Mill's liberalism and liberalism's posterity

Journal of Ethics

Volumn 4, Issue 1-2, 2000, Pages 137-165

  Gray, John ^a  

^a LONDON SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

Enlightenment; Liberalism; Perfectionism; Progress; Utilitarianism; Value pluralism

Indexed keywords

EID: 77449121940     PISSN: 13824554     EISSN: 15728609     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1023/a:1009812404139     Document Type: Article

References (79)

1. Isaiah Berlin, Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), footnote pp. lix-lx.
2. John Stuart Mill, On Liberty and Other Essays, ed. John Gray (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, World's Classics, 1991), p. 15.
3. John Gray, Mill on Liberty: A Defence (London: Routledge, 1983).
4. Among the Mill scholars, and moral and political philosophers, who have commented on the first edition of Mill on Liberty: A Defence, the most noteworthy are: Fred Berger, Happiness, Justice and Freedom: the Moral and Political Philosophy of John Stuart Mill (Berkeley: the University of California Press, 1984);
5. John Skorupski, John Stuart Mill (London and New York: Routledge, 1989);
6. Maurice Cowling, "Preface to the Second Edition," Mill and Liberalism, second edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990);
7. C.L. Ten, "Mill's Defence of Liberty," in John Gray and G.W. Smith (eds.), J.S. Mill on Liberty in Focus (London and New York: Routledge, 1991);
8. Wendy Donner, The Liberal Self: John Stuart Mill's Moral and Political Philosophy (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1991);
9. David Lyons, Rights, Welfare, and Mill's Moral Theory (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1994).
10. John Gray, "John Stuart Mill: the Crisis of Liberalism," in Plato to Nato: Studies in Political Thought (London: Penguin Books/BBC Books, 1984 and 1995);
11. "Indirect Utility and Fundamental Rights" and "Mill's and Other Liberalisms," in John Gray, Liberalisms: Essays in Political Philosophy (London and New York: Routledge, 1989)
12. Chapters 8 and 12; "Introduction" in John Stuart Mill, On Liberty and Other Essays; "Introduction" by John Gray and G.W. Smith in John Gray and G.W. Smith (eds.), J.S. Mill On Liberty in Focus (London and New York: Routledge, 1991).
13. Also concerned with, or closely relevant to Millian liberalism are: "An Epitaph for Liberalism" in John Gray, Post-liberalism: Studies in Political Thought (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), Chapter 16
14. "A Conservative Disposition: Individualism, the Free Market and the Common Life" in John Gray, Beyond the New Right: Markets, Government and the Common Environment (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), Chapter 2, especially pp. 51-55;
15. John Gray, Berlin (London: Harper/Collins, 1994);
16. John Gray, Liberalism, second edition (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1995), Chapter 6 and Postscript
17. "After the New Liberalism" and "From Postliberalism to Pluralism" in John Gray, Enlightenment's Wake: Politics and Culture at the Close of the Modern Age (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), Chapters 8 and 9.
18. James Fitzjames Stephen, Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, ed. Stuart Warner (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, Liberty Classics, 1993).
19. A very useful collection of critical reviews of On Liberty by Mill's contemporaries has been published under the title, Liberty: Contemporary Responses to John Stuart Mill, ed. Andrew Pyle (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1994).
20. John Plamenatz, The English Utilitarians (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1949), introduction.
21. Gray, Mill on Liberty: A Defence, p.67.
22. Some of the difficulties of indirect consequentialism are illuminatingly discussed by Alexander in his "Pursuing the Good-Indirectly.
23. Joel Feinberg, The Moral Limits of the Criminal Law, Volume 1, Harm to Others (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984).
24. Mill, On Liberty and Other Essays, p.13.
25. I use the term "perfectionism" here in the sense it has acquired in recent philosophy, in which it means any moral theory whose core is a conception of human flourishing. It is roughly this idea, in which the good for human beings is given by the demands of their nature (or natures), that is the subject matter of the best available study of this kind of moral theory: Thomas Hurka, Perfectionism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993).
26. Gray, Mill on Liberty: A Defence, p.89.
27. Gray, Mill on Liberty: A Defence, p.89.
28. Gray, Mill on Liberty: A Defence, p.89.
29. For an ingenious, but unpersuasive, counter-argument, see Roderick T. Long, "Mill's Higher Pleasures and the Choice of Character," Utilitas 3 (1992), pp. 284-287.
30. Isaiah Berlin, "John Stuart Mill and the Ends of Life," in Isaiah Berlin, Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), pp. 173-206.
31. For a helpful discussion of this aspect of human well-being, see James Griffin, Well-Being: Its Meaning, Measurement and Moral Importance (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), Chapter 2.
32. Gray, Mill on Liberty: A Defence, p. 120.
33. Gray, Mill on Liberty: A Defence, p. 120.
34. Gray, Mill on Liberty: A Defence, p. 120.
35. Gray, Mill on Liberty: A Defence, pp. 126-127.
36. Gray, Mill on Liberty: A Defence, p. 127.
37. For a more detailed and systematic consideration of Berlin's argument, see my Berlin.
38. Gray, Mill on Liberty: A Defence, p. 122.
39. Gray, Mill on Liberty: A Defence, p.89.
40. Mill, On Liberty and Other Essays, p. 117.
41. See John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1971)
42. and Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993).
43. Other examples of this apologetic mode in recent liberal political philosophy, in which an intuitionist approach to morality is married to an uncritical endorsement of the norms and values of American liberalism, are to be found in Ronald Dworkin, Taking Rights Seriously (London: Duckworth, 1977);
44. A Matter of Principle (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985);
45. Life's Dominion (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993);
46. B. Ackerman, Justice and the Liberal State (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980);
47. R. Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1974).
48. Mill, On Liberty and Other Essays, p.15.
49. Mill, On Liberty and Other Essays, p.80.
50. Mill, On Liberty and Other Essays, p. 223.
51. For Berlin's work, see especially his Four Essays on Liberty and The Crooked Timber of Humanity (London: John Murray, 1990)
52. Claude J. Galipeau's Isaiah Berlin's Liberalism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994). For an illuminating discussion of morality that is highly relevant to Berlin's views
53. see Charles Taylor, "A Most Peculiar Institution," in J.E.J. Altham (ed.), World, Mind, and Ethics: Essays on the Ethical Philosophy of Bernard Williams (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
54. I have discussed Berlin's relations with Mill in my book, Berlin. For the work of Joseph Raz, see particularly his The Morality of Freedom (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986)
55. and Ethics in the Public Domain (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994).
56. Raz's work is discussed in S. Mulhall and A. Swift, Liberals and Communitarians (Blackwell: Oxford, 1992)
57. Chapter 8. i have discussed Raz's work in my book Enlightenment's Wake (London: Routledge, 1995), Chapter 6.
58. For contemporary studies of autonomy as it figures in recent liberal philosophy, see L. Crocker, Positive Freedom (the Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1980);
59. John Christman (ed.), The Inner Citadel: Essays on Individual Autonomy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989);
60. Richard Lindley, Autonomy (London: Macmillan, 1986);
61. Lawrence Haworth, Autonomy: an Essay in Philosophical Psychology and Ethics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986);
62. S.I. Benn, A Theory of Freedom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989);
63. David Miller (ed.), Liberty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991).
64. Isaiah Berlin, "The Pursuit of the Ideal," in The Crooked Timber of Humanity.
65. Joseph Raz, The Morality of Freedom, pp. 412-420.
66. Isaiah Berlin, "John Stuart Mill and the Ends of Life," in Four Essays on Liberty.
67. Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
68. I have argued that Berlin necessarily fails to derive liberal political morality from value-pluralist ethical theory in my Berlin, Chapter 6.
69. Raz, Ethics in the Public Domain, p. 105.
70. Raz, The Morality of Freedom, pp. 369-370.
71. Raz, The Morality of Freedom, p. 394.
72. Raz, Ethics in the Public Domain, p. 105.
73. Joseph Raz, "Facing Up: a Reply," University of California Law Review 62 (1989), pp. 1153-1235.
74. Bhikhu Parekh, "Superior People: The Narrowness of Liberalism from Mill to Rawls," Times Literary Supplement, February 25, 1994, p. 12.
75. Raz, Ethics in the Public Domain, Chapter 7. Raz, The Morality of Freedom, p. 394.
76. Rawls, Political Liberalism, p. 78.
77. Rorty, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity.
78. Richard Rorty, Objectivity, Relativism and Truth: Philosophical Papers 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 209.
79. Rorty, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, p.60.