Get 20M+ Full-Text Papers For Less Than $1.50/day. Start a 14-Day Trial for You or Your Team.

Learn More →

From the State of Nature to Evolution in John Stuart Mill

From the State of Nature to Evolution in John Stuart Mill John Stuart Mill’s familiar ideas, such as the harm principle, the emphasis on the liberty of thought and discussion, and the extension of politics into the family and education, are all linked to a developmental and open–ended view of nature. To ground this perception of nature, Mill makes use of contemporary notions of evolution. For Mill, nature encompasses human civilisation and its higher products such as morality and justice. However, Mill recognises no benevolent guiding hand in the physical world, which the idea of evolution enables him to understand as self–propelled. Destruction and pain are part of the overall developmental movement, so that human lives always stand the danger of being crushed by nature. To minimise such risks, humans should use the distinctive features of their species, such as reason and morality, thus continuing nature while transforming it. http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Australian Journal of Politics and History Wiley

From the State of Nature to Evolution in John Stuart Mill

Loading next page...
 
/lp/wiley/from-the-state-of-nature-to-evolution-in-john-stuart-mill-vAXX1rqzC8

References (0)

References for this paper are not available at this time. We will be adding them shortly, thank you for your patience.

Publisher
Wiley
Copyright
2002 Department of History & School of Political Science and International Studies, The University of Queensland and Blackwell Publishers Ltd.
ISSN
0004-9522
eISSN
1467-8497
DOI
10.1111/1467-8497.00262
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

John Stuart Mill’s familiar ideas, such as the harm principle, the emphasis on the liberty of thought and discussion, and the extension of politics into the family and education, are all linked to a developmental and open–ended view of nature. To ground this perception of nature, Mill makes use of contemporary notions of evolution. For Mill, nature encompasses human civilisation and its higher products such as morality and justice. However, Mill recognises no benevolent guiding hand in the physical world, which the idea of evolution enables him to understand as self–propelled. Destruction and pain are part of the overall developmental movement, so that human lives always stand the danger of being crushed by nature. To minimise such risks, humans should use the distinctive features of their species, such as reason and morality, thus continuing nature while transforming it.

Journal

Australian Journal of Politics and HistoryWiley

Published: Sep 1, 2002

There are no references for this article.