Mill himself was educated as an adult from the age of four and he had strong beliefs that he was not raised but manufactured, he felt he was not allowed to mature but instead he was forced to mature by someone else’s action. Mill uses this point to establish that this was wrong. He believes his father should have allowed him to mature on his own so he could fully flourish; he ended up having a breakdown at the age of twenty. Mill is incredibly opposed personally to control and coercion, he feels people should be left alone to discover themselves and not moulded into something desirable by someone else.
Mill thought political correctness was a complete waste of time, molly coddling just like the state does, if you spare people the harshness of life you make them weak. A slightly Nietzsche-esque interpretation of Mill but I think it’s quite relevant, I think he doesn’t want people to feel sensitive about the way they live.
One of Mill’s teachers and if you like “Manufacturers” was Jeremy Bentham he was the founder of Utilitarianism and Mill heralds from that same school but his utilitarianism is very different it is more liberal, whereas Bentham believes in the greatest happiness of the greatest number Mill understands that this means that a minority will have to suffer and he thinks this is unacceptable so Mill’s philosophy and Bentham’s are quite at odds.
Mill thinks individuality is true happiness everyone should find their own happiness in their own way.
Mills basic principle relies on love thy neighbour do as you would be done to but my hypothesis is that Nietzsche thinks all people are savage in nature and any morality is counterproductive to their nature.
I find Freidrich Nietzsche to be a man who pulls no punches and is brutally honest in the deliverance of his views and that I think is incredible, here is a man that is denouncing a majority of the things that at the time were taken to be norms and saying increbibly radical things about how people live their lives.
Nietzsche’s goal it seems of morality is that of denouncing our entire system of morality, Nietzsche wants to take away morality and religion in the effort of freeing from these trappings of social life. His point is that every modern theorist excluding anarchists are actively trying to justify punishment, their morality to them justifies punishment but Nietzsche turns this on its head and says punishment in fact justifies morality.
Unlike Mill He believes that people are not naturally morally good so punishment is useful to teach moral goodness, The way Nietzsche sees punishment is that of a memory excercise; someone is bad and go without punishment so they do that bad thing again but if you punish them for that bad thing they remember it was bad so in turn will not do it again. It’s a little like Hegel in that if people aren’t told something is bad they won’t know, people have a right to be punished so that they learn what is wrong; If a law goes unpunished that law then ceases to be a law according Hegel.
Nietzsche’s claim is that God is dead and thus morality should change, some people confuse this with Nihilism, which is the belief that there is nothing to believe in but Nietzsche thinks that just doesn’t work, you can’t have a society that believes in nothing so rather than scrapping morality altogether he plans to create a new morality a morality that celebrates life. He calls this the Transvaluation of values; the morals and values of Christianity and other such moralities that deny life are replaced with ones that celebrate life. He basically wants people to live that time honoured and slightly tired philosophy of living life to the fullest, which today seems a little corny but it is the best way to live life. This may sound closely linked to Utilitarianism; that of the greatest happiness for the greatest number, but Nietzsche denounces Bentham’s work as “Alright for English people but not for real men” because it’s a slightly more relaxing in the arm chair with a nice warm cup of tea theory than it is a real theory about tackling life according to Nietzsche. When he says live life to the fullest he means mountain climbing and extreme sports, pushing yourself to the limits of experience, whereas Bentham is more of a comfortable theory of contentment.
Going through life trying to avoid suffering is pointless, suffering is a part of everyday life and Nietzsche view is that we should just accept it as a fact of life and move on, because trying to avoid suffering is just as good as trying to avoid life itself and what Nietzsche is saying is we have one life and we should cling to it but more importantly we should live it thoroughly.
Bibliography;
J.S Mill On Liberty in focus, edited by John Gray and G.W Smith (2003)
Mill on Liberty: a defence, second edition, John Gray (2003)
On Liberty, John Stuart Mill, Penguin classics (first published 1859)
The Genealogy of Morales, Friedrich Nietzsche (1913)
