AS163: John Stuart Mill

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors — the audio is the record.

0:00:31 Thomas: Hello, and welcome to episode 163 of Atheistically Speaking. I'm your host, Thomas Smith. Okay, well, let's see. Let's start with some personal news. If you don't care, feel free to skip, hit that 15 second button until you hear something that sounds more interesting. But anyway, as I've mentioned in various podcasts, I've been kind of between homes. We were trying to buy a house, and we had a number of weird things happen and it caused us to end. We ended our past lease and then didn't get the house in time and have been staying somewhere pretty far away from work. So it's been rough. And it's also made recording a bit weird because of my schedule and also the internet being a little difficult here.

0:01:22 Thomas: So I just want to let everyone know. I powered through it, of course, and I wanted to to keep the show strong, keep it going. And I think I did that. Um, but finally the word is should have the house probably as you're listening to this Monday, uh, Monday evening should finally get access to the house, which is within six miles of work right now. I'm about 90 miles from work. So that's a fun commute in the morning. Um so just in case anyone was wondering, I know I I referenced that at some point, and so that's the end of the story. It also will mean I'll be back to a way better studio. Right now, I've done what I can. I think it sounds okay, but there might be little weird noises and stuff I can't control currently, whereas when I move into the new house, it's going to be a very well-insulated room that I'm going to use for recording.

0:02:17 Thomas: I can't wait. I'm really excited. So, I mean, honestly, this process has taken a lot of the excitement out of it. Because it's just been hellish. I mean, look, it's been first world hellish, it hasn't been actually hellish there. There are a lot worse things going on in the world, but it's been very inconvenient. I'll put it that way. So there's that.

And then also, oh, I wanted to quickly say, very quickly, that I haven't really talked about the Republican debates that happened been somewhat recently on this show. I thought about it. I mean, I wasn't sure if I wanted to. I mean it's interesting. It's a really interesting topic. Not sure if I wanted to talk about. Me and my brother ended up talking about it on Comedy Shoeshine, which I don't know if everybody's familiar with. It's my other podcast I do with my brother where we just talk completely just comedy. It's just observations on society and weird jokes and it's completely separate from this show.

Just want to let everyone know it's very, very different from the show. But if you were interested in hearing anything about jokes about the Republican debates and maybe observations on it, you can check out Comedy Shoeshine if you'd like for that. So it should be last week and this week for the Republican Debates. And then finally, before we get going, well, actually kind of getting going here. It's been a month since Portable Atheist, so we're doing that again. I know I've said a million times I want it to be once a month, and I always let it get away from me, but then this time I thought, perfect timing.

0:04:00 Thomas: It has been a month. It is been almost exactly a month and I have a terrible internet connection, so here is something I can do without having to worry about the internet connection being bad. So, without further ado, we're going to do The Portable Atheist, and today, and this week, in this installment, we are going to be discussing John Stuart Mill and particularly his autobiography, actually. We're not studying any of his actual works of philosophy or economics or utilitarianism, all that stuff. This is from his autobiography, and it's sort of an accounting of how and why he believes what he believes and his sort of his teaching, his moral teaching that he received growing up.

0:04:47 Thomas: And so as is the norm with my Portable Atheist segments, I didn't want to just talk blandly about the reading. I wanted to get in depth, do some research. So it's almost like I'm really enjoying these because they're almost like providing a profile and a biography of sorts of, you know, famous atheist thinkers throughout the past. So it's been really fun. So it is almost two components. It is like we will discuss the reading, but I also have really enjoyed researching these people and providing a bit of a biography. Now, John Stuart Mill is someone I am familiar with, or I was familiar with from a college philosophy course that I took. I remembered him and I remembered that he underwent a very, very rigorous academic training at a very young age.

0:05:36 Thomas: So let's go into it. John Stuart Mill was born near London, 1806. He lived, by the way, until 1873. His father was James Mill. And one of the most interesting things like I referenced about John Stuart Mill was that his father, with the help of Jeremy Bentham, raised him in an extremely academically rigorous fashion. He was almost forced into a prodigy. It's kind of, he was like, Like they decided they wanted him to be a genius and a prodigy at a very young age. So they sort of formed a game plan as to what they would need to do to make that happen. I'm sort of surprised this doesn't happen more often. Maybe it's most parents are just so tired by the end of the day from working.

0:06:25 Thomas: They're like, well, I could force my kid to learn Latin, Greek, Euclid, and history, poetry, just everything. I could do all that, have my child learn all that stuff by the age of eight, or I don't know, I could just watch some TV and, you know, pretty exhausted. So I think I'll go with the latter option. That's probably why. Or maybe actually a lot of people do try this, but it's just, it doesn't always work out because maybe in addition to this willpower and this elbow grease, maybe you also need some good genetics to be able to receive that information at that young of an age, like John Stuart Mill did. And retain it and use it. So, who knows? I think it's kind of interesting, but it's also interesting to think about the morality of inflicting this kind of upbringing on a child.

0:07:16 Thomas: At the age of three, he was studying Greek and just all this stuff. He was reading unbelievable amounts of stuff sort of forcefully and was also kept from other children of his age. He was only allowed to sort of hang out with his siblings. So it's interesting, especially because the perpetrators of this education were, among other things, moral philosophers. So Jeremy Bentham and James Mill were sort of moral philosophers involving utilitarianism, and that's ultimately the torch that John Stuart Mill picked up. Uh, but, uh, it's interesting that they were, they, they saw fit to inflict this on John Stuart Mill.

0:08:06 Thomas: Now, maybe ultimately it was good because he, uh, John got through it okay and, um, ended up being a great thinker and contributed a lot to society. But as you'll see, there were some difficulties there. So, but first I want to talk about Jeremy Bentham. So this guy was actually pretty damn cool. I don't know if you're familiar, but here's some cool facts about him. He was traditionally thought of as the father of utilitarianism. As it turns out, he probably wasn't really the father of it, but he definitely was someone who popularized it and did enough with it that he is looked at as sort of the father of it. But he was also one of the earliest proponents of animal rights.

0:08:52 Thomas: He made an argument that you've probably heard in some form. He said that the basis on which rights are granted should not be the capacity to reason, because by that logic, you know, infants and certain impaired adults would fail that test. He argued the capacity to suffer is what should really ground rights. And therefore, he was against any sort of needless cruelty to animals or any animal experimentation that didn't have some very tangible benefit. He thought it was okay for us to kill animals to eat them as long as we did so in a humane, or I don't know if that's a good word, but in a fashion that caused as little suffering as possible. But I think that's really cool.

0:09:38 Thomas: I mean, that's a long time ago for someone to be pro-animal rights. He also used the same line of reasoning to argue against slavery, which again was, I guess, something of a rarity back then. Oh, here's another. This guy was so interesting. This is, again, this is Jeremy Bentham. Sorry. I know I'm talking about John Stuart Mill, but Jeremy Bentham was very key in his upbringing. And I came across all these things about him and I thought it was so interesting. He wrote what some people think is the first essay or was the first essay advocating the decriminalization of homosexual acts in England. So the only thing with one caveat, he was too scared to publish it during his lifetime.

0:10:25 Thomas: And And can you really blame him? Because, you know, sodomy and homosexuality was punished by hanging at that time. So to publish something like that would be quite controversial. And I could understand him being, you know, reticent to do so. But he wrote it in 1785 and it wasn't published until 1931. So that's a very long time. But he said he couldn't, in the essay, he said but he couldn't find any justification under the principle of utility, which again, that was his whole thing. He argued for utilitarianism, that the greatest good for the greatest number of people is essentially what morality should be based on. And as a result of that philosophy, he said, I don't understand why we are punishing these so-called crimes.

0:11:13 Thomas: He called these crimes irregularities of the venereal appetite, which is a good description. They're just things that aren't the norm, basically. You know, people's proclivities that aren't what we consider normal, that's all they are. They're just things that arenít, you know, lots of people have things that aren't what we considered normal and there's no reason to punish people for them. But yeah, it was punished by hanging at the time. So, that's really scary. But I thought that was so cool. Okay, a couple more things.

0:11:44 Thomas: He also spoke for complete equality between the sexes. So he was was really progressive. He was a very progressive guy for his time. And I think he was a great thinker for John Stuart Mill to have modeled himself after. Oh, and then of course, Jeremy Bentham, a lot of people probably know this if you've had any philosophy or whatever, but he was the guy who donated his body to be dissected after death. And he wanted his skeleton and his head to be made into kind of like a little, I guess, a display of his actual head. Really creepy, but at least in a cool science-y way. It turned out the mummification of his head didn't work out because, I don't know, it turns out people just aren't very practiced in mummifications, so it looked horrible.

0:12:35 Thomas: So they actually used a wax, you know, molding of his hair, but with some of his real hair. But his skeleton was in an outfit and stuffed and stuff. And it's still on display at University College London ever since then. So that's kind of funny. But he's that guy. I don't know if you've heard of that. So back to John Stuart Mill, who is the focus. He was incredibly well-read by a very young age. Like I mentioned, Bentham and James Mill essentially engineered him to be, they wanted him to the next proponent of utilitarianism. They were engineering a genius to carry on their torch of utilitarianism and to move it forward. So again, that seems kind of unethical. I mean, let's just, sorry for the sidebar, but let's just think about utilitarianismo.

0:13:26 Thomas: If we lived in a world where parents did this, where they treated their kids as sort of means to an end, which is advancing their own philosophical, you know, pet philosophical theories, if they treated them in that way, that would be, I don't think, a good outcome. I think that would be negative under utilitarianism. However, I think it's interesting. I'm not sure how they thought of it, and I'm not sure where the wording comes from or whatever, but if it's true that they engineered him to be that, I would find that to be unethical. But if they phrased it as, well, we, or rather James Mill, if he said, I want my son to be a genius, I think he's going to accomplish great things, if I believe utilitarianism to be the correct moral theory, if he goes down that road, he'll develop it, or maybe he won't.

0:14:21 Thomas: If they phrased it more like that, then it'd be a different story. But I think the idea of engineering your kids to take on your philosophical legacy just seems a little unethical to me. So that's always been kind of weird, like a contradiction to me, and then famously, this is something, again, people likely know, but at the age of 20, John Stuart Mill had some sort of breakdown, which he believed to be a result of this extreme academic pressure he was put under. So he went 20 years or maybe 17 years, I guess, if it started at the age of three, of just nonstop study. And according to his own writings, he believed that his capacity for emotion had been underdeveloped because of his training.

0:15:08 Thomas: But then here's the weird thing. I find this weird. So his theory was that he had all this depression, sort of a breakdown at age 20, couldn't do anything, couldn't work. But he says in his own words, he says that Wordsworth's poetry, as well as someone else's, I think, was what cured him of it, because it allowed him to open up his emotions more that he thought were underdeveloped, and then he eventually pulled through his depression and and was able to continue working. And this story is so weird to me. I find it, as a skeptical person, I find it to be a bit extraordinary. I find find it to be a little too convenient. It's like a little too concise. Well, I was raised with under these horrendous conditions, essentially. And then I felt like my emotion was underdeveloped.

0:15:55 Thomas: And I read some poetry, and then I was fine. I mean, maybe, maybe that's not exactly how he told it. But I've always found this to be little unbelievable. I wonder, I would be curious to hear other accounts of his personality and in his relationships, because I do think that this, the breakdown could very well have been because of his upbringing. And I think that that can have, I mean, if you're not allowed to socialize, if You're always studying, I Mean, that could have profound effects on your ability to form relationships. So I would be curious about his relationships. It turns out that he did eventually find a wife. He started kind of an affair with a married woman that his father, father, James Mill, really disapproved of.

0:16:41 Thomas: But James Mill also, his son called him Epicurean about pleasure. He believed he shouldn't be pursuing pleasure, he should just be pursuing work and trying to make society better. So, I mean, good qualities, but maybe not something you'd want in a father, and definitely could have had an impact. But John Stuart Mill said his wife was a huge influence on him, and he was inconsolable when she died in 1858. And like Jeremy Bentham, he made equal rights for women a focus of his political career. John Stuart Mill held political office, and it wasn't terribly successful at it, but that was one of the reasons. He wanted equal rights, the vote for women, and that made him incredibly unpopular.

0:17:29 Thomas: Uh, he anyway, John Stuart Mill wrote a number of interesting works, and we'll talk about those at another time, maybe, or maybe we won't. But the, oh, one last interesting fact, since I found this very fascinating, since John Stuart Mill was a non-conformist who refused to subscribe to the 39 articles of the Church of England, he was not eligible to study at the University of Oxford or of Cambridge. So that's pretty rough. So he was a brilliant kid, but he couldn't go to Oxford or Cambridge because he refused to ascribe to the official dogma of the Church of England. And I didn't know that existed. And I also wonder why he didn't just fake it.

0:18:16 Thomas: Maybe he didn't view those colleges as that crucial. Ultimately, I think he went to that College of London or or something, I forget. But anyway, isn't that weird? He couldn't go to Oxford or Cambridge because of that, for that reason. So, okay, so now let's get to today's reading. That's my biography, my brief profile of a famous, well, a couple of famous atheist thinkers, particularly John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham, and a little bit James Mill. Now, John Stuart Mill is actually going to talk a bit more about his father, so that'll give you more info about that. So the reading is Moral Influences in Early Youth, My Father's Character and Opinions. So this must be a chapter of his autobiography.

0:19:04 Thomas: And as usual, I want to read Hitch in his own words talking about this. The son of another Scotsman, the philosopher James Mill, John Stuart Mill, 1806 to 1873, is best remembered for the terrifying precocity of his education at the hands of his distinguished parent, and of other great contemporaries such as David Ricardo and Jeremy Bentham, whose theory of the greatest happiness for the greatest number he was to go on to refine. Mill's political career was distinguished by firm opposition to slavery and by advocacy of the rights of women. Even this great and brave Victorian was afraid to affirm his irreligious views in public. His three essays on the subject, including a brilliant critique of the notion of immortality, were not published until after his death.

0:19:51 Thomas: By a nice coincidence, he was a godfather to Bertrand Russell. Oh yeah, that's a very interesting thing I saw too. How cool is that? Godfather to Bertrand Russell. So very impressive kind of family lines, or not really family, but sort of family minds there of philosophers. Okay, so time to get into it. Paragraph one is short and actually provides a good precursor of what we're going to read. So, its entirety: "In my education, as in that of everyone, the moral influences which are so much more important than all others are also the most complicated and the most difficult to specify with any approach to completeness. Without attempting the hopeless task of detailing the circumstances by which, in this respect, my early character may have been shaped, I shall confine myself to a few leading points which form an indispensable part of any true account of my education."

0:20:47 Thomas: So he's pointing out the difficulties of pinpointing all your influences and what shaped your thinking, but he says he's going to try to do a few, and so that sets up the reading. So the next paragraph, he talks about his father's lack of religious belief. This is kind of interesting. So although James Mill, again, James is the father, John Stuart Mill the son, James Mill was brought up a Presbyterian, and I think he actually became became ordained at some point, but he eventually gave that up. His studies led him to reject Revelation. In particular, an argument Mill calls Butler's analogy, written by Joseph Butler, who was an apologist at that time, or a little bit before that time I guess, caused James Mill to remain a Christian for quite some time.

0:21:33 Thomas: So this is somewhat nuanced here in reading through this. Without getting too off topic, because I read a bit of Butler's thing, but I couldn't find a good summary of it, so I was trying to pinpoint it. But anyway, I didn't want to get too off topic with another reading. But essentially, Butler's argument targeted believers who were more attracted to deism, and it pretty much said the crux or the target of the argument, the goal of the argument was to say it's more likely that there would be a personal God than a detached God. So not, you know, notwithstanding how he proved that or sought to prove that, I don't know, I couldn't really find it without reading the entire thing, which I didn't. I almost did, actually.

0:22:20 Thomas: I was just read, found that entire argument. But then I was like, I'm getting a little too into the inception here. It really is like inception. I do. I'm reading one thing and I want to delve into another thing and then another thing. But I resisted this temptation to try to keep this on topic. But anyway, this is interesting because his father, James Mill, had identified problems with Christianity and problems with the concept of God. But what actually kept him a Christian was this argument from this guy, again, Butler, who it made him think, well, I can't really go to deism. Deism doesn't really make sense based on this guy. So I guess I'll stay a Christian because I still believe in something.

0:23:08 Thomas: But, ultimately, when James Mill was overcome by the problems with Christianity, he leapt straight from Christianity to some level of atheism. So, he didn't really think there was any, you know, bastion of deism to stay in because of this argument. So here's a good quote, finding therefore no halting place in deism, he remained in a state of perplexity until doubtless after many struggles, he yield to the conviction that concerning the origin of things, nothing, whatever can be known. This is the only correct statement of his opinion for dogmatic atheism. He looked upon as absurd as most of those whom the world has considered atheists have always done. That's a, that's an interesting quote right there. This seems to suggest that Mill, both Mills I think, thought that every atheist of their day, or most every atheist, believed nothing could be known about our origin.

0:24:05 Thomas: So it wasn't like atheists... So John Stuart Mill is saying atheists, it's a caricature of atheists to say that they firmly believe, I know that there is no God. According to John Stuart Miller, most atheists of the day actually just think, well, we can't know anything. And this goes into a debate that I hear a lot about the definition of atheism. In particular, I know Blake Junta and other, I mean, people have very differing views on this. It seems as though John Stuart Mill's view was these people thought you couldn't know nothing about the origin of the universe, and that makes you an atheist. And I agree. I think that effectively makes you Antheist. If you say, no, we cannot know, you're not a theist. I mean, you don't believe those claims.

0:24:50 Thomas: But anyway, there's debate to be had there. But one thing I do find interesting is I wonder if Mill were around today, what he would make of recent advances in physics and biology and all that. Would he still think dogmatic atheism, as he calls it, is absurd? I don't know. I'm not sure. I wonder if he would have been convinced that, oh, wait a minute, maybe we can know some things. Now, Now, ultimately, we may still never be able to know what's behind our universe or what's... We may never beable to know, but I wonder if given, you know, the research of astrophysics and cosmology, which is really exciting, I wonder if he would have changed his tune.

But anyway, he Says next that James Mill, his father's atheism or disbelief, was actually more to do with morality than it was with reason and logic, and that people sort of mistakenly assumed it was a very cold, logical thing. But this is fascinating. So here's a quote. He found it impossible to believe that a world so full of evil was the work of an author combining infinite power with perfect goodness and righteousness. His intellect spurned the subtleties by which men attempt to blind themselves to this open contradiction. Contradiction. This reminds me of the conversation I just had with Justin Schieber. It's sort of a argument from evil kind of thing.

0:26:20 Thomas: I feel this exact same way. No amount of apologetics or logicking could convince me that an all-knowing, benevolent God would allow the amount of suffering and evil that there is in the world. It is just, for me, it is completely incompatible. And I see, similarly to the Mills here, the Mill family, I see these attempts of people to reconcile this as they're just blind. I mean, they just want to believe in God, and so they're going to try to form all these ways to reconcile it. But it really is irreconcilable. So Mill also says that his father was surprised that more people didn't ascribe to the idea that there's good and evil openly struggling against each other. And that's what explains the suffering in the world.

0:27:07 Thomas: He says James Mill didn't actually believe this. He just thought it would be an interesting hypothesis and was surprised more people didn't believe it or at least look into it. Here's another interesting quote. He looked upon it as the greatest enemy of morality, first by setting up fictitious excellencies, belief in creeds, devotional feelings and ceremonies not connected with the good of of humankind, and causing these to be accepted as substitutes for genuine virtues, but above all, by radically vitiating the standard of morals, making it consist in doing the will of a being, that's why I thought this quote was interesting, making consistent doing the will of being on whom it lavishes indeed all the phrases of adulation, but whom in sober truth it depicts as eminently hateful. And that was just sort of a, when I read that, it stuck out to me is like, yeah, why would what's good be doing what someone says?

0:28:01 Thomas: Why would that ever be a good? You know, just thinking conceptually about the universe. You know? If I were a god and I were designing it, why Would you ever? What's good should be what, you know, maybe if I were god, or if god were real, god would give us the ability to determine what's god and then do that. Well, this is already so backward because I don't believe that god would ever create anything. But if I ignore that, if I think, okay, God's going to create people for some reason, just telling them to do stuff and then that's the measure of good, it really doesn't make sense. And I thought this was a good quote that pointed that out. So James Mill also pointed out that gods are universally represented as wicked, and that the most perfect conception of wickedness ended up being called God, and then, you know, people worship that God.

0:28:52 Thomas: And he cites an example that we all know, why would a being with infallible foreknowledge create a place like hell? Mill expresses amazement that so many people could be capable of believing such a contradictory thing as a perfect creator of hell. He predicts that someday Christians will no longer believe in hell. And this is interesting. He made that prediction and I think he's right. This is John Stuart Mill making this prediction, not James Mill. John Stuart mill said something like, I didn't pick the exact quote, but he said he doesn't think Christians will always believe in this ridiculous thing, this literal hell. I think He's right because no Christians I ever have on the show, I mean who knows, maybe people secretly believe stuff that they don't want to talk about.

0:29:39 Thomas: But Christians that I have on the show almost never say they believe in hell. They always say, "Oh, well, that's just, you know, the absence of God, not really torment or whatever." Granted, these people exist, you know, people who believe in that literal fire and brimstone hell, they exist. But I really think it's not the popular conception, or at least it's trending downward. So maybe John Stuart Mill was right when he said that. Let's see. He also said Mill says that people worship their own ideals of excellence so they formed like this hateful being and it's really true that gods throughout history have been portrayed as just like terrible, you know, they're like, it's almost like people have needed something to be afraid of, or, or maybe, and this is just me, uh, guessing, maybe in primitive society being scary and being fearful and being like, like, you know, someone who could win battles.

0:30:35 Thomas: Maybe that's something that people worshipped. I mean, that's a quality that people thought, oh, this is a, I don't know if they would say godly, but this is, uh, a, a very strong quality. Like those are the people who have success. Those are people I'm scared of. I'll, I'll do what they say. It's like they formed that into an ideal. And then John Stuart Mill says they, they sort of, we formed this into an idea. And then people worship their own ideals of excellence and not the actual creator that, you know, he's been talking about, the one that would, you know, a perfect creator would create a hell and all that. People don't actually worship that God, he doesn't think. He thinks that worship has always just more been a question of blind tradition than of actual reason. So that's the end of that particular section.

0:31:22 Thomas: And actually, I'm just looking and the time has flown by. So I think that'll be a good place to pause. Pause, we'll go ahead and tackle this in two parts because there's quite a bit left and there's no way I'm going to finish at one. And also these readings tend to be really dense, so I don't want to do like a really long episode of just dense thought because I think people might get bored and fall asleep. So we'll call it there for now. And then I'll finish on Thursday with part two of John Stuart Mill and his little autobiography and his discussion of, you know, what he thinks influenced his thinking. Oh, one thing I was going to say, how fascinating would it have been to be John Stuart Mill? And it's like James Mill was, he's not as famous now because I don't think much of what he did withstood the test of time, but he was a prominent thinker at the time.

0:32:14 Thomas: And how interesting would it be to be, you know, discussing like, well, here's what my father thought. And, you Know, here we discussed this. It's like having those discussions. I mean, Maybe I'm projecting, but it would have been cool if I had a dad who was like a prominent thinker to discuss things with, argue with, and then later report like, well, here's what he thought. Here's what I thought and have anyone care. It's not really the most interesting thing to talk about usually. Like, well here's What My Dad Thinks. But in the case of John Stuart Mill, it was kind of interesting. So, we'll call it there for this installment of the Portable Atheist, part one of this installment, and then we will finish it on Thursday.

0:33:01 Thomas: Thank you for joining me. Feel free to contact me, Facebook, AtheisticallySpeaking, or AtheisticallySpeaking.com, or, you know, Gmail, so it's AtheisticallySpeaking at Gmail.com. And just give me any thoughts you have at any time. I have a lot, actually, that I read all of them, by the way. I have a lot I need to respond to. Some people I want to have on the show, some people I want to talk with that I haven't quite gotten to, like I said, because of this weird schedule and house thing. But I'm very much going to be back with a vengeance in terms of scheduling with people. And oh, the parent panel, too. I forgot to mention that. I'm setting up the parent panel part two, and it's actually been a while since I sought people for that. I think I have all the people I need, but it's just a question of I did not want to do the parent panel with my current internet connection because I just think managing multiple connections, there's no way.

0:33:58 Thomas: So I was putting that off. I forget if I announced that or not. Putting that off for a little bit until my internet's all set up and it'll be super fast and I will have the confidence to have that episode. So that'll be later. OK, well, enough for me today. I will see you on Thursday with the remainder of John Stuart Mill.