Humanly Possible: Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Inquiry, and Hope

by Sarah Bakewell

“What pleasure comes from our faculties of appraisal, memory and understanding!”) Happiness is still the good to be sought, but from now on, Mill knew that some forms of happiness were more meaningful than others. One such form is that feeling of being free, “alive,” and “a human being,” which he would write about in The Subjection of Women. Strict utilitarianism cannot easily accommodate this: instead of countable happiness units, we are taken back to qualities that are incalculable and immeasurable. But what Mill’s new approach loses in rigor, it gains in subtlety. His version is more human than Bentham’s. As well as improving utilitarianism, Mill’s human element improves liberalism. It distinguishes it, for example, from the travesty now described as “neoliberalism,” which allows the rich to pursue profit without regulation while the rest of the population is left to deal with the consequences of such ravaging of society. For Mill, as for Humboldt, this is not what freedom means. A truly liberal society both values and enables deeper fulfillments: the pursuit of meaning and beauty, the diversity of cultural and personal experiences, the excitement of intellectual discovery, and the pleasures of love and companionship.