PHIL 123 AI & Ethics
Black-and-white head-and-shoulders photograph of John Stuart Mill facing forward, with a high forehead and long side whiskers.
John Stuart Mill, photograph by the London Stereoscopic Company, c. 1870.Image: John Stuart Mill by London Stereoscopic Company, c1870 · London Stereoscopic Company. Public domain. Modified: Locally auto-oriented, metadata-stripped, resized without enlargement to at most 720px wide, and encoded as WebP quality 82. Wikimedia Commons record, reviewed revision 1228105606.

Permanent scholarly record

John Stuart Mill

1806–1873

John Stuart Mill was a nineteenth-century British philosopher, political economist, and reformer who developed a version of utilitarianism that distinguishes the quality as well as the quantity of pleasures. In Utilitarianism, he connects human flourishing to higher capacities such as thought, imagination, and moral feeling. In On Liberty, he defends individuality and limits on coercion through the harm principle. Mill retains welfare as utilitarianism's ultimate standard while giving durable moral rules, justice, liberty, and personal development greater weight in practical judgment. For AI ethics, he helps students test whether a convenient system merely raises short-term satisfaction or also protects the capacities and freedoms education should cultivate.

In PHIL 123

Why this thinker matters

Mill connects welfare with liberty, higher capacities, and stable secondary principles.

Primary texts
Utilitarianism Mill · On Liberty