(1806-1873) English philosopher and economist who wrote On Liberty 1859, the classic philosophical defense of liberalism, and Utilitarianism 1863, a version of the “greatest happiness for the greatest number” principle in ethics. His progressive views inspired On the Subjection of Women 1869.
He was born in London, the son of James Mill. In 1822 he entered the East India Company, where he remained until retiring in 1858. In 1826, as described in his Autobiography 1873, he passed through a mental crisis; he found his father’s bleakly intellectual Utilitarianism emotionally unsatisfying and abandoned it for a more human philosophy influenced by the poet S T Coleridge. Mill sat in Parliament as a Radical 1865–68 and introduced a motion for women’s suffrage.
In Utilitarianism, he states that actions are right if they bring about happiness and wrong if they bring about the reverse of happiness. On Liberty moved away from the Utilitarian notion that individual liberty was necessary for economic and governmental efficiency and advanced the classical defense of individual freedom as a value in itself and the mark of a mature society; this change can be traced in the later editions of Principles of Political Economy 1848. His philosophical and political writings include A System of Logic 1843 and Considerations on Representative Government 1861. + prikaži više