ABSTRACT
The first move is to establish exactly what John Stuart Mill’s ideal of marriage is. The notion of perfectibility, and its role in Mill’s philosophical thought, may be approached via a discussion of two related problems –– the problem of two Mills, and the problem of the interpretation of Mill’s account of freedom. If the argument against legal inequality is central to his political thought, the argument for the ideal of marriage as a marriage of true minds is central to his moral thought and is the inevitable consequence of pursuing that thought to its logical conclusion. There is, however, no suggestion that Mill’s positive thesis about marriage coheres with the moral doctrines he expounds elsewhere. Mill’s commitment to the possibility of human development and self-improvement is not an unmixed blessing. So from the belief in human development nothing follows about conformity or uniformity.
