Reviews for Wills of the Archdeaconry of Sudbury, 1630-1635

The average rating for Wills of the Archdeaconry of Sudbury, 1630-1635 based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2020-02-19 00:00:00 Miller Pinson Read On Liberty (1859) and Utilitarianism (1861), both for a second time. I am still impressed by the force of Mill's arguments and his ethical exhaltedness. Personally, I think On Liberty should be obligatory reading for all students all over the world. Mill's plea for radical individual freedom, especially its use for society as a whole (which usually is neglected) is a healthy antidote in these times where different forms of totalitarianism are spreading across the globe. Tech giants, radical political groups (mostly leftists, in my opinion), 'benevolent capitalists', oppressive government, dictators, and supranational institutions like the UN, are all threatening and attacking the rights of individuals to express themselves freely, and to live a life according to their own wishes and desires. I think the optimism Mill felt has not been fully realized. Within fifty years after his passing (1874) the world saw the rise and spread of communism, fascism and nazism; post World War II saw a relative increase in freedom in the western sphere; yet the nineties saw the origin of a new threat: globalist elites and their interests. We are currently facing a huge crisis that threatens individual freedom on many fronts, on an existential level. Too few people seem to realize this, and I think Mill's essay could be worth gold on this debate. Utilitarianism is interesting yet kind of superficial. The weak points in Mill's argument (e.g. temporality, target audience, etc.) are easy to point out, yet Mill was the first since Kant (and excluding Kant since Aristotle) who came up with an original ethical theory. In my view, Mill's utilitarianism is Aristotelean virtue ethics for the masses. Everyone - master and slave, rich and poor, educated and uneducated - should strive to improve the greatest happiness for the greatest number. This doesn't mean pursuing the animal pleasures, but cultivating yourself in many ways. Mill places high emphasis on the intellectual virtues - very reminiscent of Aristotle's virtue ethics. Aristotle saw the 'utility' of his ethics (he never phrased it this way) in living the happy life of a cultivated aristocrat; Mill expands the scope of this theory and includes all people. Also, in Mill's framework the reason for living this way has an explicit purpose, it serves a (social and individual) goal. While Aristotle never formulated an end-goal, the simple question 'Why should I live like this, and not like a lower animal?' immediately brings Mill's arguments in view. Important works by one of the most brilliant philosophers of the modern times.

Review # 2 was written on 2013-09-16 00:00:00 Darby Little How we all know and love our liberal freedoms - freedom of speech (if you have the money to speak!), freedom of association (that is, if your union isn't in a right-to-work state, or your political group isn't being monitored and busted by COINTELPRO), and, the libertarian favorite, freedom to do bodily harm to oneself (i.e. freedom to buy an unhealthy lifestyle on the exhilaratingly free market). In theory, these are the freedoms Mill is particularly concerned with defending in his famous essay On Liberty. Along the way, he throws in a theory of individuality, taken wholesale from the altogether superior philosopher, Wilhelm Von Humboldt, which sits uneasily next to his empiricist/positivist views on morality and social conditioning - he both says that the individual must be elicited to develop in accordance with its innate tendencies (his famous Enlightenment reference to the individual being more like a tree than a vessel), and, at the same time, says that "moral feelings are not innate, but acquired". There are more discrepancies in his defense of utilitarianism, which is a dastardly ugly and almost impossible to understand theory (there are many, for instance, who think that its emphasis on the greater good looks like communism, but this theory is really about making everyone happy through commodities, which is obvious when one looks at the quantitative aspect). The ideal utilitarian looks at results only, which is in blatant opposition to any form of individuality which must rest on principles of knowing thyself; hence, Mill merely superimposes Enlightenment posturing on top of empiricist/positivist ethics, which, since it only takes into account consequences, and one of the most inscrutable at that, happiness, one must insist that Mill did not read his Humboldt, for the latter says somewhere that those who look to make everyone happy desire them to be machines for one's purposes - precisely the predicament of individuals who are branded as consumers, who are, in effect, nothing but machines for corporate execs. Furthermore, it is surely no coincidence that the largest propoganda compaign in human history, consumer advertising, literally began right after Mill's essays collected here were published. All in all, Mill can be seen in these confusing and contradictory essays to be one of the key architects of our incredibly ugly, wonderfully modern, liberal-nightmare (where freedoms exist so long as one doesn't test them), consumer-driven mess of a society.