131 - Mill, John Stuart

Summary

Thanks to the publication of Lectures on the History of Political Philosophy, we now have a much better understanding of Rawls’s views on John Stuart Mill (1806–1873) and this strengthens the suggestion that Mill has always occupied a very special place in Rawls’s thinking. Rawls sees Mill as supporting versions of utilitarianism and liberalism that are congenial to his own thinking and that have even inspired the development of justice as fairness and helped sharpen its arguments. Nonetheless, we must conclude that there are real limits to the rapprochement.

It is clear that, for Rawls, Mill is at a distance from the classical utilitarian doctrines of Bentham, Edgeworth, and Sidgwick (“the BES line” LHPP 375), even if he shares with Sidgwick a criticism of intuitionism and believes, like him, “that at some point we must have a single principle to straighten out and to systematize our judgments” (TJ 36). Even if Mill’s perfectionism has been understood as a form of intuitionism, Rawls sees him as searching for irst principles and an answer to the “priority problem” (LHPP 269).