John Locke vs. John Stuart Mill: Using metaethics to examine claims | Daniel Jacobson | Big Think

In meta ethics, what one tries to do is think about what makes the sorts of claims, such as the foundational claims of liberalism, true. In the liberal tradition, for instance, there are really two central strands. One is personified by John Locke; that's a natural rights tradition that finds these rights endowed to us by our creators—either given to us by God or by some sort of fact about human nature. It's like the slightly different tradition.

Then, John Stuart Mill, on the other hand, thinks that—who puts the—who defends many of the same sorts of rights but defends them on fundamentally different grounds. He defends them as moral rights because he thinks that they're the sorts of things that need to be protected in order for people to flourish. So, it's a utilitarian argument in the sense that the ultimate value here is happiness or well-being, but it's an indirect utilitarian argument because it says that we shouldn't just evaluate individual actions by trying to estimate their effect in isolation.

Rather, we should think about the most important moral rules for the governance of society that will be particularly conducive to human happiness. For Mill, he thought that those rules enshrined the kinds of rights that classical liberals focus on: freedom of conscience, freedom of association, rule of law, autonomy of your mind and body.

Another way of viewing the difference between a Lockean form of liberalism and a Millian form of liberalism is about whether it holds that certain sorts of actions are inherently right or inherently wrong. Locke thought something like that; he thought that somehow or other we could rationally determine the rightness or wrongness of certain sorts of actions. Kant was another person who found that.

For Mill, he thought that what makes actions right or wrong ultimately is their consequences for human happiness. At the same time, though, he thought that there was a crucial role for rules—for moral rules. The rightness or wrongness of actions issues from whether or not they're in accordance with the best set of moral rules, where the best set of moral rules are the ones whose adoption is going to be maximally conducive to happiness.

A central ethical question is: Are certain sorts of actions inherently right or wrong, or are they right or wrong in virtue of their consequences? What I'm suggesting in Mill's view is somewhere in between there because he thinks foundationally it's the good—it's happiness that's the ultimate value.

But he also sees moral rules not just as being heuristics, rules of thumb—things that we can apply but then throw away under pressure to the contrary. He thinks that they generate real obligations, even in extraordinary circumstances, where it seems like, say, violating someone's freedom of speech will be better in terms of its consequences because of the political contingencies of the moment.

What Mill understood was the stability of having moral rules that we respect in a very stringent way. Maybe not in catastrophe, but in ordinary conduct, we really need to guard against people wanting to make exceptions. We need to guard against people thinking especially that their own case is different from the general case because we're all biased. We're all biased in favor of ourselves, those we love, and the projects that we believe in.

One of the things that we have to do to be able to live in society with each other is to play by the same rules and implement rules that we can agree are worth playing by, even when we think that we can see that breaking one on an occasion would lead to better results.