bad if it generates the reverse. In his ethical approach, Mill suggests that the measure of success and happiness depends on how many…

of the greatest number should be the guiding principle of conduct. As blacks are labelled as a minority in our American society, the main agreement would be that we don’t bring the greatest amount of joy to those with power. Within the same article, Mill introduces “The Greatest Happiness Principle, it is the ultimate end with reference to and for the sake of which all other things are desirable is an existence exempt as far as possible from pain, and as rich as possible in…

Morals and Mill’s Utilitarianism present morality from two vastly different perspectives. They both give us fundamental and universal theories pertaining to morality. Mill begins Utilitarianism by introducing the issue of the foundation of morality as one that has been discussed by philosophers for more than two thousand years (Mill 95). He then mentions that in areas like the sciences it is common to have some confusion and uncertainty. However, in the sciences, there exists the first…

In certain extracts of John Stuart Mill’s “Utilitarianism,” he argues, “that the only ends of human life are pleasure and the avoidance of pain, so that anything else is bound ultimately to turn in some way on these ends” (Mill 127). Essentially this means that Mill believes that pleasure and the avoidance of pain are the guiding source when it comes to making decisions regarding moral dilemmas. This claim also involves stating that utility is the ultimate source for decision making. Utility is…