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Notes on Harriet Taylor Mill, The Enfranchisement of Women
[The essay first appeared in the Westminster Review (1851), then in 1868 in a pamphlet under her name, and in John Stuart Mill’s Dissertations and Discussions in 1875. After some confusion as to its authorship, J. S. Mill attributed the essay to Harriet Taylor (1807–1858). Mill elaborated […]

Notes on J. S. Mill, The Subjection of Women, chapter 1
[The “feeling” Mill addresses is that the legal subordination of women is somehow justified.]
…So long as opinion is strongly rooted in the feelings, it gains rather than loses instability by having a preponderating weight of argument against it. For if it were accepted as a […]

Notes on J. S. Mill, The Subjection of Women, chapter 4
[All emphasis in the quoted passages is added by me.]
The self-worship of the monarch, or of the feudal superior, is matched by the self-worship of the male. Human beings do not grow up from childhood in the possession of unearned distinctions, without pluming themselves upon […]

Notes on Mill, On Liberty, chapter 5
Self-sale into slavery
Not only persons are not held to engagements which violate the rights of third parties, but it is sometimes considered a sufficient reason for releasing them from an engagement, that it is injurious to themselves. In this and most other civilized countries, for example, an engagement by […]

The limits of liberalism and pornography: notes on Lorenne M. G. Clark

Notes on Jean Hampton’s moral educationist theory of punishment

No one can be a great thinker who does not recognise, that as a thinker it is his first duty to follow his intellect to whatever conclusions it may lead. [Mill, On Liberty, chapter II, par. 20.]
I think of Socrates and Otto Weininger, the only two philosophers I know of whose deaths were a direct […]

Mill and I gloss Bentham’s dictum, “everybody to count for one, nobody for more than one”:
All persons are deemed to have a right to equality of treatment, except when some recognized social expediency requires the reverse. And hence all social inequalities which have ceased to be considered expedient, assume the character not of simple inexpediency, […]

The important rank, among human evils and wrongs, of the disappointment of expectation, is shown in the fact that it constitutes the principal criminality of two such highly immoral acts as a breach of friendship and a breach of promise. Few hurts which human beings can sustain are greater, and none wound more, than when […]

Is, then, the difference between the just and the Expedient a merely imaginary distinction? Have mankind been under a delusion in thinking that justice is a more sacred thing than policy, and that the latter ought only to be listened to after the former has been satisfied? By no means. The exposition we have given […]