More Grice to the Mill

Mill, John Stuart (1806–73) British logician, utilitarian moral and political philosopher, and economist, born in London, educated by his father James Mill (1773–1836) who was also a philosopher, and served as an administrator in the East India Company. Mill’s Utilitarianism (1861) developed and systematized the utilitarianism founded by Jeremy Bentham. A morally right action is the one that brings about the greatest happiness for everyone affected by the action, with happiness understood in terms of pleasure and the absence of pain. Mill altered Bentham’s position by distinguishing qualities as well as quantities of different kinds of pleasures and claimed that “it is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied.” On Liberty (1859), a classic statement of political liberalism, defined and defended individual freedom and argued that restrictions on liberty are acceptable only to avoid harm to others. His System of Logic (1843) made significant contributions to the theory of inductive reasoning. The Subjection of Women (1869), which was radical when published, has now become a classic of liberal feminism. Mill’s main work as an economist was Principles of Political Economy (1848). Mill’s canons Logic, Philosophy of science Also called Mill’s methods, the five inductive laws formulated and generalized by Mill for discovering the causal relations among phenomena. (1) The Canon or Method of Agreement: “If two or more instances of the phenomenon under investigation have only one circumstance in common, the circumstance in which alone all the instances appear is the cause (or effect) of the given phenomenon.” (2) The Canon or Method of Difference: “If an instance in which the phenomenon under investigation occurs, and an instance in which it does not occur, have every circumstance in common save one, that one occurring in the former; the circumstance in which alone the two instances differ, is the effect, or the cause, or an indispensable part of the cause, of the phenomenon.” (3) The Joint Canon or Method of Agreement and Difference: “If two or more instances in which the phenomenon occurs have only one circumstance in common, while two or more instances in which it does not occur have nothing in common save the absence of that circumstance, the circumstance in which alone the two sets of instances differ, is the effect, or the cause, or an indispensable part of the cause.” (4) The Canon or Method of Concomitant Variations: “Whatever phenomenon varies in any manner whenever another phenomenon varies in some particular manner, is either a cause or an effect of that phenomenon, or is connected with it through some fact of causation.” (5) The Canon or Method of Residues: “Subduct from any phenomenon such part as is known by previous induction to be the effect of certain antecedents, and the residue of the phenomenon is the effect of the remaining antecedents.” “The classical exposition of the inductive method is as Mill’s Canons.” Harré, The Philosophies of Science Mill’s methods, another expression for Mill’s canons