John Stuart Mill’s Platonic Heritage by Loizides Antis;

Author:Loizides, Antis;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 1203901
Publisher: Lexington Books

Both the phenomena which are produced human agency, ‘the volition which designs, the intelligence which contrives, and the muscular force which executes’, and those which are not, Mill pointed out, ‘depend on the properties of the elementary forces, or of the elementary substances and their compounds’.

Mill then proceeded to the third step, that is to question and test a common practical maxim in which ‘nature’ bears a part: i.e., that ‘any mode of thinking, feeling, or acting, is “according to nature” is usually accepted as a strong argument for its goodness’. However, as both senses of the term noted earlier correspond to ‘what is’, and the practical maxim of ‘following nature’ refers to ‘what ought to be’, Mill asked himself whether this means that we can distinguish a third sense of ‘nature’. His answer was no:

Those who say that we ought to act according to Nature do not mean the mere identical proposition that we ought to do what we ought to do. They think that the word Nature affords some external criterion of what we should do; and if they lay down as a rule for what ought to be, a word which in its proper signification denotes what is, they do so because they have a notion, either clearly or confusedly, that what is, constitutes the rule and standard of what ought to be.

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