John Stuart Mill and virtue ethics

Abstract

John Stuart Mill’s utilitarianism has some interesting connections and indebtedness to the tradition of virtue ethics. I explore some of these linkages against the backdrop of an interpretive framework that I have developed in several other writings.1 In other writings I have examined Mill’s value theory, a variant of qualitative hedonism, in part by comparing it with the quantitative hedonism of Jeremy Bentham.2 I have argued that Mill holds that those qualities or kinds of happiness that develop and exercise the higher human capacities and faculties are the most valuable. His conception of the good for humans is analyzed in terms of certain core excellences of development and self-development. Mill’s liberalism underpins his baseline conviction that activities involving the development and exercise of these excellences over the span of entire human lifetimes are stable and enduring sources of highly valuable satisfactions and worthwhile lives. Societies owe it to their members to offer the liberal cultural context and educational venues so that they may avail themselves of the opportunities to realize these excellences, in multifarious forms as appropriate in pluralistic societies.3 Mill’s elaborate liberal philosophy of education, featuring promotion of processes of development and self-development, is best read as prescribing a programme for inculcating and cultivating the mental and moral virtues he regularly extols. Education and selfdevelopment train the human capacities of reason, emotion and sympathy as well as higher order capacities like autonomy, individuality, sociality and compassion. The ‘competent judges’ that Mill invokes in Utilitarianism as being in an excellent position to assess and compare the value of different kinds or qualities of happiness and models of life are members of society who have been so educated. Mill combines a liberal commitment to egalitarianism with the insight gleaned from Greek virtue ethical traditions that a flourishing human life depends upon an education which trains the excellences of self-development. I begin here by looking at the structure of Mill’s moral philosophy, as he explains it, primarily in A System of Logic and Utilitarianism. I argue that Mill’s philosophy has a doctrine of Virtue to complement his theory of Morality. They both have their due place in the practices of life that promote happiness, and they should not be regarded as competitors. Mill’s theory is comprehensive, but heargues that morality should not be regarded as being entrusted with the entire mandate for utility promotion. Mill scrutinizes with deep suspicion those ‘moralists by profession’ who believe otherwise and are overly enthusiastic about the province of morality in the Art of Life. He suspects that those with despotic tendencies, who love wielding power over others and are the enemies of liberty, are rather quick to resort to their favoured tools of coercion and thus end up undermining rather than promoting happiness. In the Logic, Mill lays out the three departments of the Art of Life – ‘Morality, Prudence or Policy, and Aesthetics; the Right, the Expedient, and the Beautiful or Noble’.4 The distinction between Morality or Duty, on the one hand, and Nobility or Virtue, on the other, plays a crucial role in Mill’s theory and yet this distinction is often underplayed in discussions of his philosophy. In the absence of this understanding, it is not surprising that confusion sometimes follows concerning Mill’s arguments and commitments. For example, blurring the distinction between Duty and Virtue can lead to mistaken readings in which virtue is incorrectly taken to be obligatory, resulting in the false conviction that it is permissible to coerce people to be more virtuous.