John Stuart Mill

John Gray in his introduction to Mill’s On Liberty and Other Essays, says, ‘on the received and conventional view, John Stuart Mill is an eclectic and transitional thinker, who is never able either to endorse or to abandon the classical utilitarian philosophy he inherited from his father, James Mill …’³² But as we will see below, Mill’s dilemma was not without reason. His concern was to moralize his father’s and Bentham’s utilitarianism. This he sought to do by introducing the qualitative element in the quantitative calculus, his father and also Bentham had preached and endorsed. A similar dilemma is visible in his formulation of liberty and freedom—’self-regarding’ and ‘other-regarding’.