John Stuart Mill

But mostly, thanks to you for being here, because you make this special and worthwhile for me each and every day.

The Money Life quote of the day comes from John Stuart Mill, who said, he who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that.

Yeah, you want to get out and learn a bunch of stuff.

It's what I'll be doing at Schwab.

On the 17th of April 1866, an important debate on Britain's national debt took place in Parliament.

John Stuart Mill, who was an MP at the time, had a special interest in the discussion.

The country had admittedly demonstrated impressive rates of growth, but many were sceptical that this growth could be sustained.

One of the central questions in this debate was the availability of the natural resources that had made growth possible.

And at the heart of the discussion was a single resource on which all industrial activity depended – coal.

The air in the chamber was damp and light stench dwarfed inside from the polluted thames, despite the chloride-soaked curtains that were hanged to dull the smell.

When his turn came to speak, the MP John Stuart Mill rose and presented those gathered with a book by a young economist named Jevons.

In his book, The Coal Question, Mill declared, Jevons had analysed the problem of coal availability with great thoroughness, and Parliament ought to pay close attention.

Liberalism is a progressive idea, certainly from its inception.

Like if you, you know, Mill is... explicit about this he wants to build a whole philosophy and a political philosophy based on the idea that humans are inherently progressive beings that's his phrase not mine so he's trying to set up this is really a post-enlightenment idea you know arguably the enlightenment is just that's the beginning of progressive politics in the way we understand it now and everything since has been an attempt at that um but so liberalism is progressive in that way But it gets complicated because along the way, it ends up in a marriage with conservatism, conservatism having been its enemy early on.

And then I think we're now witnessing the throes of a divorce between conservatism and liberalism.

So you end up in the really existing world, the world we experience day to day.

You know, then it becomes one of these questions of how do you interpret that history? And the liberals would say, or some liberals would say, no, no, liberalism is neutral on the question of religion.

It just wants religion to be something that you choose.

And they would point even to things like, you know, Mill... emphasizing the importance of virtue and even of relationality and these sorts of things, not necessarily in On Liberty, but in others of his writings.

And the post-liberals make an argument, which I don't know the liberals are fully reckoned with, which is, yeah, but the direction of travel you've set is one of shaking all these things off and diluting them.

My approach is the utilitarian way.

You know, John, good old John Stuart Mill and utilitarianism, the greatest good for the greatest number.

You're always going to have people on the fringe who politically on any slice of pie, they're always going to have a fringe segment who find something wrong with the majority viewpoint.

and you can't cater or pander to everybody you can't pander to the to the minority um so do i go out of my way to offend people no do i apologize if you're offended um it's circumstantial and contextual let's let's discuss why you're offended and if you're still offended by the time we're done with the conversation then i'll gracefully apologize for your offense You know, but this idea that so am I anti woke? Yes.

Um, I mean, I don't, I mean, I think we all can fit in that category.

Now it's just whether some of them were more vividly colorful or more, you know, I, I don't necessarily think that you can like, like John Stuart Mills would rate the pleasures, you know, that, um, um, You know, one pleasure might be to eat cupcakes, you know, and that ultimately may not be gratifying for you in the long run.

And so maybe there are other pleasures like your idea of being healthier in the long run might not weigh that other pleasure, right? Right.

And so, I mean, it's a horrible example.

It's enjoyable.

And so I assign them to read John Stuart Mill utilitarianism excerpts.

And I put up quotations on the projector and we work through them together in class.

And we look at, you know, how the sentence is put together.