InOurTime-20060518-Mill

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Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast.

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For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use please go to

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bbc .co .uk forward slash radio 4.

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I hope you enjoy the programme.

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Hello, the 19th century philosopher John Stuart Mill believed that,

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quote, the true philosophy is a marriage of poetry and logic,

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unquote.

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He was one of the first thinkers to argue that a social theory must engage with

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the ideas of culture and the internal life.

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He used Wordsworth to inform his social theory.

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He was a proto -feminist,

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and his treatise On Liberty is one of the sacred texts of liberalism.

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J .S.

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Mill believed that action was the natural articulation of thought.

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He battled throughout his life for social reform and individual freedom and

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was hugely influential in the extension of the vote.

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Few modern discussions on race,

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birth control,

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the state and human rights have not been influenced by Mill's theories.

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How did Mill's utilitarian background shape his political ideas?

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Why did he think romantic literature was significant to the rational structure

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of society?

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On what grounds did he argue for women's equality?

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And how did his notions of the individual become so central to

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modern social theory?

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With me to discuss J .S.

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Mill are A .C.

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Grayling, Professor of Philosophy at Birkbeck University of London.

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Janet Rutledge Richards,

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reader in bioethics at University College London,

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and Alan Ryan,

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professor of politics at Oxford University.

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Anthony Grayling,

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can you just give us an idea of Mill's significance as a philosophical

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and political thinker,

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an outline?

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Well,

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he's certainly the major...

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British philosopher of the 19th century,

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I think.

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And the impact that he's had on subsequent debate in all the

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different fields that you've just mentioned there has been very considerable.

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You find him being mentioned,

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cited in technical philosophical discussions in theory of perception,

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in logic and philosophy of mathematics.

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Not always with approval,

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but he's there anyway.

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And he is certainly a very,

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very large figure in political philosophy and social philosophy.

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So his classic On Liberty.

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is a much -read,

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much -cited,

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much -discussed book.

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In fact, for all its apparent clarity and simplicity

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when you read it,

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it's a short book,

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a very interesting and eloquent book.

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It is very rich in topics for discussion and has been the

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center of an industry,

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really.

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So his influence has been enormous.

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When you said industry,

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can you just elaborate that a little?

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Well, when you open the essay on liberty and you read

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the first paragraph or so,

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he says in it,

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I've got a very simple thesis to argue,

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and that is that society has no right to

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coerce an individual other than to prevent that individual from harming others.

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And you might think that that's a pretty straightforward thing

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to...

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be pushing as a line and a worthy line too.

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But then it turns out immediately to have all sorts of inner rich complexities,

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and they've been the basis of a lot of scholarly discussion since.

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He was born in 1806 and was writing until the end of

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his life in 1873.

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What were the big themes of British politics at that time?

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What was his context,

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Anthony?

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Well,

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when he was born in 1806,

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of course, the United Kingdom was at war with France.

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It was going through a tremendous change socially and economically.

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It was the very earliest phases of the Industrial Revolution.

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Agricultural Revolution had already happened.

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So it was a pollulating age,

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really, with a lot of different things happening.

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And one of the important things that was happening was the...

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attempted reform led by Bentham and John Stuart Mill's

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father, James Mill.

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And they were the inheritors of a tradition in the 18th century,

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mainly led by dissenters who were trying to...

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get more social justice,

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reform of parliament,

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rights for working people,

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all of which had been stymied in the 1790s because of the French Revolution.

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And so the effort at social reform had had to reinvent itself

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in the early decades of the 19th century.

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And John Stuart Mill was an inheritor of that.

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So he was riding on the back of this great wave of nationalism,

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industrialization,

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inequality,

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the women's question,

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and so on.

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And he,

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as it were, sort of surfed that in his work,

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as well as going deeper in other areas.

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Well, I mean,

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it was certainly not just happening all around him,

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but the people who were directly influencers on him,

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his own father,

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Bentham,

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Ricardo, who was a big friend of his father's,

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were themselves at the very centre of these endeavours.

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And when,

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after the Great Reform Bill of 1832,

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which extended the franchise somewhat,

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Mill became disillusioned by the...

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process of reform that had been going on in the previous decades,

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he felt it necessary to settle down and rethink how this reform

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process was going to be best conducted.

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And a lot of his best work,

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really, done later on in political economy and in politics,

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the essay on liberty and his work on utilitarianism,

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stems from the rethinking that he did of his legacy from Bentham and

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his father.

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Janet Radcliffe Richards,

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he was influenced,

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Mill was influenced by utilitarian thinking,

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particularly by Jeremy Bentham,

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who was his godfather.

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Can you give us the basis of utilitarianism and how it influenced him?

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Well, the essence of utilitarianism is it gets you out of a lot of

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traditional ways of thinking about ethics in that it has nothing

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to do with revealed religious ethics,

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of course, and it has nothing to do with simply appealing to your,

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at least it's not supposed to have anything to do with simply appealing to your intuitions

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about what's right and wrong.

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Bentham had the idea that ethics could be turned into a science

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where you could calculate what the right thing to do was.

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you should be trying to produce happiness,

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which was the really important thing.

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And if you regarded yourself as trying to produce happiness,

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then you had to understand the workings of the world

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and the workings of people in order to try to work

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out the best way to produce the best outcome.

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So it wasn't a matter of sitting with...

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pre -existing rules in the assumption that,

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say, God knew how to bring about the best outcome,

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we actually had to do the science to work out what the best outcome was.

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Now,

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there was, of course, an intuition in the root of all that,

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which was the idea that happiness was the important thing to go for.

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How was it different from hedonism in that sense?

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Well, it wasn't in a way,

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except that it had the idea that...

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every person's happiness counted as much as anybody else's.

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As I understand it,

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Bentham's idea of happiness was quantitative,

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wasn't it?

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Well,

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it couldn't be quantitative in itself because

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you have to have something to have a quantity of.

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But are you now drawing a contrast with Mill?

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Yes.

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Well,

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Mill...

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was pushing to a different kind of idea of the sort of happiness we should

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be aiming for.

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And it's often said that Bentham's happiness

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was that of a contented pig,

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and it's better to be a discontented human being than a contented pig,

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or that it's better to be a discontented Socrates than a contented fool.

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So Mill was committed to certainly

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producing the best outcome,

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but he went for what he called,

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the higher pleasures,

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which he thought were not just those of contented pigs.

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So he made a hierarchy of pleasures,

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didn't he?

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Well, yes, he did,

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except that his view of the hierarchy of pleasures was

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that if you'd had experience of all of them,

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you would go for these higher ones,

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which essentially means that if you'd had experience of them,

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they would make you happier.

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So it's not clear that there's qualitative and quantitative difference.

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Bentham was also interested in penal reform and the abolition of capital punishment and great

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social issues.

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Did he pass on?

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Did Mills pick up those views from him?

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Well,

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he certainly picked up the general idea of...

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the approach to social reform and the like.

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But interestingly,

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he was different on capital punishment in a way which is quite interesting for illustrating

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the way utilitarians think.

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Mill was in favor of capital punishment,

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but on a rather curious ground.

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The utilitarian idea of punishment is that you shouldn't do

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harm to the person being punished just in itself because suffering is always

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bad.

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So the only justification you have for punishment is preventing...

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worse kinds of harm.

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Now,

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Mill had the idea that penal servitude for life,

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which was the alternative to capital punishment,

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was in fact much worse than being killed.

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On the other hand,

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people were more afraid of being killed than they were of penal servitude

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for life.

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So you actually caused less harm,

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but at the same time deterred people more effectively with capital punishment

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than you did with penal servitude.

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Mill's father,

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James Mill,

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as I've said,

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was a friend of,

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colleague of Bentham's ideas.

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And can you tell us what impact they had on J .S.

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Mill's upbringing and is this fabled and most singular education

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he gave his son?

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Mill's autobiography.

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is Mill's own record of that education.

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And he tells the reader that the only

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thing the reader is to pay any attention to about this autobiography is

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that it is a record of an education.

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And it's actually,

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on Mill's view,

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a record of two educations,

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the first of which he got from his father and

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the second of which he got from Harriet Taylor.

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later in life.

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And Mill was immensely clever.

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People who try to calculate IQ on flimsy

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evidence reckon he had an IQ of 192,

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which is pretty high.

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And everybody who encountered

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him thought he was immensely clever.

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His father told him...

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that he wasn't,

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persuaded him that his abilities were rather below

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average.

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This included learning Greek at the age of three,

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learning English by way of learning

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Greek.

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I'd say learning how to read English by reading Greek.

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He could read Latin fluently by nine.

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He was reading Plato and Demosthenes at the age of 10,

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learnt logic and economics between 12 and 14.

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And as everybody said,

10:30

S… Speaker 1 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

by the age of 16,

10:31

S… Speaker 1 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

he had an advantage of about a quarter of a century on

10:35

S… Speaker 1 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

any of his contemporaries.

10:37

S… Speaker 1 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

A lot of people thought it was bad for him.

10:41

S… Speaker 1 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

even at the time.

10:42

S… Speaker 1 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

People like Leslie Stephen said it was a pity he never learnt to

10:46

S… Speaker 1 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

play cricket,

10:47

S… Speaker 1 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

given that he said rather unhappily

10:51

S… Speaker 1 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

in an early draft of the autobiography that he didn't actually learn how to

10:55

S… Speaker 1 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

tie his shoelaces until he was 12.

10:57

S… Speaker 1 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

Learning cricket might have been a bit difficult too.

11:00

S… Speaker 1 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

He did go to France when he was 14 and learnt to fence

11:05

S… Speaker 1 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

and to dance,

11:05

S… Speaker 1 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

so some are the graces of life.

11:08

S… Speaker 2 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

Why did his father impose that educational experiment in such

11:12

S… Speaker 2 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

a draconian fashion on this little boy?

11:14

S… Speaker 2 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

Was it to do with Bentham's ideas and his own ideas?

11:17

S… Speaker 2 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

But it does seem that the boy was a laboratory,

11:20

S… Speaker 2 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

because then the boy then to go and teach his eight siblings,

11:23

S… Speaker 2 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

and he was punished if they didn't answer his father's questions.

11:26

S… Speaker 2 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

It's a strange business that's going on there.

11:28

S… Speaker 2 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

So what's the purpose of it?

11:29

S… Speaker 1 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

It's half strange and half not.

11:31

S… Speaker 1 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

Quite a lot of Mill's contemporaries...

11:34

S… Speaker 1 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

were tremendously well read by a very,

11:38

S… Speaker 1 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

very early age.

11:39

S… Speaker 1 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

I mean, Mill didn't in fact get much further in

11:43

S… Speaker 1 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

a literary direction than Macaulay did.

11:45

S… Speaker 1 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

A lot of children just learnt a great deal,

11:49

S… Speaker 1 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

particularly of a literary kind,

11:50

S… Speaker 1 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

very quickly.

11:51

S… Speaker 1 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

But Mill's father was obsessed with education,

11:55

S… Speaker 1 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

and this is,

11:57

S… Speaker 1 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

in a way,

11:57

S… Speaker 1 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

Mill's...

11:59

S… Speaker 1 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

mill's father's side of the whole bentham story if

12:03

S… Speaker 1 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

what you're obsessed by is calculating the consequences of people's

12:08

S… Speaker 1 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

behavior then one of the things you very much want is

12:12

S… Speaker 1 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

for everybody to be good at calculating consequences and

12:17

S… Speaker 1 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

you also

12:18

S… Speaker 1 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

want to know how to get people to have the right kind

12:22

S… Speaker 1 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

of aspirations and the right kind of wishes so that you can organise

12:26

S… Speaker 1 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

society in such a way that they become happy.

12:29

S… Speaker 1 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

So there's a sort of natural alliance between utilitarians

12:34

S… Speaker 1 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

and the early educational.

12:37

S… Speaker 1 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

theorists of the 19th century.

12:39

S… Speaker 1 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

And the people who disliked it because they thought it was too calculating and

12:43

S… Speaker 1 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

it didn't give enough scope to the emotions included,

12:47

S… Speaker 1 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

for example, Dickens,

12:48

S… Speaker 1 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

who mocks the whole thing in the picture of Mr.

12:51

S… Speaker 1 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

Gradgrind.

12:52

S… Speaker 1 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

So Bentham and James Mill in a sense

12:56

S… Speaker 1 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

were experimenting with...

12:58

S… Speaker 1 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

little John Stuart,

13:00

S… Speaker 1 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

but at the same time,

13:01

S… Speaker 1 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

of course, they wanted him to grow up and become a leader of advanced

13:05

S… Speaker 1 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

opinion and to push the whole reforming movement forwards.

13:09

S… Speaker 2 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

At 16,

13:10

S… Speaker 2 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

he seems to have been quite a,

13:11

S… Speaker 2 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

16 or 17,

13:12

S… Speaker 2 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

quite a leader of opinion anyway.

13:14

S… Speaker 2 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

He was, as an agnostic,

13:15

S… Speaker 2 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

he couldn't go to Oxford or Cambridge.

13:17

S… Speaker 2 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

He joined his father,

13:18

S… Speaker 2 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

who worked in the East Indian Company and worked,

13:20

S… Speaker 2 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

as I understand it,

13:21

S… Speaker 2 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

for his father.

13:22

S… Speaker 2 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

At the same time,

13:23

S… Speaker 2 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

he begins to write for magazines and journals.

13:26

S… Speaker 2 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

What are his...

13:27

S… Speaker 2 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

What preoccupations do he gather from his written work at that time?

13:31

S… Speaker 4 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

Well,

13:32

S… Speaker 1 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

not really very much,

13:33

S… Speaker 1 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

because he's still essentially writing under the influence

13:38

S… Speaker 1 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

of his father and Bentham,

13:40

S… Speaker 1 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

so it's pretty much early simple pieces on economics

13:44

S… Speaker 1 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

and on social reform.

13:46

S… Speaker 1 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

He doesn't really begin to find his own voice until...

13:52

S… Speaker 1 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

Ten years later,

13:53

S… Speaker 1 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

after the nervous breakdown,

13:55

S… Speaker 1 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

and when he becomes much more interested in what was

13:59

S… Speaker 1 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

happening in France and really begins to strike

14:03

S… Speaker 1 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

out on his own,

14:04

S… Speaker 1 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

what he calls youthful propagandism,

14:07

S… Speaker 1 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

he pretty much dismisses and...

14:11

S… Speaker 1 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

Much of it was taken up with helping Bentham and helping

14:15

S… Speaker 1 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

his father.

14:16

S… Speaker 1 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

And he himself had a very strong sense

14:20

S… Speaker 1 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

that he was really their creation.

14:22

S… Speaker 2 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

Anthony Groening,

14:24

S… Speaker 2 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

Alan Ryan's referred to the nervous breakdown when he was about 20.

14:27

S… Speaker 2 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

Can you describe that and tell us what effect it had on his

14:31

S… Speaker 1 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

thinking?

14:33

S… Speaker 3 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

Well, it's an interesting episode in his life because it seems not

14:37

S… Speaker 3 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

to have been much noticed by other people.

14:39

S… Speaker 3 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

In other words, it was a very internal event.

14:42

S… Speaker 3 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

And the crisis of it lasted for

14:46

S… Speaker 3 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

about six months.

14:47

S… Speaker 3 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

And he managed to survive that period by

14:51

S… Speaker 3 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

reading.

14:53

S… Speaker 3 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

I think it was Marmontel he read,

14:54

S… Speaker 1 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

wasn't he?

14:54

S… Speaker 3 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

He became conscious of the fact that the effective side of life,

14:58

S… Speaker 3 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

the sentiments were very important.

15:00

S… Speaker 1 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

He read a passage,

15:01

S… Speaker 1 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

I think, in which somebody's father dies,

15:04

S… Speaker 1 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

if I remember this,

15:05

S… Speaker 1 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

a long time ago since I read it,

15:06

S… Speaker 1 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

and he burst into tears when he read this passage.

15:09

S… Speaker 1 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

There's a rather Freudian connection here between that episode and his

15:14

S… Speaker 1 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

relationship with his own father.

15:15

S… Speaker 1 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

But afterwards,

15:16

S… Speaker 1 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

he read Wordsworth,

15:17

S… Speaker 1 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

and of course...

15:18

S… Speaker 1 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

felt a tremendous liberating influence of Wordsworth's poetry on

15:22

S… Speaker 1 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

him. And the great importance of the feelings,

15:25

S… Speaker 1 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

of the emotions,

15:25

S… Speaker 1 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

and the fact that they had to be wedded to the life of the mind burst

15:30

S… Speaker 1 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

in upon him and had a great,

15:32

S… Speaker 1 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

great effect on him.

15:33

S… Speaker 1 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

It changed his whole attitude towards the kind of work that he did later.

15:36

S… Speaker 4 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

For a great number of reasons,

15:37

S… Speaker 4 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

can you elaborate a little on what he got from Wordsworth's Anthony?

15:40

S… Speaker 1 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

I think it was the sense that there is beauty to be found in the world

15:45

S… Speaker 1 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

to which one can respond emotionally and not rationally,

15:48

S… Speaker 1 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

that there is this whole other dimension to experience that one

15:53

S… Speaker 1 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

can admit, one can allow it in,

15:54

S… Speaker 1 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

and it can feed into the...

15:57

S… Speaker 1 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

rational side of one's life as well by informing it as to what's really

16:01

S… Speaker 1 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

important.

16:01

S… Speaker 1 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

I mean, it had been argued often enough by people beforehand that reason

16:05

S… Speaker 1 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

by itself,

16:06

S… Speaker 1 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

this is a point that David Hume made a century before,

16:09

S… Speaker 1 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

reason by itself couldn't tell you

16:11

S… Speaker 1 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

which things to choose and to value,

16:13

S… Speaker 1 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

which direction to go in life or in some particular circumstance,

16:16

S… Speaker 1 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

and that the engagement of your emotions was very important in that process.

16:20

S… Speaker 1 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

And by the way,

16:21

S… Speaker 1 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

it's very interesting mentioning Hume there.

16:23

S… Speaker 1 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

Hume also had a nervous breakdown when he was about 20.

16:25

S… Speaker 1 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

And in fact,

16:26

S… Speaker 1 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

this is a very,

16:27

S… Speaker 1 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

very common feature of the lives of intellectuals,

16:30

S… Speaker 1 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

that in early adulthood,

16:31

S… Speaker 1 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

some sort of crisis of this kind happens,

16:34

S… Speaker 1 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

and it happens in this transforming way.

16:36

S… Speaker 1 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

It certainly did for Mill.

16:39

S… Speaker 4 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

He believed that the inner life of individuals should be linked with society and the

16:43

S… Speaker 4 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

public realm.

16:44

S… Speaker 4 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

How radical was this idea,

16:46

S… Speaker 4 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

do you think?

16:47

S… Speaker 4 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

And what effect did Harriet Taylor have on his inner life?

16:49

S… Speaker 6 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

Well,

16:50

S… Speaker 3 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

Harriet Taylor had an enormous effect in showing him about the emotions

16:54

S… Speaker 3 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

and having very strong emotions herself.

16:56

S… Speaker 3 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

And he addressed his reasoning to

17:01

S… Speaker 3 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

linking this with the public life.

17:03

S… Speaker 3 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

But one of the problems that he had to

17:07

S… Speaker 3 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

face was the extent to which you could develop the

17:11

S… Speaker 3 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

individual.

17:12

S… Speaker 3 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

while still having the kind of social constraints which you needed

17:17

S… Speaker 3 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

for any functioning society.

17:18

S… Speaker 3 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

And one of the interesting things about Mill is that he doesn't cover

17:22

S… Speaker 3 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

up any of these conflicts.

17:24

S… Speaker 3 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

He really wrestles with them.

17:25

S… Speaker 3 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

So his feeling about the individual is that the individual's

17:29

S… Speaker 3 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

good, good for the individual,

17:31

S… Speaker 3 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

is to develop as fully as they can,

17:34

S… Speaker 3 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

as fully as an individual.

17:35

S… Speaker 3 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

He's very worried about...

17:38

S… Speaker 3 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

the sort of pressures which society can impose on

17:42

S… Speaker 3 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

you and stifle your thinking.

17:45

S… Speaker 3 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

It's a kind of later version of

17:49

S… Speaker 3 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

a fear of tyranny.

17:50

S… Speaker 3 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

It isn't an external individual bullying

17:55

S… Speaker 3 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

you into something.

17:56

S… Speaker 3 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

It's something much more subtle that social pressures put on you.

18:01

S… Speaker 3 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

aware that social pressure is necessary for any functioning society,

18:04

S… Speaker 3 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

but still he's trying to work out how that society can best

18:09

S… Speaker 3 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

liberate the individual at the same time.

18:11

S… Speaker 4 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

Can we link it to Harriet Taylor and mention something not mentioned so far

18:16

S… Speaker 4 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

about his autobiography,

18:17

S… Speaker 4 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

that he doesn't mention his mother in it at all.

18:19

S… Speaker 4 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

And he meets Harriet Taylor,

18:21

S… Speaker 4 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

who's already married to John Taylor,

18:23

S… Speaker 4 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

and they have a relationship which we understand is very chaste and respectable so

18:27

S… Speaker 4 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

as not to hurt the feelings and social standing of John Taylor.

18:29

S… Speaker 4 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

And only two years after John Taylor dies do they marry.

18:33

S… Speaker 4 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

And then it seems to be...

18:34

S… Speaker 4 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

Even though they'd been around together before,

18:36

S… Speaker 4 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

there seemed to be a marriage among other things of true minds.

18:39

S… Speaker 4 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

He said she helped him.

18:40

S… Speaker 4 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

He gave an enormous credit for the work he did very

18:45

S… Speaker 4 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

soon after he met her.

18:46

S… Speaker 4 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

So...

18:47

S… Speaker 4 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

Did that drive forward what Anthony Grayling described,

18:50

S… Speaker 4 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

drive further forward the idea of discovering a new way to think through

18:55

S… Speaker 1 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

feeling?

18:55

S… Speaker 3 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

There seems to be no doubt at all that it did,

18:57

S… Speaker 3 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

though, of course,

18:58

S… Speaker 3 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

he was the one with the expertise in pushing it into an

19:02

S… Speaker 3 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

intellectually structured form.

19:05

S… Speaker 3 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

It's interesting that he comments in his work on women how

19:09

S… Speaker 3 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

early it is in life.

19:11

S… Speaker 3 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

that a boy starts to feel superior to his mother.

19:14

S… Speaker 3 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

So I presume it's later in life when he got a sense of

19:18

S… Speaker 3 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

what women were capable of that he fully realised quite how

19:22

S… Speaker 3 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

oppressed his mother had been with all these children.

19:25

S… Speaker 2 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

He clearly felt two things.

19:28

S… Speaker 2 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

which in a way were a bit unkind to both of his parents.

19:32

S… Speaker 2 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

He thought that his mother had been turned into

19:36

S… Speaker 2 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

a drudge,

19:36

S… Speaker 2 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

that she had no intellectual interest,

19:39

S… Speaker 2 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

that she became incapable of sharing feelings with

19:43

S… Speaker 2 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

her children.

19:44

S… Speaker 2 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

And he suppressed various passages of an early

19:48

S… Speaker 2 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

draft of the autobiography in which he said that he just lacked the

19:52

S… Speaker 2 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

kind of love that he could have had from a mother who had enough sense of her own

19:56

S… Speaker 5 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

existence.

19:58

S… Speaker 2 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

And of course...

20:00

S… Speaker 1 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

Of course, that,

20:01

S… Speaker 1 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

even he must have thought,

20:03

S… Speaker 1 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

reflected pretty badly on his father,

20:05

S… Speaker 1 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

who after all was the person who turned his mother into a drudge.

20:09

S… Speaker 1 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

And the thing about Harriet,

20:12

S… Speaker 1 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

I think, is that Harriet had a very strong sense that people

20:16

S… Speaker 1 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

had to live their own lives.

20:17

S… Speaker 1 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

And the whole push of On Liberty is...

20:23

S… Speaker 1 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

an argument in favour of autonomy,

20:25

S… Speaker 1 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

in favour of people saying,

20:27

S… Speaker 1 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

I have a life of my own to live.

20:30

S… Speaker 1 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

The thoughts I steer by must be my

20:34

S… Speaker 1 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

thoughts, they must be thoughts I have critically examined,

20:37

S… Speaker 1 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

I have got to work with.

20:39

S… Speaker 1 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

And it's a curious sort of mixture of

20:44

S… Speaker 1 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

what he picks up from Wordsworth and how that pushes

20:48

S… Speaker 1 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

back against Bentham and his father because he has this...

20:52

S… Speaker 1 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

sort of two -level picture of ethics and

20:56

S… Speaker 1 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

of what moral philosophy is meant to be about.

20:58

S… Speaker 1 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

One level that he always associates with Bentham and his

21:02

S… Speaker 1 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

father is the matter -of -fact question about how do you make society work

21:07

S… Speaker 1 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

in a successful,

21:08

S… Speaker 1 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

economical,

21:10

S… Speaker 1 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

functioning fashion so that people are made happy

21:14

S… Speaker 1 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

to the extent that social arrangements can do it.

21:18

S… Speaker 1 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

That's that story.

21:19

S… Speaker 1 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

You then ask yourself the question,

21:21

S… Speaker 1 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

what would it be like for me to be truly,

21:25

S… Speaker 1 (InOurTime-20060518-Mill)

fully,

InOurTime-20060518-Mill

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