Abstract
John Stuart Mill has not featured as prominently as one might expect in discussions of diversity and toleration, even as the author of On Liberty 1 There may be various reasons for this neglect. One reason may be the more general belief that utilitarianism is inherently unable to cope with these problems, presumably because any account of them in terms of utility seems to deny that they are problems at all, to deny that differences between the conceptions of the good held by competing groups resist translation into a common utilitarian calculus. This perceived inability on the part of utilitarianism is bolstered by the classical objection that utilitarianism does not offer sufficient guarantees that individuals or minorities will not be sacrificed to the majority’s well being whenever that sacrifice leads to greater general good. That utilitarians are insensitive to the interests of minorities is also coupled with the charge that utilitarian policy-makers are insensitive to their subjects’ beliefs; that the historic relations between utilitarianism and colonialism help explain a pernicious ‘Government House Utilitarianism’ (one might say ‘India House Utilitarianism’), where a utilitarian elite sharply distinguish between the demands of the utilitarian theory of the rulers and the committed practices of the ruled.2 Another reason for the specific exclusion of On Liberty from recent discussions of toleration may stem from the increasing emphasis on groups, rather than individuals, as the objects of toleration. Mill’s individualism, as classically expressed in On Liberty, may seem inadequate to deal with the problems of ‘multiculturalism’ and the situation of individuals in groups that provide them with their ‘conceptions of the good’.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
This statement is less true of the literature of toleration in the United Kingdom than it is of the same literature in the United States. See, especially, the anthologies produced by the Morrell Centre at the University of York: e.g. S. Mendus, ed., Justifying Toleration, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), J. Horton and S. Mendus, eds., Aspects of Toleration, (London: Methuen, 1985 ) and J. Horton and P. Nicholson, eds., Toleration: Theory and Practice, ( Aldershot: Avebury, 1992 ).
B. Williams, `A critique of utilitarianism’, Utilitarianism: For and Against, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), 75–150 at pp. 135–140, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), pp. 108–110 and `The point of view of the universe: Sidgwick and the ambitions of ethics’, Making Sense of Humanity, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 153171 at p. 166.
See, especially, W. Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 52–53. Perhaps the most significant and seriously considered rejection of Mill’s usefulness for problems of social conflict is John Rawls’ rejection of Mill’s `comprehensive liberalism’ in favour of a `political liberalism’ in his Political Liberalism, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), of which more below.
John Stuart Mill, Considerations on Representative Government, in Collected Works, (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1963–1991), XIX, p. 546. All future references to the Collected Works will give the work’s title in parentheses followed by CW and the volume and page number.Ibid, pp. 376–379, 394–398, 415–420.
See also the notorious claim of On Liberty, CW XVIII, p. 224: “Despotism is a legitimate mode of government in dealing with barbarians, provided the end be their improvement, and the means justified by actually effecting that end.”
Representative Government, CW XIX, p. 549.
See, for example, F. R. Berger, Happiness, Justice and Freedom, ( Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984 ), p. 227.
On Liberty, CW XVIII, pp. 274–275.
Raymond Williams notes this historical contribution in Culture and Society, (New York: Harper and Row, 1958), pp. 58–59. Mill, of course, means by `culture’ something closer to our notion of `cultivation’, for example, `self-culture’.
See, e.g., J. Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Peter Nidditch ed., (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), Book II, Chapter XXXIII “Of the Association of Ideas”, pp. 394–401.
See D. Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, L.A. Selby-Bigge ed., (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1888), Book II, Part III, Section V, “Of the effects of Custom”, pp. 422–424. For political matters, see Tbid, Book III, Part II, Section 10, “Of the Objects of Allegiance”, pp. 555–557 and Hume, Essays Moral, Political, and Literary, (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1987), “Of the Original Contract”, p. 474–475. For the form of this idea with which Mill probably was most familiar, see William Paley, The Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy, Book I, Chapter V, cited by J.B. Schneewind in Sidgwick’s Ethics and Victorian Moral Philosophy, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), p. 124. I am indebted to Schneewind for this reference.
J. Mill, Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind, (London: Longmans, Green, Reader and Dyer,1869), Volume I, pp. 380–381, p. 368.
Ibid, John Stuart Mill’s editorial comments, Volume I, p. 407.
J. Mill, Analysis, John Stuart Mill’s editorial comments, Volume I, pp. 117–120. For moral and political matters, see A System of Logic, CW VIII, p. 777.
See e.g. Logic, CW VII, p. 564–565. Paul Feyerabend has, of course, drawn attention to Mill’s insistence on the importance of knowledge of the entire history of science for scientific investigation in`Introduction: proliferation and realism as methodological principles’ in his Realism, Rationalism and Scientific Method: Philosophical Papers, Vol. 1, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981.), p. 140143 and Against Method, ( London: Verso, 1978 ), p. 47–48.
G.W. Smith, “Social Liberty and Free Agency”, in J.S. Mill on Liberty in Focus, J. Gray and G.W. Smith eds. (London: Routledge, 1991), 239–259 at pp. 254–255. See also, G.W. Smith, “J.S. Mill on Edger and Réville: An Episode in the Development of Mill’s Conception of Freedom”, Journal of the History of Ideas 41, 1980, reprinted in J. C. Wood, ed. John Stuart Mill: Critical Perspectives, ( London: Routledge, 1988 ) 550–566.
For language, see Logic, CW VII, p. 663; for tradition, see Ibid, p. 238, cited above, and “Coleridge”, CW X, 117–164 at pp. 119–120; for economic institutions, see Principles of Political Economy, CW II, pp. 240–244, for legal and political institutions, see Logic, CW VIII, pp. 911–912.
On Liberty, CW XVIII, p. 220. That the `tyranny of opinion’ is on the increase and possesses its own historical dynamic, see Ibid, p. 269, 227.
lbid, p. 227.
For women and slaves, see, e.g., On the Subjection of Women, CW XXI, pp. 267–270.
The Negro Question’, CW XXI, 85–96 at p. 93.
On Liberty, CW XVIII, p. 241.
They ask themselves, what is suitable to my position? what is usually done by persons of my station and pecuniary circumstances? or (worse still) what is usually done by persons of a station and circumstances superior to mine?“, Ibid, p. 264.
Ibid, pp. 284–285, 290.
Ibid, pp. 256–257.
For the former see, Representative Government, CW XIX, p. 506, and p. 476. For the latter see, e.g., On Liberty, CW XVIII p. 269.
All that has been said of the importance of individuality of character, and diversity in opinions and modes of conduct, involves, as of the same unspeakable importance, diversity of education.“, tbid, pp. 302–303.
This recommendation has obvious parallels with Mill’s suggestion that competing socialist cooperatives may be the solution to the problems of class power, where `class’ is construed in a narrow economic sense. See “Chapters on Socialism”, CW V, 703–756 at pp. 739–748.
Representative Government, CW XIX, pp. 546–547.
Ibid, pp. 549–550.
Mill declares: a “moral or human interest” in nature, art, poetry, history and “the ways of mankind past and present, and their prospects in the future” to be chief among the sources of happiness. Utilitarianism,CW X, pp. 215–216
it is a personal injustice to withhold from anyone, unless for the prevention of greater evils, the33 Lynn Zastoupil, the only scholar to make an exhaustive investigation of the India House collection of Mill’s dispatches, has drawn on those dispatches to show that Mill’s career with the company is marked by an increased insistence on sensitivity to native customs and native opinion, in contrast with his father’s hostility and indifference to those aspects of Indian life. See Lynn Zastoupil, J.S. Mill and India. ( Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994 ).
Zastoupil, J.S. Mill, pp. 42–46. For Mill’s later views, see On Liberty, CW XVIII, pp. 240–241, note, in which the connection between toleration and liberty is emphasized: “I desire to call attention to the fact, that a man who has been deemed fit to fill a high office in the government of this country, under a liberal Ministry, maintains the doctrine that all who do not believe in the divinity of Christ are beyond the pale of toleration. Who, after this imbecile display, can indulge the illusion that religious persecution has passed away, never to return?”
The East India Company’s Charter’, CW XXX, 31–74 at p. 49.
Representative Government, CW XIX, p. 568–569.
For in the subject community also there are oppressors and oppressed; powerful individuals or classes, and slaves prostrate before them; and it is the former, not the latter, who have the means of access to the English public.“, Representative Government, CW XIX, p. 572.
Ibid, CW XIX, p. 571.
Representative Government, CW XIX, pp. 570–571. `Minute on the Black Act’, CW XXX, 11–16 at pp. 14–15.
Representative Government, CW XIX, p. 570.
In England, the experts of the Examiner’s Office, of which Mill eventually became the head, guided the decisions of the Court of Directors, who in turn proposed policies to the Board of Control, which had a veto over policies it considered unwise. Policies produced through this complex process of revision eventually were eventually sent, as despatches, to the government in India, both as comments on the Indian government’s previous actions and as guides to its future action.
Representative Government, CW XIX, p. 447.
Recognition“, m A. Gutmann, ed., Multiculturalism, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994) 25–74. Gutmann herself is an exception to the above claims about `liberal neutrality’. See, e.g., A. Gutmann, ”Why Go to School?“ in A. Sen and B. Williams, eds. Utilitarianism and Beyond. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 261–278, as is J. Raz, The Morality of Freedom, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986) and `Multiculturalism: A Liberal Perspective’, Dissent, Winter, (1994), 67–79.
Rawls, Political Liberalism, p. 141.
Ibid, pp. 141–143.
Ibid, p. 169 and p. 143, respectively.
Ibid, p. 139.
bid, p. xxi.
In, of course, Mill’s sense of `equal access’, which famously does not mean, at least not necessarily,equal participation in terns of voting.
The example of Tennessee fundamentalists is from A. Gutman, “Undemocratic Education”, in Nancy L.. Rosenblum, ed.,Liberalism and the Moral Life, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 71–88 at pp. 81–82. The Amish are discussed in W. Kymlicka, Multicultural, p. 161.
John Gray notes this in Enlightenment’s Wake, (London: Routledge, 1995), p. 142.
See On Liberty, CW XVIII, pp. 301–302, Principles, CW III, p. 947.
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2003 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Finlay, G. (2003). John Stuart Mill as a Theorist of Toleration. In: Castiglione, D., McKinnon, C. (eds) Toleration, Neutrality and Democracy. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-0241-6_9
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-0241-6_9
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-90-481-6492-9
Online ISBN: 978-94-017-0241-6
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive