THE LOGIC OF J. S. MILL ON FREEDOM

Abstract Mill's aim in Chapter 2 of Book 6 of the System of Logic, to reconcile human freedom with universal causality whilst at the same time answering the challenge of Owenite 'social fatalism', pushes him into attempting an ambitious reconstruction of the traditional Compatibilist conception of freedom as absence of constraint. An examination of the convolutions through which the argument goes before culminating in the conclusion that genuine freedom is the same as complete virtue reveals over half-a-dozen distinct varieties of freedom and a remarkably chaotic mixture of insight and confusion, much of which bears directly upon an understanding of the kind of freedom Mill was out to protect in On Liberty.