CW XV, p. 1204.
4
See Michael St. John Packe, The Life of John Stuart Mill (New York: Macmillan 1954),
5
pp. 466–72.
Utilitarianism, CW X, pp. 240–259.
6
There is a large literature on this aspect of Mill’s thought. For a brief overview of some
7
of the basic issues, see my “Moral Expertise: A Millian Perspective,” forthcoming in Ethical
Expertise: A Critical Assessment, ed. Lisa M. Rasmussen (Kluwer, 2004).
Page -3-
cause during the American Civil War. In fact, he reportedly attempted to donate proceeds from
the sales of American editions of his books to a relief fund for Union soldiers and sailors. The
4
vehemence with which Mill sought a criminal trial for Jamaica’s Governor Edward Eyre, who
responded to a rebellion of ex-slaves with a month-long spree of atrocities, shows that Mill does
not fail to take seriously the human rights of non-whites.
5
In two passages quoted in the last paragraph, Mill describes slavery as unjust. He
develops his account of justice in the final chapter of the essay Utilitarianism. There he argues
6
that to call something unjust is to say that it violates a particular sort of moral rule. Formally, a
rule of justice is a rule of conduct that entails that individuals have certain rights, where having a
right to something is understood as being entitled to call upon society’s help in protecting one’s
possession of it. Substantively, a rule of justice must be justified in utilitarian terms; it must be
part of a set of moral rules that is superior, from a utilitarian standpoint, to any set of rules with
which it is inconsistent. Admittedly, there is much that is unclear about Mill’s account. Most
significantly, he does not spell out as clearly as we might wish what it means for rules to be
justified in utilitarian terms. This feeds the more general uncertainty about the precise role of
rules in his moral philosophy and about whether he is an “act utilitarian” or a “rule utilitarian.”
7
Convention