Plato And John Stuart Mill Analysis

John Greavu
Professor Joan Tronto
POL 1201
11 November 2013
Plato and John Stuart Mill:
Valuations of Individual Well-Being with Regards to Social Standing

In response to prompt #1:
Mill and Plato share a belief in something like “higher pleasures.” As a result, despite their great differences, both are really trying to do the same thing. Both advocate for a society that allows elites to pursue their own interests, at the expense of others. The result is that both are trying to create a society that is most beneficial to individual members of the elite.

It has been suggested that Plato and John Stuart Mill were partial to the “elite”: the most educated, wisest, and “truly” philosophizing members of society. This supposedly being at the
Plato responds to this by making an analogy to the true captain of a ship who may be called a “stargazer”, “babbler”, or a “good-for-nothing”, by those who simply do not understand the craft of navigation (Plato 181-182). Just as heads-of-state must take into account all factors – while tirelessly asserting the validity of each – in order to properly make decisions, a ship’s captain must also take into account all variables as well (the sky, stars, winds, etc.), in order to properly navigate a ship. True philosophers, true ship captains, true anything, for that matter, will often be doubted or even mocked by most of society, as most of society is ignorant of what it takes to truly master something. As true philosophers are better than anyone else at deliberately seeking and taking into account all variables of a certain problem, while always questioning any notion of certainty or dogma, they are the best candidates to make society’s most important and impactful decisions. Thus, it has been shown that Plato’s belief in philosophers is reasonable, as it is based on strong argument, and not on any sort of inherent bias. Even if true philosophers would be the best rulers, one still may argue that giving them this luxury life and power would lead to gluttony, abuse, and the pursuit of vested interests, at
He was in favor of constitutional checks and worried deeply about “tyranny of the majority” which “leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul” (Mill 9). To keep this potential tyranny in check, Mill advocates free speech, thought, and discussion, intensely. He institutes the “harm principle”, in which citizens have absolute freedom until “[their] conduct affects prejudicially the interests of others,” (Mill 83) in which then, “society has jurisdiction over it, and the question whether the general welfare will or will not be promoted by interfering with it, becomes open to discussion” (Mill 83-84). Furthermore, he thinks no opinions should ever be fully silenced under any circumstances, as silencing any opinion means silencing potential truth. Mill, maybe more so than any other political theorist in recent memory, consistently advocated for minority opinions, no matter how