slavery, and that the compensation granted to the slave-owners for its abolition was
not more, perhaps even less, than an equivalent for their loss.
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Yet despite his displeasure, Mill is at least relieved that “the flagrant injustice of emancipation
without compensation” was avoided.
What could possibly move Mill to announce that slaveholders ought to be compensated
when the state frees their slaves? He sees this as a fairly straightforward application of the
principle that the state must compensate citizens when it seizes property that they legally acquired
and held—the same principle that underlies the “takings” clause in the U. S. Constitution. For
brevity, we can call this the takings principle. Of course, he does not believe that human beings
can in fact be property, as we have seen. However, when it comes to compensating slave owners,
he takes the pertinent points to be that the state has allowed some people to be treated as if they
were property and that it has encouraged others to expect that it will continue to allow this in the
future. Mill thinks that there is an even more fundamental principle of justice in play here, which
might be roughly stated thus: once one has encouraged others to form expectations about one’s
future behavior and to base their plans around these expectations, one has an obligation to follow
through. This might be called the expectations principle. It is this principle that underlies the
government’s obligation to compensate citizens for taking their property, and this explains why
the obligation exists even in the case of something that has wrongly been assigned the legal status
of property.
Mill believes that we already consider the expectations principle to be an important rule of
justice. He thinks that he can account for its importance in terms of his utilitarianism. In general,
Convention