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Mill on the Harm in Not Voting

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 May 2010

D. G. BROWN
D. G. BROWN*
Affiliation:
University of British Columbiadonbrown@interchange.ubc.ca
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Abstract

Christopher Miles Coope offers a letter, drafted by Helen Taylor but certified by Mill, in which Mill asserts the duty to vote, as evidence that he could not have regarded harmfulness to others as a necessary condition of moral wrongness. But it is clear that Mill regarded the duty to vote as one of imperfect obligation, and the wrongness of not fulfilling it as a matter roughly of not doing enough, in this case not doing one's fair share. He has room for the common-sense harmlessness of staying at home. At the same time he grounds political duties in the harmfulness of neglecting the power of legislation and in the possibility, consistently maintained, that one can harm by inaction. Mill's view, central to his relation between morality and liberty, remains at work here, while also suggesting reflections on the peculiarity of his conception of harm.

Type
Research Article
Information
Utilitas , Volume 22 , Issue 2 , June 2010 , pp. 126 - 133
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2010

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References

1 Coope, Christopher Miles, ‘Was Mill a Utilitarian?’, Utilitas 10.1 (1998), pp. 33–67CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 Alan Ryan, ‘John Stuart Mill's Art of Living’, The Listener, 21 October 1965, pp. 620–2.

3 I have mined this vein of thought in ‘Mill's Criterion of Wrong Conduct’, Dialogue 21.1 (1982), pp. 27–44, and ‘Millian Liberalism and Colonial Oppression’, Canadian Journal of Philosophy, suppl. vol. 25 (1999), Civilization and Oppression, ed. Catherine Wilson, pp. 79–97.

4 John Stuart Mill, Later Letters, 1848–1873, ed. Francis E. Mineka and Dwight N. Lindley, Collected Works, vol. XVI (Toronto, 1972), Letter 1167, pp. 1339–41, 29 December 1867.

5 Mill, Later Letters, vol. XVI, Letter 1186, p. 1359, 3 February 1868.

6 The issue being the interpretation of Mill, there is no need to entertain subtle doubts about whether the conduct is actually harmless. I see no reason to suppose that Mill had views on such intricate questions as Parfit, Derek, for example, explores in ‘Five Mistakes in Moral Mathematics’, Reasons and Persons (Oxford, 1986), pp. 67–86CrossRefGoogle Scholar. And Mill does say in a letter to John Venn of 14 April 1872 (Later Letters vol. XVII, Letter 1717A, p. 1881): ‘I agree with you that the right way of testing actions by their consequences, is to test them by the natural consequences of the particular action, and not by those which would follow if every one did the same.’ Compare my ‘Mill's Act-Utilitarianism’, Philosophical Quarterly 24 (1974), pp. 67–8.

7 Mill, Essays on Ethics, Religion, and Society, ed. J. M. Robson, Collected Works vol. X (Toronto, 1969), p. 247 (paragraph 15 of Utilitarianism, ch. V).

8 For example in the paper cited by Coope and those cited in n. 3 above.

9 Mill, Essays on Politics and Society, ed. J. M. Robson, Collected Works, vol. XVIII (Toronto, 1977), pp. 224–5 (paragraph 11 of On Liberty, ch. I).

10 I do not find that any version of the distinction known to me, including Kant's, is free from large indeterminacies in the relation between the overall requirement and the decisions on particular occasions. Anyone who is aware of a satisfactory account would oblige me by directing me to it. One thing that is clear is that Mill is willing to rely on such notions as a duty to the public, an obligation to one's society, or a duty to humankind, any of which would require for their fulfillment a wide use of discretion.

11 The category of ‘defeaters’ and the role of permissive defeaters in ordinary morality are identified by Stephen Darwall, ‘Abolishing Morality’, Synthese 72 (1987), pp. 71–89 (pp. 78–81). Phillip Montague, in section III. 2, ‘Moral Presumptions and Their Defeaters’, of his In the Interests of Others (Dordrecht, 1992), refers to Darwall, Nozick, and Rawls, and clearly agrees that permissive defeaters merit further study.

12 An extended inquiry into deontological tendencies in Mill's moral theory is in preparation.

13 This note is much indebted to Alister Browne. He raised pointed questions about the first draft, and discussion with him about related interests of his shaped much of the argument. My thanks also to Martin Meissner and Richard Sikora for their comments.