ABSTRACT
In this chapter, starting with Mill’s revision of Jeremy Bentham’s utility principle, we explain how Mill’s view of civil society is designed to facilitate what Mill most treasured, the development of the higher mental and moral capacities. Here, Mill argues for a conception of civil society that lessens the impact of the worst features of the market economy on the lives of individuals. As players in the market setting, individuals frequently engage in destructive relationships. Often in the market setting, individuals, as they pursue their selfinterest, only seek to enhance their power and position against others. Indeed, Mill says that economic life is “the parent of envy, hatred, and all uncharitableness; it makes everyone the natural enemy of all others who cross his path, and every one’s path is constantly liable to
be crossed.”1 Mill’s discussion of the utility principle points the way to the cultural context that can promote, despite the experience of economic life, the higher capacities of persons. In this reformed and revamped culture, which a civil society is to embody, restraints can be placed on the economic arrangements, posed by the market setting, to avoid the threats to Mill’s fuller freedom.
