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Comment by dcre | Hacker News Reader

You are arguing with a fact: Mill's influence on Nussbaum. Reconsider. You also clearly don't know anything about Mill, whose writing is all about what you say it's not.

"Though Mill is an advocate of limited government in ways that one might expect given his defense of basic liberties in On Liberty, he is no libertarian. He emphatically rejects the idea that legitimate government is limited to the functions of affording protection against force and fraud (PPE V.i.2). Instead, he thinks that there are a variety of ways in which government can and should intervene in the lives of citizens—sometimes as coercer and other times as enabler or facilitator—in order to promote the common good."

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/mill-moral-political/#Lib...

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You can't reduce philosophy to the people involved. After all, the foundations of neoconservatism drew heavily on ideas introduced by Trotskyists [1]. That's about as dramatic of a political about-face as it gets.

1: https://www.foreignaffairs.com/reviews/review-essay/1995-07-...

The person I'm responding to is wrong on both the people and the substance.

I'm wrong that Nussbaum wants people to involuntarily serve the needs of others?

You have a very simplistic understanding of what is voluntary and what is involuntary, and taking such an understanding as the basis of your moral and political thinking can only lead to utter confusion.

What's hard for you to understand about the word "voluntary?"

how the word "voluntary" is actually used by people is complex in interesting ways. People report (degrees and shades of) involuntariness and coercion in lots of different situations. For example "I hate this shitty job but I don't have a choice". So as a matter of language use there's lots of different kinds of involuntariness that doesn't cleanly map onto any libertarian-ish view. At which point libertarians tend to make the move of proposing their own, much more narrow definition of "voluntary". Which implicitly embeds normative assumptions that would need to be argued for, which libertarians fail to do.

A man points a gun at me. He says: Give me the money, or die. I make the voluntary decision to give him the money.

What do you think Mill would say about Nussbaum's capabilities approach? Whether or not "Mill was a libertarian," my sense is that he would object on basically libertarian grounds (i.e. he would see CA as paternalism).

To me it is fundamentally a Millian approach to the question.

"Mill thinks that the state can and should require parents to provide schooling for their children, ensuring that this kind of education is available to all, regardless of financial circumstances, by subsidizing the costs of education for the poor so that it is available free or at a nominal cost."

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/mill-moral-political/#Lib...

It's fundamentally not Mill's approach. As a utilitarian, Mill got to dodge questions like "what is human flourishing?" Nussbaum, I believe, refers to her interpretation of virtue ethics to answer that question and give CA ultimate grounding.

I'd be wary of quoting that article like it's some authority. At a glance, it reads as skeptical of Mill. The harm principle is the basis of his thinking and he was very concerned about paternalism. I think it's quite likely he would view CA as an overreach.

> As a utilitarian, Mill got to dodge questions like "what is human flourishing?"

What do you mean? What is the thing that utilitarian founders like Mill wanted to promote in the world? How is that not connected to human flourishing?

Utilitarism says that we should maximize utility; it doesn't say we have to do so by focusing on "human flourishing" or that every individual must get the same capabilities as Nussbaum does. Moreover, utiliarians don't agree about what utility is, and not all of them would say "human flourishing" is a synonym.

Nussbaum's specific list of capabilities isn't anticipated by Mill, but that doesn't mean Mill dodges questions like what is human flourishing. Mill wrote a lot about politics and what makes human life go better, both in terms of what is ultimately valuable and what it is crucial to nurture in people for them to experience such value. His views on education, freedom of expression and more in political theory are in that way covering some of the same ground that Nussbaum does with here capabilities approach.

This is the epigraph of On Liberty:

“The grand, leading principle, towards which every argument unfolded in these pages directly converges, is the absolute and essential importance of human development in its richest diversity.”

— Wilhelm Von Humboldt, Sphere and Duties of Government

Utilitarianism is fundamentally concerned with what human flourishing consists in. Otherwise you would not be able to promote it.

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