On John Stuart Mill (Core Knowledge)

John Stuart Mill expressed many of the central tenets of liberalism with unsurpassed clarity and enduring influence. Yet Mill’s apparent victory in the marketplace of ideas has numbed us to the power of his arguments. To many readers today, his views can seem utterly familiar, even banal. Sharing insights from teaching Mill for many years, the eminent philosopher Philip Kitcher makes a cogent case for why we should read this nineteenth-century thinker now. He portrays Mill as a conflicted humanist who wrestled with problems that are equally urgent in our own time. Kitcher reflects on Mill’s ideas in the context of contemporary ethical, social, and political issues such as COVID mandates, gun control, income inequality, gay rights, and climate change. More broadly, he shows, Mill’s writings help us cultivate our own capacities for critical thought and ethical decision making. Inviting readers into a conversation with Mill, this book shows that he supplies tools for thinking that are as valuable today as they were in the nineteenth century. "When reading John Stuart Mill, it's easy to have a sense of "déja vu all over again." At first sight, his ideas seem completely familiar, well understood, and thoroughly absorbed in the way we live now. Do we need him to explain the advantages of free speech and open debate? Or to emphasize attending to the consequences of actions? To protect differences that don't harm others, and to plead for equality of opportunity? Even if he once counted as "dangerous" or "subversive", he can appear all too tame today. On John Stuart Mill aims to approach him differently - not by rehearsing his (considerable) contributions to contemporary attitudes, but by starting just where the ideas he has bequeathed to us seem most problematic. Our own political debates hardly approximate the conditions envisaged in the famous defense of free speech. If we read more closely - and more widely - it becomes evident that he was already aware of the problem, and that he struggled to reconcile the claims of democracy with the importance of expertise. Those struggles can help us as we wrestle with kindred difficulties. In this extended, and beautifully written, essay, Kitcher develops some of Mill's ideas in the context of contemporary ethical, social, and political issues and debates, and what he would have made of them. These debates--such as those around government mandated Covid-19 masks and vaccines, Second Amendment worship, income inequality, gay marriage, and climate change--involve questions of individual freedom, free speech, equality, and utilitarianism, all of which are central to Mill's project. In doing so, Kitcher draws primarily, though not exclusively, on the three works by Mill (sometimes in close collaboration with Harriet Taylor) that typically feature on the Contemporary Civilization syllabus: On Liberty, Utilitarianism, and The Subjection of Women. He also discusses Mill's Principles of Political Economy. By focusing on questions that are salient today, he hopes to capture the tone of exploratory conversations at which Contemporary Civilization aims"-- Provided by publisher Sharing insights from teaching John Stuart Mill for many years, the eminent philosopher Philip Kitcher makes a cogent case for why we should read this nineteenth-century thinker now. He reflects on Mill’s ideas in the context of contemporary ethical, social, and political issues.