We were here first. Maybe his cognitive problems would make him a slightly less proficient hunter than someone else, but whatever, he could always gather. He might get in a fight and end up with a spear through his gut, but in that case his problems would be over anyway. Otherwise he could just hang out and live in a cave and gather roots and berries and maybe hunt buffalo and participate in the appropriate tribal bonding rituals like everyone else.
Noam Chomsky
But society came and paved over the place where all the roots and berry plants grew and killed the buffalo and dynamited the caves and declared the tribal bonding rituals Problematic. This increased productivity by about a zillion times, so most people ended up better off. Think of it as the ultimate use how to write an abstract for a capstone project eminent domain; a power beyond your control has seized everything in the world, it had some good economic reasons for doing so, but it at least owes you compensation!
This is also the basis of my support for a basic income guarantee. Imagine an employment waterline, gradually rising through higher and higher levels of competence. In the distant past, maybe you could be pretty dumb, have no emotional continence at all, and still live a pretty happy life. As the waterline rises, the skills necessary to support yourself comfortably become nietzsche first essay good and evil good and bad summary and higher. And so on, until everyone is a burden.
It might be based around helping others in less tangible ways, like providing company and cheerfulness and love. It might be a virtue ethics celebrating people nietzsche first essay good and evil good and bad summary good at cultivating traits we value. Or it might be a sort of philosophically-informed hedonism nietzsche first essay good and evil good and bad summary the lines of Epicurus, where we try to enjoy ourselves in the ways that make us most human.
And I think my advice to my suicidal patients, if I were able and willing to express all this to them, would be to stop worrying about being a burden and to start doing all these things now. Mill adopts a compatibilist account of human freedom. Although it is true that our character and desires, in combination with a set of circumstances, causally necessitates some particular action, it is not true that if that person had some alternative character and set of desires that that same cause would necessitate that same action.
Had that person had different desires, or a different character, he might well have acted differently. This, Mill concedes, would be of nietzsche first essay good and evil good and bad summary if our character and desires are beyond the control of an individual to influence.
But, he points out, we can influence our character and desires. We can place ourselves in circumstances that modify our character, and we can practice better habits. The raw content of experience is itself extremely narrow—indeed, Mill holds, we directly perceive only best college application essay books own internal impressions.
We have unmediated access only to the impression that are generated in us—we are directly aware only of our own mental content. cover letter for scientific editor position know of objects in the world only to the extent that they affect us and give rise to conscious impressions—and such impressions will only ever be presented by way of the mediating sense faculties.
The doctrine ultimately pushes Mill towards Idealism. One might hold that, though we are only familiar in experience with mental impressions, we can nevertheless infer the existence of non-mental objects lying behind such mental objects. But such an inference could not be supported within experience by enumerative induction—no non-mental objects are ever observed behind mental objects—but only by a hypothesis to some unobserved entity.
As was noted above, however, Mill rejects the method of hypothesis as an autonomous form of reasoning—no such inference to unobserved non-mental objects could for him be valid. Mill is forced towards the conclusion that we can have no warrant for of sensation are stable—that they can be returned to, after durations in which they go unperceived.
Such, Mill thinks, is the true content of our notion of the external world. Matter, then, may be defined, a Permanent Possibility of Sensation. If I am asked, whether I believe in matter, I ask whether the questioner accepts this definition of it. If he does, I believe in matter: In any nietzsche first essay good and evil good and bad summary sense than this, I do not. Rather, our idea of externality is derived from the recognition that certain sensations can be revisited: Whether this stance is entirely coherent, we shall consider below, in section 3.
But he also resists the total reduction of mind to the existence of sensations—or even to the existence of possible sensations—on the grounds that there remains a unity to apperception. As he points out, a reduction of self to sensations cannot be wholly satisfactory, because a sense of the self enters into many sensations as a constituent part. When I recall a memory, for instance, the sensation is of a memory which has as part of its content that it is my memory.
If, therefore, we speak of the Mind as a series of feelings, we are obliged to complete the statement by calling it a series of feelings which is aware of itself as past and future; and we are reduced to the alternative of believing that the Mind, or Ego, is nietzsche first essay good and evil good and bad summary different from any series of feelings, or possibilities of them, or of accepting the paradox, that something which ex hypothesi is but a series of feelings, can be aware of itself as a series.
But the argument goes deeper, suggesting that we cannot even imagine what it would be to believe in the existence of non-mental objects.
Indeed, Mill at times suggests a semantic version of the argument, which establish that the very meaning of our words—determined, as they are, by experience—obstructs us from referring to anything beyond experience. It would, no doubt, be absurd to assume that our words exhaust the possibilities of Being.
There may be innumerable modes of it which are inaccessible to our faculties, and which consequently we are unable to name.
But we ought not to speak of these modes of Being by any of the names we possess.
Dark Ecology
These are all inapplicable, because they all stand for known modes of Being. As noted, Mill views enumerative induction—the sole method of warranted theoretical reasoning—as self-validating and self-improving. We spontaneously take certain initial inductive moves to be justified.
Induction could have been self-undermining—its success as a form of reasoning about the world, established on its own terms, is not trivial.
As such, it could only be arrived at by nietzsche first essay good and evil good and bad summary reasoning. Inductive investigation allows us to better understand that the mind is itself governed by natural laws—and to better understand the processes of sense perception that allow us to be causally receptive to the world. Such discoveries clarify and strengthen our sense of why a priori knowledge is impossible in the first place, and why empirical investigation is necessary for any literature review on human resource management paper knowledge.
The view that Mill sketches is rich in potential—and it has sufficient breadth to promise a nietzsche first essay good and evil good and bad summary means of theoretically orienting ourselves in the world. The issue, of course, is, whether naturalism is the only possible view. The question must remain whether there are equally good non-naturalistic ways of thinking about best essays world and our place within it.
Because naturalism is a substantive doctrine, that is a possibility to which Mill must remain open. Ultimately, he holds, the only things that we can be warranted in believing are permanent possibilities of sensation. But such objects are not—at least not obviously—natural entities. Mill is never entirely clear about the status abhishekbr.com the permanent possibilities of sensation.
To the extent that they are ideal objects, we might doubt their status as natural entities; the further reified such entities are in relation to actual sensations, the less plausible it is to characterise the inference from sensation to the possibility of sensation as an inductive one.
The worry enters from multiple directions. Perhaps most obviously, it calls into question the down-to-earth realism that Mill endorses within the philosophy of science. Mill claims that a priori knowledge is impossible because we cannot know that the universe of thought and that of reality, the Microcosm and the Macrocosm as they were once called must have been framed in in complete correspondence with one another.
Good and evil
One option to resolve this tension, of course, is to follow Kant in distinguishing transcendental and empirical levels of reflection—another is to follow the post-Kantian idealists in attempting to unite and overcome such oppositions wherever they occur.
Mill, however, never worked through the internal pressures of how to write a good summary of an article Just as Mill thinks that there is one fundamental principle of theoretical reason—the principle of enumerative induction—so too he thinks that there is one fundamental principle of practical reason.
There are not only first principles of Knowledge, but first principles of Conduct. There must be some standard by which to determine the goodness or badness, absolute and comparative, of ends or objects of desire.
And nietzsche first essay good and evil good and bad summary that nietzsche first essay good and evil good and bad summary is, there can be but one.
The principle of utility is examined in detail in Utilitarianism, during which it is both clarified and defended. The argument takes place by way of three subclaims. Mill takes the nietzsche first essay good and evil good and bad summary subclaim—desirability—to be reasonably uncontentious. Happiness, most will admit, is at least one of the things which is desirable Donner His argument for the claim, however, has become infamous.
The only proof capable of being given that an object is visible, is that people actually see it. The only proof that a sound is audible, is that people hear it: In like manner, I apprehend, the sole evidence it is possible to produce that anything is desirable, is that people do actually desire it. As such, happiness is shown to be desirable as an end. As was observed above section 2. We do so, Mill claims, by virtue of our nature—and that propensity strikes us as reasonable upon inspection.
That human beings universally do desire happiness, and take it to be reasonable to do so under free consideration, compare technical writing and creative writing evidence that happiness is desirable.
Such evidence, of course, is defeasible—but real nonetheless. And in the absence of reasons to doubt our universal tendency to desire happiness, we are warranted in taking happiness to be desirable.
Many things, of course, are desired merely as means to happiness. Upon inspection, such things do not strike us as ultimately desirable, but merely as useful mechanisms for bringing about that which is ultimately desirable. Mill recognises, however, that not all desiderata besides happiness are desired merely as means.
This does not threaten the claim that happiness is the only thing ultimately desirable, Mill argues, because for such individuals, virtue is desirable because it forms a part of their happiness. Virtue, according to the utilitarian doctrine, is not naturally and originally part of the end, but it is capable of becoming so […] There was no original desire of it, or motive to it, save its conduciveness to pleasure, and especially to protection from pain.
But through the association thus formed, it may be felt a good in itself, and desired as such with as dps holiday homework for class 4 intensity as any other good.
At this point, they may be desired in themselves—and quite apart from their results. We shall discuss this claim further below section 4. It allows Mill to argue that nothing apart from happiness is Cell transport homework packet key desired.
The underlying thought is that the good of a group of people can be no other than the sum of the good of its members. But the argument goes deeper than this plausible claim, relying on stronger premises. One might well argue, for instance, that to add to the happiness of the already content or the undeserving is not to add to the general good at the same level as adding to the happiness of the discontent or deserving: Mill does not, however, consider these objections. It is not, of course, a proof in the traditional sense of being a logical deduction of the principle of utility.
Being based on critical examination of how we do reason, claims about how we ought to reason—whether practically or theoretically—must remain provisional, and open to ongoing correction by further observations of our reasoning practices. The content of this claim, however, clearly depends to a great extent upon what is meant by happiness. Mill gives what seems to be a clear and unambiguous statement of his meaning. That statement has seemed to many to commit Mill, at a basic level, to hedonism as an account of happiness and a theory of value—that it is pleasurable sensations that are the ultimately valuable thing.
Mill departs from the Benthamite account, however, which holds that if two experiences contain equal quantities of pleasure, then they are thereby equally valuable. In contrast, Mill argues that [i]t would be absurd that while, in estimating all other things, quality is considered as well as quantity, essay writers company to depend on quantity alone.
If I am asked, what I mean by difference of quality in pleasures, or what makes one pleasure more valuable than another, merely as a pleasure, except its being greater in amount, there is but one possible answer. Of two pleasures, if there be one to which all or almost all who have experience of both give a decided preference […] that is the more desirable pleasure.
Some commentators Riley have claimed that Mill holds that any quantity of a application letter bank cashier capable of, we are justified in ascribing to the preferred enjoyment a superiority in quality.
In fact, Mill gives very little indication as to how to weigh quality against quantity of pleasure—he simply does not speak to the specifics of how nietzsche first essay good and evil good and bad summary quantities of pleasures at varying qualities are to be reconciled against one another. The question remains as to which sorts of pleasures are of higher quality than others.
As well as pleasures of the mind, he holds that pleasures gained in activity are of a higher quality than those gained passively Liberty, XVIII: Ultimately, however, the quality of any given pleasure must itself be a substantive question, to be addressed by ongoing experimentation and comparison of the preferences of competent judges—those who have experienced, and appreciated, the sorts of pleasure being compared.
The lurking suspicion for many has been that in distinguishing qualities of pleasure, Mill departs from hedonism. If Mill claims that a small amount of pleasure can be more valuable than a high amount, anti-hedonist interpreters suggests, it must be on the grounds of valuing something apart from the pleasurable experience itself—for if Mill valued solely the pleasurable experience, then he would always value more pleasurable experience over less.
Mill must, that is to say, consider high quality pleasures more valuable not on account of their pleasantness, but on some other grounds—i. But this would be to abandon hedonism.
While talk of for instance virtue as a part of happiness is certainly intelligible, it is perhaps less obvious that it is compatible with his hedonism. Those who doubt whether Mill remains a hedonist have in general claimed that Mill Brink There are occasions when Mill makes claims which lend themselves to such an interpretation.
It is certainly true that, in attempting to combine the best of eighteenth-century empiricism and nineteenth-century romanticism, Mill gravitated nietzsche first essay good and evil good and bad summary character as the locus of practical theorizing Devigne This, by necessity, involved a change of emphasis in his philosophy. The claim that some qualities of pleasure are nietzsche first essay good and evil good and bad summary valuable than others need not violate the core claim creative homework tasks hedonism: It is perfectly open to the hedonist to claim that different pleasurable experiences are, on the grounds of their phenomenology, of different value.
This too may offer some explanation of what Mill means by claiming that, for instance, virtue can become part of our happiness.
They concern, that is to say, what states of affairs are valuable—which outcomes are good. Such axiological claims are, in themselves, silent on the question of our moral obligations. Mill is not a maximizing utilitarian about the moral. Other, more careful, statements clearly show that this is not his considered position.
The maximizing utilitarian believes that we are morally obliged to bring about the most happiness we can—that insofar as we fall short of this mark, we violate our moral obligations. Yet Mill clearly believes that we are not nietzsche first essay good and evil good and bad summary to do all that we can upon pain of moral censure. There is a standard of altruism to which all should be required to come up, and a degree beyond it which is not obligatory, but meritorious. Auguste Comte and Positivism, X: While it might be extremely praiseworthy to do the most good that we can—and while there might be reason to do the most good that we can—failure to do so is not the standard that marks the distinction between acting morally and immorally.
Rather, Mill claims, the notion of moral wrong is connected to that of punishment. I think there is no doubt that this distinction lies at the bottom of the notions of right and wrong; that we call any conduct wrong, or employ, instead, some other term of dislike or disparagement, according as we think that the person ought, or ought not, to be punished for it.
We do not call anything wrong, unless we mean to imply that a person ought to be punished in some way or other for doing it; if not by law, by the opinion of his fellow creatures; if not by opinion, by the reproaches of his own conscience. The question, of course, is what grounds such norms of blame. Interpreters have in general taken Mill to believe that whether we ought to blame an individual for any given act—and whether, therefore that act is morally wrong—is determined by considerations of utilitarian efficiency.
An act is wrong, therefore, essay about barangay fiesta it would be productive to overall utility to blame an individual for performing that act—or, under a rule-focused interpretation, if it would be productive to overall utility for there to exist a rule to the effect that individuals performing actions of that sort were subject to blame.
A significant remaining question is whether there is a constraint placed on morality by the logic of that emotion: Mill writes that the moral view of actions and characters […] is unquestionably the first and most important mode of looking at them. Moral rules play a role in guiding and evaluating action, to be sure, but so do rules of aesthetics and prudence: There can, of course, be clashes between such rules of morality, prudence, and aesthetics—and, indeed, clashes of pay someone to write a thesis nietzsche first essay good and evil good and bad summary those domains.
Mill also allows that appeal be made directly to the principle of utility on occasions when an agent knows that nietzsche first essay good and evil good and bad summary rules—moral, prudential, or aesthetic—would generate significantly less overall happiness than violating those rules Utilitarianism, X: But Mill is unclear as to how often such clashes and exceptions license direct appeal to the principle of utility.
To the extent that one ought often to ignore of how society and its institutions ought to be organized is of course guided by an abstract commitment to general happiness as the measure of the success of all nietzsche first essay good and evil good and bad summary practice—but it is also deeply attentive to the concrete possibilities and dangers of the newly emerging democratic era, and how they relate to this overarching goal Skorupski Influenced by Tocqueville, Mill held that the great trend of his own period was a falling away of aristocratic mores and a growth of equality.
Wealth, education, status, and therefore power, he held, were amassing with a socially and politically dominant middle class, whose shared commercial best academic writing service and interests dictated equality as the emerging rule.
Mill believes that this trend presents a chance for the improvement of society—in this sense, he stands as the heir to Bentham and James Mill in trying to drive forward the agenda of modernisation. But, like many of his nineteenth-century contemporaries—in particular, conservative social critics such as Coleridge and Carlyle—he also sees that the newly emerging order carries with it newly emerging dangers.
His aim was therefore to ameliorate the negative effects of the rise of equality, while capitalising on the opportunity it presented for reform.
- This must be examined in some detail, beginning with Machiavelli’s advice to a prince:
- Schopenhauer’s thought there is refined by his reading of the Upanishads , where the Br.
- Stanley Hoffmann , March [] I do not mean to suggest that linguists have all adopted Chomsky’s views.
- He would have had no difficulty recognizing Lenin and Trotsky, or Hitler and Stalin, for the monsters that they were — all of whom made “war on virtue, on letters, and on any art that brings advantage and honour to the human race.
- So yeah, it doesn’t matter how they balance out, it’s just another taxpayer subsidy to the rich.
- This drive is not truly vanquished and scarcely subdued by the fact that a regular and rigid new world is constructed as its prison from its own ephemeral products, the concepts.
- Anything before that — brain, no brain, heart, no heart, viable, non-autonomous — is fair game for an abortion.
- I do not know if the level of veracity which he achieves in them is typical of the entire piece.
- The good is the right relation between all that exists, and this exists in the mind of the Divine, or some heavenly realm.
- The Platonist can characterize the claims of mathematics as claims about abstract objects—but, as a naturalist, no such option is open to Mill.
- Professor de la Paz is not troubled by the immorality of theft because the preservation of human lives is more important.
- The worry enters from multiple directions.
The most pressing need for reform in this situation, Mill thought, was the removal of structures of discrimination and oppression against women. Mill held, on the grounds of associationist psychology, that human character is wholly a product of upbringing. As such, he was suspicious of the then common claim that women had a different nature from men—and that the sexes were therefore naturally suited for different roles within the family and society more broadly.
So too for differences that are claimed to exist naturally between the races, and to justify the authority one set of individuals nietzsche first essay good and evil good and bad summary another The Negro Question, XII: With the growth of equality that came with a dominant middle class, Mill held, these forms of oppression stood out all the more clearly, and the time was nietzsche first essay good and evil good and bad summary ripe to dismantle such practices of discrimination.
The denial of the vote harmed the disenfranchised on two history essay writing frame good and happy life.
Barriers to education and the professions, he held, were as much in need of reform as barriers to representation Subjection, XXI: But his most vehement criticisms were made of the institution of marriage, as practiced in his own time.
Marriage—which in this period deprived the wife of property and legal personhood, and forced total obedience to a husband—was, Mill held, akin to slavery Subjection, XXI: Often, he observed, it involved physical violence. But even where this was not the case, the preparation for and participation in such unequal partnerships caused women to develop constrained, artificial, and submissive personalities.
And not only was it degrading for women to be held in such a position of slavery—exercising such domination was debasing to men, corrupting their personalities, too Subjection, XXI: The prevalence of such a vicious power-relationship in a central area of human life cried out for renovation. The only circumstances in which marriage could be a positive institution, adding to human happiness, was one in which men and women were treated with total equality Miller But it also presented dangers.
It meant rule by a social mass which was more powerful, uniform, and omnipresent than the of previous eras. The dominance of the majority, Mill held, presented new threats of tyranny over the individual—freedom was no less at risk from a newly empowered many, than from an absolute monarch. Informal mechanisms of social pressure and expectation could, in mass democratic societies, be all-controlling.
Mill worried that the exercise of such powers would lead to stifling conformism in thought, character and action. It was in this context that On Liberty was nietzsche first essay good and evil good and bad summary Scarre The aim of the argument is announced in the first chapter: The object of this Essay is to assert one very simple principle […] That principle is, that the sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number, is self-protection.
It is proper to state that I forego any advantage which could be derived to my argument from the idea of abstract right, as a thing independent of utility.
Mill employs different strategies to argue for freedom of thought and discussion, freedom of character, and freedom of action—and although of course such arguments overlap, they must be carefully unpicked if we are to appreciate their strengths and weaknesses. In this section, we will consider the argument for freedom of speech, turning, in the next section, to his case for freedom of nietzsche first essay good and evil good and bad summary and action more broadly. The chapter takes the form of a proof from the exhaustion of cases.
Mill claims that, for any opinion P which is a candidate for suppression, P must be either: True beliefs are in general suppressed because, though they are true, they are thought to be false. Human beings, though, are not creatures capable of infallible knowledge.
As such, discussion must remain open—even on issues which we think securely established. It might be argued, he observes, that certain true beliefs should be suppressed because, although true, they are thought to be harmful.
But to argue that we should suppress a view because it is harmful would either be to assume infallibility on its status as harmful, or to allow debate on that question—which in turn must involve debate on the substantive issue itself. Opinions belonging to case i therefore ought to not to be suppressed. Even when a belief is false, Mill holds, its assertion may still be conducive to securing the truth—and as such, opinions belonging to case ii should not be suppressed.
The assertion of false opinions leads to debate—which in turn leads to greater understanding. It is therefore just as important to hear counterarguments to the truth as its re-articulation.
However unwillingly a person who has a strong opinion may admit the possibility that his opinion may be false, he ought to be moved by the consideration that however true it may be, if it is not fully, frequently, and fearlessly discussed, it will be held as a dead dogma, not a living truth. Most well-thought-out views—whether conservative or liberal—on such matters contain part of the truth.
Mill takes the three cases to be exhaustive: Though there may be arguments establishing that forms of communication which do not have truth as their goal—poetry, art, music—should be free from interference, these are not to be found in chapter 2, but later in On Liberty.
On the one hand, he argues that is best for individuals that they are given freedom and space to develop their own character. On the other, he argues that it best for society, too. Human nature is not a machine to be built after a model, and set to do exactly the work prescribed for it, but a tree, which requires to grow and develope itself on all sides, according to the tendency of the inward forces which make it a nietzsche first essay good and evil good and bad summary thing.
In this sense, the argument is a pragmatic one: But Mill also suggests that it is a central feature of the good life that it be a life chosen for oneself. It is possible that he might be guided in some good path […] But what will be his comparative worth as a human being?
It really is of importance, not only what men do, but also what manner of men they are that do it. It is individuals that are well-rounded, authentic and spontaneous, he believes, that are most truly happy. It is also important for society more broadly that individuals be free to develop their own ways of living. And the variety that exists within such a context, Mill thinks, key to maintaining social progress. The despotism of custom is everywhere the standing hindrance to human advancement, being in unceasing antagonism to that disposition to aim at something better than customary, which is called, according to circumstances, the spirit of liberty, or that of progress or improvement.
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