Social Morality in Mill

A leading classical utilitarian, John Stuart Mill is an unlikely contributor to the public reason tradition in political philosophy. To hold that social rules or political institutions are justified by their contribution to overall happiness is to deny that they are justified by their being the object of consensus or convergence among all those holding qualified moral or political viewpoints. In this chapter, I explore the surprising ways in which Mill nevertheless works to accommodate the problems and insights of the public reason tradition, and the extent to which he makes arguments that can help those working within that tradition. Mill’s utilitarian theory incorporates the claim that the demands of social life require a publicly accepted set of normative expectations to govern judgments about when one has met one’s obligations and, relatedly, about the appropriateness of blame or punishment

Mill, John Stuart

This draft entry is an overview of John Stuart Mill's moral and political philosophy, with an emphasis on his views on religion, for the Encyclopedia of the Philosophy of Religion (Wiley-Blackwell)

John Stuart Mill on Luck and Distributive Justice

My aim in this chapter is to place John Stuart Mill’s distinctive utilitarian political philosophy in the context of the debate about luck, responsibility, and equality. I hope it will reveal the extent to which his utilitarianism provides a helpful framework for synthesizing the competing claims of luck and relational egalitarianism. I attempt to show that when Mill’s distributive justice commitments are not decided by direct appeal to overall happiness, they are guided by three main public principles: an impartiality principle, a sufficiency principle, and a merit principle. The question then becomes how luck and relational considerations figure into his articulation of these public principles. I argue that relational egalitarianism is more fundamental than considerations of luck and responsibility in Mill’s thought, but I also hope to show that any fleshed out picture of Mill’s reform proposals must recognize his condemnation of the role luck plays in determining the distribution of opportunities and outcomes

More Democracy Is Not Better Democracy: Cain's Case for Reform Pluralism

This article is part of a symposium on Bruce Cain's "Democracy More or Less: America’s Political Reform Quandary." It identifies the basic normative framework of Cain's skeptical "reform pluralism" as a form of democratic instrumentalism rather than political realism, and then argues that a more optimistic instrumentalist alternative is available. The instrumentalist can accept that more democracy need not entail better democracy. But the instrumentalist account of better democracy also gives us reason to believe that significant reform efforts remain worth pursuing, for the simple reason that some of them have worked in the past

The Rise of Liberal Utilitarianism: Bentham and Mill

My aim in this chapter is to push back against the tendency to emphasize Mill’s break from Bentham rather than his debt to him. Mill made important advances on Bentham’s views, but I believe there remains a shared core to their thinking—over and above their commitment to the principle of utility itself—that has been underappreciated. Essentially, I believe that the structure of Mill’s utilitarian thought owes a great debt to Bentham even if he filled in that structure with a richer conception of human nature and developed it in more liberal directions. This commonality is revealed, in particular, in Mill’s own institutional designs and practical reform proposals in Considerations on Representative Government and related writings. If this is right, then the tendency of interpreters to highlight their differences rather than their similarities has been to the detriment of both Mill and Bentham scholarship, and so to our understanding of the rise of liberal utilitarianism

Weak convergence of the localized disturbance flow to the coalescing Brownian flow

We define a new state-space for the coalescing Brownian flow, also known as the Brownian web, on the circle. The elements of this space are families of order-preserving maps of the circle, depending continuously on two time parameters and having a certain weak flow property. The space is equipped with a complete separable metric. A larger state-space, allowing jumps in time, is also introduced, and equipped with a Skorokhod-type metric, also complete and separable. We prove that the coalescing Brownian flow is the weak limit in this larger space of a family of flows which evolve by jumps, each jump arising from a small localized disturbance of the circle. A local version of this result is also obtained, in which the weak limit law is that of the coalescing Brownian flow on the line. Our set-up is well adapted to time-reversal and our weak limit result provides a new proof of time-reversibility of the coalescing Brownian flow. We also identify a martingale associated with the coalescing Brownian flow on the circle and use this to make a direct calculation of the Laplace transform of the time to complete coalescence.Comment: Published at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/13-AOP845 in the Annals of Probability (http://www.imstat.org/aop/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org). arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:0810.021

Mill, John Stuart

This draft entry is an overview of John Stuart Mill's moral and political philosophy, with an emphasis on his views on religion, for the Encyclopedia of the Philosophy of Religion (Wiley-Blackwell)

The Arguments of On Liberty: Mill's Institutional Designs

This paper addresses the question of whether all that unites the main parts of John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty—the liberty principle, the defense of free discussion, the promotion of individuality, and the claims concerning individual competence about one’s own good—is a general concern with individual liberty, or whether we can say something more concrete about how they are related. I attempt to show that the arguments of On Liberty exemplify Mill’s institutional design approach set out in Considerations of Representative Government and related works. Mill’s approach reflects both his debt to Bentham and his own progressive development of the utilitarian tradition. The paper proceeds by setting out the elements of Mill’s institutional designs and then showing that On Liberty neatly applies them, thereby clarifying the structure of the arguments of On Liberty

Mill's Evolutionary Theory of Justice: Reflections on Persky

Joseph Persky's excellent book, The Political Economy of Progress: John Stuart Mill and Modern Radicalism, shows that J. S. Mill's support for socialism is a carefully considered element of his political and economic reform agenda. The key thought underlying Persky's argument is that Mill has an ‘evolutionary theory of justice’, according to which the set of institutions and practices that are appropriate to one state of society should give way to a new set of institutions as circumstances change and the people themselves improve. However, Persky does not spend a great deal of time discussing Mill's theory of reform, in particular the principles he believes should guide our reform efforts. Reflecting on these principles – notably his principle of impartiality or equal treatment – shows the consistency of Mill's thought over time

The Stability of Polar Oxide Surfaces

The structures of the polar surfaces of ZnO are studied using ab initio calculations and surface x-ray diffraction. The experimental and theoretical relaxations are in good agreement. The polar surfaces are shown to be very stable; the cleavage energy for the (0001)-Zn and (0001̅ )-O surfaces is 4.0J/m2 comparable to 2.32J/m2 for the most stable nonpolar (1010) surface. The surfaces are stabilized by an electronic mechanism involving the transfer of 0.17 electrons between them. This leads to 2D metallic surface states, which has implications for the use of the material in gas sensing and catalytic applications