Liberty And Public Morality

John Stuart Mill is regarded as a distinguished liberal theorist in nineteenth-century Britain. His opinion on liberty was related to his thought of ways of social reform. This treatise will try to contact his political thought with the history of nineteenth-century British political reform. When he was young, Mill's goal as a reformer was limited to fundamentally changing institutions. But in his mature age he turned to regarded the cultivation of people's public morality as the most important and effective way. This treatise focuses on the reason why he changed his ideas and implicates the related procedure of such change. And I also want to make a discussion on the relationship between liberty and public morality.In the first chapter, I will discuss the historical background and the original knowledge of Mill's liberalism. At the beginning of nineteenth-century, the British society was forming a modern industrial society. The inquiry for democratic rights among the people was strengthened. The philosophical radicals who were under the leadership of James Mill supported a kind of political theory. They greatly opposed to the domination of land aristocracy and desired to abolish them of their political privileges. The philosophical radicals wanted universal suffrage and a parliamentary government as well as free speech. All these ideas were so succeeded to John Stuart Mill when he was very young that his liberalism was at first mainly related to the opposition to aristocracy. As a result, young Mill thought that institutional reform may be the best effective way. As the disciple of Bentham, his father James Mill educated little Mill with the Utilitarian doctrine. But when suffering the mental crisis. Mill recognized the limitation of Bentham's theory that it ignored the development theory of mankind. Then Mill began to regard the development of mankind as one of the ultimate goals.In the second chapter, I will discuss the methodology of Mill's thought of public morality. Influenced by the Continental Romanticism, Mill gradually understood that every polity is relative and political reform has precondition. His understanding was by two ways: firstly, he began to recognize the importance of history and found that any reform was restricted by history. Secondly, Mill abandoned the abstractive idea of human nature and accepted the complexity of human nature. Since mankind was...