John Stuart Mill was one of the most influential philosophers in Western thought and in the later development of Psychology. Besides being one of the referents of the last phase of the Enlightenment, many of his ethical and political approaches served to shape the purposes of the science of behavior and the ideas about the idea of mind.

Next we will give a summary review to the utilitarian theory of John Stuart Mill and his thought .

Who was John Stuart Mill?

This philosopher was born in London in 1806. His father, James Mill, was one of the philosopher Jeremy Bentham’s friends, and he soon embarked his son on a hard and demanding education program to make him an intellectual. After leaving the university due to a collapse, he devoted himself to working in the East India Company, and also to writing.

In 1931 he began a friendship with Harriet Taylor, whom he would marry 20 years later . Harriet was a fighter for women’s rights and her influence was clearly reflected in the way of thinking of John Stuart Mill, who as a defender of the Enlightenment believed in the principle of equality and his philosophy on the subject, so it would be comparable to the liberal feminism that developed later.

From 1865 to 1868, John Stuart Mill was an MP in London , and from this position his philosophy gained even more visibility.

John Stuart Mill’s theory

The main aspects of John Stuart Mill’s thinking are as follows.

1. The greatest good for the greatest number of people

Stuart Mill was greatly influenced by Jeremy Bentham, a good friend of his family. If Plato believed that the good was the truth, Bentham was a radical utilitarian, and he believed that the idea of the good was equivalent to the useful.

John Stuart Mill did not go to the extremes of Bentham , but he did place the idea of the useful in a high place in his philosophical system. When it came to establishing what is morally correct, he established that the greatest good must be pursued for the greatest number of people.

2. The idea of freedom

In order to achieve the above objective, people must have the freedom to establish what makes them happy and allows them to live well. Only in this way is it possible to create a moral system without the existence of a totalizing and imposed idea (and therefore contrary to the principles of the Enlightenment) of what is good.

3. The limits of freedom

To ensure that personal projects for the pursuit of happiness of people do not overlap with each other causing unfair damage, it is important to avoid that which directly harms others .

4. The sovereign subject

However, it is not easy to distinguish between a situation that benefits one person and one in which another person loses out. To this end, John Stuart Mill places a clear limit that must not be crossed by imposed wills: the body itself . Something undoubtedly bad is that which involves an unwanted intrusion into a body or into its health.

Thus, Stuart Mill establishes the idea that each person is sovereign of his own body and mind. However, the body is not the only thing in which a limit is created that cannot be crossed, but the minimum, the safe in all cases, regardless of the context. There is another moral boundary: that posed by private property. This is considered an extension of the sovereign subject itself , like the body.

5. Fixism

Fixism is the idea that beings remain isolated from context . It is a concept widely used in Psychology and in philosophy of the mind, and which John Stuart Mill defended in spite of not using this word.

Basically, considering that each person is sovereign over his body and mind is a way of establishing a conceptual framework in which the starting point is always the individual, something that relates to what is beyond its properties by owning it or negotiating, winning or losing, but not changing.

This idea is totally opposed, for example, to the behavioral way of understanding the human being.Behavioralists, especially since B. F. Skinner’s contributions to this field, believe that each person is the result of the transactions between stimuli (what they perceive) and responses (what they do). In other words, that they do not exist in a way that is alien to the context.

In conclusion

Western countries of the contemporary era. It starts from an individualistic conception of the human being and establishes that, by default, nothing is bad if it does not flagrantly harm someone. However, ontologically their conception of the human being is dualistic, and that is why many psychologists, and especially behaviourists, oppose them.