Mill's Metaethical Non-cognitivism

Abstract

In section I, I lay out key components of my favoured non-cognitivist interpretation of Mill's metaethics. In section II, I respond to several objections to this style of interpretation posed by Christopher Macleod. In section III, I respond to David Brink's treatment of the well-known ‘competent judges’ passage in Mill's Utilitarianism. I argue that important difficulties face both Brink's evidential interpretation and the rival constitutive interpretation that he proposes but rejects. I opt for a third interpretative option that I call the psychological interpretation. This interpretation makes sense of otherwise difficult aspects of chapter IV of Utilitarianism. In section IV, I offer some reasons for rejecting Nicholas Drake's claim that Mill is ultimately best characterized as a Humean constructivist. If we accept Drake's suggestion that Mill's non-cognitivism is compatible with his being a constructivist, I argue, we should view Mill as putting forward a distinctively Millian form of constructivism rather than a Humean one.

Mill's proof and the guise of the good

“…For ease of exposition I have inverted the textual order of steps 2 and 3. I should add that this standard reading of Mill's proof stands in contrast to Zuk (2018), who argues that in steps 1 and 2 Mill is intent on proving only the descriptive claim that we can desire only our own happiness as an end, thus using "desirable" in the purely psychological sense of "capable of being desired"-and leaving it to the reader to make the inference from this descriptive claim to "only happiness is good as an end". On Zuk's reading, Mill would not need anything like GG for his proof.…”