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John Gray and John Stuart Mill View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by DSpace at Waseda University 33 社学研論集 Vol. 16 2010年９月 論 文 John Gray and John Stuart Mill Shota Mitsushima＊ Ⅰ．Philosophical inquiry John Gray launched on a study of John Stuart Mill at first and published the results in a book titled Mill on Liberty: A Defense. He came out with Hayek on Liberty next year. Among other books about Hayek at that time, his work is comparatively characterized by its contribution to make known Hayek’s systematic and philosophical, particularly Kantian, aspects. It seems that Gray had gained the recognition of a full-fledged thinker of liberalism up to this point. Gray brought out Liberalism soon. However Gray has, it is supposed, moved away from Hayek’s thought since the middle eighties and gradually shifted his position to Isaiah Berlin. This reading is not necessarily incorrect. However the substantial arguments of Gray easily incline to be overgeneralised, even distorted. Gray never disavows Hayek’s contribution to liberal theory through an epistemological claim against socialist central planning, and nor has regrets for his own attitude of the day, even today. Instead we can discover liberal heritages（ including Hayek’s） in his thinking. For example, Gray notes in Hayek on liberty that Mill and Hayek had had the same experience of headwork about the theory of knowledge before they made a contribution to economics. I think that this insight is applicable to his own thought. Though I will discuss this point on another occasion, the thing to be said here is that the apostasy of Gray as they say ― ironically as with J. （1） S. Mill ― is, I think, attributed to his（ or their） approach, philosophical inquiry. Gray has often said that an appropriate criticism of our inheritance of moral traditions is‘ immanent criticism’, invoking a part of the stock of our practices to illuminate and correct the rest. This kind of criticism is a common thread which runs through his arguments in Liberalisms, Post-liberalism, Beyond the New Right, and so on. In this regard we should especially focus attention to his claims about‘ the arguments from ignorance’ in Liberalisms. The exemplary case for this type of argument is Mill’s fallibilistic argument, which states that the growth of（ moral） knowledge attains through contestations among opinions and successive experiments in living. Gray claims that this type of argument seems to presuppose that, because any of the things we think we know is not dependable, we must seek it through trial and error and further that the whole moral knowledge ＊早稲田大学大学院社会科学研究科 博士後期課程４年（指導教員 古賀勝次郎） 34 we have inherited must be open to question. Though Skorupski addresses the importance of difference between Mill and Nietzsche in these days, Gray quotes the metaphor of Neurath’s ship and suggests that our practical and moral knowledge we have inherited can be amended and refashioned only by piecemeal and that we can （2） not do anything but sink the ship if we try to built it anew. In addition, Gray suggests that Mill’s theory of experiments of living is too rationalistic and, as Hayek also points out, neglects the artifactual character of （3） human identity and the dependency of personal individuality and human flourishing on a cultural tradition. But Gray still shares with Mill the same view that“ the things we think we know…could turn out to be wrong in the course of our continuing inquiry”［ Skorupski 2007: 8］ In spite of affinities between Gray and Mill, it can not be denied that there are major differences. Crucial one of these is an attitude toward the idea of‘ progress’. His skeptical stance of progress is nothing new. He had already said in the basic issue Mill on liberty that“ ［i］n part Mill’s difference from Hume is just his belief in the possibility of moral progress, grounded in his almost unlimited confidence in the efficacy of social education and self-cultivation. But Mill’s adherence to a doctrine of progress does not by itself---indicate---why progress should consist in the promotion of human freedom.”［ Gray 1983: 111］ In another paper concerning Mill collected in Plato to Nato: studies in political thought, he says that“ ［i］t cannot be said that Mill predicted many of the cataclysmic developments of the twentieth century. He tended to extrapolate from the trends observable in his own time, and there is no doubt that Mill expected the dominant institutions of liberal England---to spread across the world. It could not have occurred to him that the great bourgeois civilization---would turn out to be a century of peace sandwiched between eras of war and tyranny. With the exception of Nietzsche, all of Mill’s contemporaries shared Mill’s lack of prophetic insight: none of them glimpsed the apocalyptic twentieth century realities of the Holocaust and the Gulag, of the inexorable proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and the rise of totalitarian political movements. In Mill’s case, part of the fault lies in his conception of human nature. In spite of his efforts to free his view of man from the crude errors of classical Utilitarianism, his account still seems to us at once narrowly rationalistic and unrealistically optimistic. Modern depth psychology has uncovered dark forces in the human mind which are deaf to the voice of liberal reason. Much of the history of our century has been dominated by movements which Mill’s theory of human nature not only failed to predict but cannot explain. The steady trajectory of progress which he expected depended in the end on the realism of his account of human nature. Now that we know man to be more fixed and intractable than Mill’s theory allowed, we have less reason to expect the human future to be an improvement on the past. History has not been kind to Mill’s （4） attempt to forge a new liberalism in response to the dilemmas of his age.” ［ Ibid., 1984: 155-56］ It is at this point that his original approach takes on a major significance. In the postscript to Liberalisms, Gray presents his comparatively original approach:‘ post-Pyrrhonian method of philosophical inquiry’. This method is“ a mode of theorizing in which to the skeptical Pyrrhonism of Hume is added the insight that our forms of the self- （5） understanding are narrative historical creations.” ［ Ibid., 1989: 263］ In a way, it is not necessarily wrong that John Gray and John Stuart Mill 35 Gray’s intellectual works so far are efforts to be free from Humean skepticism. However, it does not mean that Gray is not a successor of Mill’s liberal heritage. Because Mill had also shared‘ Humean predicament’. Ⅱ．Mill on Liberty: A Defence ― His analysis of Mill’s‘Doctrine of Liberty’― From around sixties, it seems that some thinkers such as Alan Ryan, J.C. Rees broke a new path of interpretation of J. S. Mill against the traditional readings and many books gradually made an appearance in the field of Mill studies. Gray’s work Mill on Liberty: A Defense is a contribution among these books. According to traditional reading to which, say, James Fitzjames Stephen, Gertrude Himmelfarb, and Isaiah Berlin belong, John Stuart Mill is a transitional and eclectic thinker and his attempt to combine utilitarianism to liberalism is, or is doomed to, failure. Against this interpretation, Alan Ryan presented his claims that Mill is“ the author of philosophical system, a system which I［ Ryan］ shall call‘ inductivism’—the philosophy of what Mill himself termed‘ the inductive school’”［ Ryan 1987: xxv］ and the key element to which utilitarianism and liberalism could be connected is‘ the Art of Life’. In A system of Logic, particularly chapter ⅩⅡ:‘ Of the Logic of Practice, of Art: Including Morality and Policy’, Mill distinguishes art and science and says that the imperative mode is the characteristic of art, as distinguished from science. Science is expressed in indicative mode. As often pointed out, what is behind his demarcation means that Mill had been aware of distinction between is（ or will be） and ought（ or should be）. In this regard, Ross Harrison, who provides a useful outline of recent interpretations of Mill’s philosophy, says that“ ［t］he part of Logic that is most relevant for the understanding of Mill’s ethical and political though is the last chapter, which is about‘ morality and policy’. In it, Mill says that‘ a proposition of which the predicate is expressed by the words ought or should be, is generally different from one which is expressed by is or will be.’ In other words, Mill here very clearly distinguishes between is and ought. Furthermore, he says that every art has its leading principle. The leading principle of architecture, for example, is that it is desirable to have buildings. Standing above all these particular arts is the Art of Life itself. Its leading principle is that what is‘ conducive to happiness’ is desirable.”［ Harrison 1996 :764］ The Art of Life is constructed by Morality, Prudence（ or Policy）, and Aesthetics: the Right, the Expedient, and the Beautiful or Noble. According to Ryan“, the principles of each are to be derived from the principle of maximizing utility. Prudential rules are hypothetical commands…. Moral rules are categorical commands, and are backed by sanctions, both those of general opinion and those of the agent’s own conscience. They differ from prudential commands in that they apply only to other-regarding actions or to the other-regarding aspects of actions, where prudential rules apply only to the self-regarding aspects or to self-regarding actions.”［Ryan 1987: 215-6］ The important thing is that Prudence（ the concern for one’s own interests） and Excellence（ the pursuit of beauty and nobility in character） are outside of the sphere of imposition of Morality.
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