That is, all people should be in a position to determine how they can best contribute to society. His was more an equality of opportunity as opposed to equality of outcomes. Mill was not delusional about equality and did not assume that everyone is equally capable of doing everything. People need to have equal freedom to choose the paths that they want to pursue. Humans face enough natural challenges, Mill thought, that to cut ourselves off from any part of the available pool of brainpower costs society timely and insightful solutions to our problems-solutions that may be better than the existing ones. If we don’t, we prevent ourselves from accessing the best ideas and contributions. He argued that we need to give people a choice as to how they will best contribute to society. Because his argument rests on the social cost of inequality, a modern reading of his text is easily reframed as “the subjection of people.” Even if that was not his initial intent, we can use our current understanding to adapt his ideas. Mill was specifically addressing the equality of women in relation to men, but his reasoning as to why equality is desirable transcends that one case.
John Stuart Mill, a nineteenth-century British philosopher who not only wrote political philosophy but also served in Parliament and advocated for many liberal reforms, challenged the status quo by pointing out the incredible cost to society of maintaining inequality between the sexes. The Subjection of Women was released in 1869, a time when, in most of the world, women were considered the legal property-objects, not subjects-of men, specifically their fathers and husbands. “The loss to the world, by refusing to make use of one-half of the whole quantity of talent it possesses, is extremely serious.” In his classic text The Subjection of Women, John Stuart Mill explains why equality is critical for solving the world’s problems-because it allows everyone to decide how they can best contribute to society. Sometimes in the debates about how to improve equality in our society, the reason why we should desire equality gets lost.
0 kommentar(er)
