ABSTRACT
While it again appears that Mill reserves a central role for consciousness of human connection here, such is not in fact the case. Sympathy and benevolence may be natural dispositions for Mill, but he does not anchor them in our objective need for one another. While he assigns important value to human interconnection, he does not see human interconnection as the ground of possibility for individual conceptions of the good. Rather, individuals naturally develop conflicting accounts of the good that must then be resolved through disinterested reflection. Social feelings are not spontaneous feelings of connection deriving from our interdependence buried under alienated social conditions and forms of consciousness but dispositions adopted as a result of abstract reflection on the constraints other people’s conception of the good impose on our own. Mill, like Hobbes and Kant, thus overlooks our shared organic nature as the material ground for a universal conception of the good.
