[PDF] Rethinking Mill’s Ethics: Character and Aesthetic Education

Discussion of John Stuart Mill’s ethics has been dominated by concern with right and wrong action as determined by the principle of utility. His substantive ethical positions about the kinds of lives we should lead and the kinds of dispositions we should strive to develop have been of interest only incidentally – partly because much of what Mill wrote about these things appears somewhat vague to the modern reader. Colin Heydt’s book unearths the rich context of moral and socio-political debate that Mill did not have to make explicit to his Victorian readers, in order to enrich the philosophical analysis of his ethics and to show a famous and misunderstood moralist in a new light. Heydt investigates Mill’s conception of character by focusing on aesthetic education, i.e. the cultivation of dispositions of feeling and imagination. Aesthetic education is important because it occupies a place alongside intellectual and moral culture as one of the three forms of character development, of which it is the least studied; it is crucial for comprehending the relation of Mill’s views to those of his teachers (Bentham and James Mill) and to those of prominent intellectuals in the period (Coleridge, Carlyle, Comte, Whewell, Macaulay, Southey, etc.); and most significantly, close attention to the ideals of aesthetic education and the means whereby those ideals get realized provides the reader with a vivid portrait of the good life as Mill sees it.