Sublime

what Mill wants in On Liberty is people ‘less capable … of fitting themselves, without hurtful compression, into any of the small number of moulds which society provides in order to save its members the trouble of forming their own character’. He wants to make us wary of our temptation to fit ourselves into any of the small number of moulds society

“What important truth do very few people agree with you on?”

“Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences,” he wrote, “are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.”

Singer’s thought experiment, which he called “the Drowning Child,” became influential within the school of philosophy known as utilitarianism. Utilitarians argue that the proper action is the one that maximizes the world’s collective well-being.

My problem with Marxism is that it makes too much sense.

So actions and consequences are not all that matter after all. Character also counts. For Mill, individuality matters less for the pleasure it brings than for the character it reflects. “One whose desires and impulses are not his own, has no character, no more than a steam engine has character.”

As John Stuart Mill so wisely said (speaking about social science, but it applies more widely): All students of man and society who possess that first requisite for so difficult a study, a due sense of its difficulties, are aware that the besetting danger is not so much of embracing falsehood for truth, as of mistaking part of the truth for the who

Le grand principe, le principe dominant auquel aboutissent tous les arguments exposés dans ces pages, est l’importance essentielle et absolue du développement humain dans sa plus riche diversité. (Wilhelm von Humboldt : De la sphère et des devoirs du gouvernement.)