Mill’s moral theory: Ongoing revisionism

D.G. Brown
Additional contact information
D.G. Brown: University of British Columbia, Canada, donbrown@interchange.ubc.ca

Politics, Philosophy & Economics, 2010, vol. 9, issue 1, 5-45

Abstract: Revisionist interpretation of Mill needs to be extended to deal with a residue of puzzles about his moral theory and its connection with his theory of liberty. The upshot shows his reinterpretation of his Benthamite tradition as a form of ‘philosophical utilitarianism’; his definition of the art of morality as collective self-defence; his ignoring of maximization in favour of ad hoc dealing in utilities; the central role of his account of the justice of punishment; the marginal role of the internal sanction in his criterion of moral wrong; his deep respect for common-sense morality; and his restriction of the scope of morality so as to claim for the utilitarian tradition the whole realm of the aesthetics of conduct as part of a general theory of practical reason.

Keywords: aesthetics of conduct; justice; liberty; Lyons; Mill; maximizing consequentialism; morality; philosophical utilitarianism; punishment; revisionism; societal self-defence (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1470594X09345675 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:pophec:v:9:y:2010:i:1:p:5-45

DOI: 10.1177/1470594X09345675

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Politics, Philosophy & Economics
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().