Born in 1806, John Stuart Mill was a prodigy: at six he had had written a history of Rome and by eight he was reading both Plato and Sophocles in the original Greek. Open-minded and magnanimous, in early adulthood John Stuart Mills was far ahead of his time, espousing just about every progressive ideal, from total sexual equality, through slave emancipation and votes for the working classes, to the absolute right to contraception. In 'Utilitarianism', Mill argues for the rightness of this philosophy, which is based on the principle that "actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness", and originates from the social nature of humanity. In five chapters he clearly sets forth a more nuanced and complex idea of this important moral and social theory.
Born in 1806, John Stuart Mill was a prodigy: at six he had had written a history of Rome and by eight he was reading both Plato and Sophocles in the original Greek. Open-minded and magnanimous, in early adulthood John Stuart Mills was far ahead of his time, espousing just about every progressive ideal, from total sexual equality, through slave emancipation and votes for the working classes, to the absolute right to contraception. In 'Utilitarianism', Mill argues for the rightness of this philosophy, which is based on the principle that "actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness", and originates from the social nature of humanity. In five chapters he clearly sets forth a more nuanced and complex idea of this important moral and social theory.
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John Stuart Mill (20 May 1806 - 7 May 1873) was an English philosopher, political economist, politician and civil servant. One of the most influential thinkers in the history of classical liberalism, he contributed widely to social theory, political theory, and political economy. Dubbed "the most influential English-speaking philosopher of the nineteenth century" by the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy,[11] he conceived of liberty as justifying the freedom of the individual in opposition to unlimited state and social control.[12]Mill was a proponent of utilitarianism, an ethical theory developed by his predecessor Jeremy Bentham. He contributed to the investigation of scientific methodology, though his knowledge of the topic was based on the writings of others, notably William Whewell, John Herschel, and Auguste Comte, and research carried out for Mill by Alexander Bain. He engaged in written debate with Whewell.[13]A member of the Liberal Party and author of the early feminist work The Subjection of Women, Mill was also the second member of Parliament to call for women's suffrage after Henry Hunt in 1832
