When I was a bit younger and first starting on the study of philosophy, I found great satisfaction in setting out to refute the doctrines of others. This is often the way budding philosophers are trained, and it may be that my graduate training at Cornell, in the late 1940s at a time when Cornell was regarded in the American philosophical community at large as an offshoot of the linguistic analysis schools of Oxford and Cambridge1 served to reinforce this propensity. But over the years I have acquired a somewhat different outlook and, taking a piece of advice from William James, have come to read philosophers, especially those who are no longer around to defend themselves, with an eye to what they are saying that is true or enlightening rather than solely with an eye for determining where they went wrong or contradicted themselves; that is to say, sympathetically rather than caustically. This has led me over a period of years to come to a view of the moral philosophy of John Stuart Mill that is quite different from the point of view I had of Mill years before and from the view that still seems canonical in the textbooks and the presuppositions of philosophical writers today. So I am going to give an account of some matters in Mill that I have come to think are right, sound, true, or enlightening, even though this goes against the grain of standard philosophical opinion. I make no claims to originality. I do not claim that what I say herein is new, only that it is true, and that it is the result of my own reading of and reflecting on Mill over quite a long period of time. If credit for some fundamental new insight properly belongs elsewhere, then let it be credited elsewhere. We live in a period when philosophical reflection is increasingly being hampered by a rapidly escalating mass of philosophical literature and a proclaimed though rarely defended need to consult all the sources. A pox on it! This attitude, if generalized, would turn philosophers into timid antiquarians constantly looking over their shoulders to see whether. © 2000, Cambridge University Press. All rights reserved.
