The Utilitarian Approach

Abstract

When John Stuart Mill lay dying in Avignon in May 1873, his last words to his step-daughter and faithful companion, Helen Taylor, were: ‘You know that I have done my work.’ They were the words of a man who had dedicated his whole life to the service of freedom and truth, a radical and agnostic who had shocked Victorian public opinion by his uncompromising intellectual honesty. He was a champion of individual liberty, whether it was liberty of conscience for the intellectual or liberty for the prostitute to refuse compulsory medical examination. When, three years before his death, he gave evidence before the Royal Commission on the Contagious Diseases Bill, a Bill that compelled prostitutes but not their customers to be medically examined, he shocked his questioner, Sir John Packington, by exposing the Victorian dual system of morality. ‘It seems to me’, said Mill, ‘that if the object is to protect those who are not unchaste, the way to do this is to bring motive to bear on the man not the woman.’ Earlier, he saw the logical implications of Malthus’s arguments that restraint could prevent the population explosion. When he was only seventeen, he was arrested for distributing pamphlets advocating birth control. The magistrate, like Sir John Packington, indeed like most men in Victorian society, preferred to restrict logic to the schools. Even today there are countries in the world that resist the implications of Mill’s remorseless logic, not only in the sphere of sexual morality, but in the spheres of religion and politics as well.