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The Psychology Behind J. S. Mill's ‘Proof’

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 February 2009

G. W. Spence
G. W. Spence
Affiliation:
Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge.
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Extract

Professor J. B. Schneewind's recent excellent volume Mill's Ethical Writings has drawn attention to the necessity of studying Mill's notes to chapter XXIII of his father's Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind for a clear understanding of his theory of the moral sentiments. There are notes, however, by J. S. Mill to other chapters of that work, which should not be forgotten, because they elucidate the associationist theory of motivation which is obscurely appealed to in chapter IV of Utilitarianism. Critics of Mill from F. H. Bradley onwards have made erroneous statements about the psychology that underlies Mill's justification of the principle of utility. But if Mill was going to support his ethics with a psychological theory, he should have expressed that theory at length and unambiguously in his ethical treatise. In what follows, it is pointed out where critics have been unfair to Mill through their apparent ignorance of his notes to the Analysis and of his conception of sympathy; but it is also shown that there is a puzzling inconsistency between the notes and a key passage in Utilitarianism, chapter IV. Finally, the theory of habitual volition, which is expressed at the close of that chapter, is examined. Critics have paid little attention to this theory, but it entails a serious modification of psychological hedonism, and Mill obviously attributed great importance to it.

Type
Articles
Information
Philosophy , Volume 43 , Issue 163 , January 1968 , pp. 18 - 28
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1968

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References

page 18 note 1 Mill's Ethical Writings, New York, 1965Google Scholar; hereafter cited as ‘MEW’.

page 18 note 2 The English Utilitarians, Oxford, 2nd edition 1958, ch. X, pp. 168–9.Google Scholar

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page 27 note 1 Cf. letter to Cairnes, J. E., 23 06 1869Google Scholar (The Letters of John Stuart Mill, ed. Elliot, H. S. R., London, 1910, Vol. II, p. 208Google Scholar), where Mill says that he is inclined to agree in what he thinks is Bain's opinion, that volition is not a name for a peculiar state of feeling, but ‘only a name for the immediate and irresistible sequence between the specific action of the efferent nerve fibres as effort, and the internal cause which produces it, and which is either an idea or desire or (as explained for the first time by Bain) the spontaneous activity of the nervous system under the stimulus of nutriment’.

Mill's notion of volition is similar to Schopenhauer's. Schopenhauer argues that, although a man can wish two opposing actions, he can will only one of them, and only his action reveals to him which of the two he has willed, for until the action is performed, the issue is undecided; and that, when the strongest of competing motives has driven the others out of consciousness and determines the will, this outcome is called a resolve, that is, a volition. (On the Freedom of the Will, 1841, translated by Kolenda, K., Library of Liberal Arts, 1960, ch. II, p. 17, and ch. III, p. 37Google Scholar.) (A volition in this sense must not be confused with the intention to perform a certain action later on.) If it is only by the action that the agent himself can distinguish between a wish and a volition, it would indeed be wrong to regard a volition as a state of feeling.

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page 28 note 1 Ibid., p. 310.

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