Taking It to Heart

The chapter compares two misguided forms of moral reasoning that Mill identifies as threats to moral life. First, it studies the tendency of ethicists to overlook secondary principles in moral reasoning and to rely exclusively on first principles, for example, the principle of utility. chapter refers to this tendency, which Mill saw as an obstacle to utilitarianism, as doing ethics in a deductive spirit. Second, the paper studies the tendency of moral reasoners to give a dull and torpid assent to a belief instead of taking it to heart, truly appropriating it. This is a key theme of On Liberty, and Mill's treatment of it reveals a ghostly form of moral reasoning strikingly similar to doing ethics in a deductive spirit. The comparison of these forms of reasoning helps explain Mill's insistence that ethics is an art that calls for a genuine concern for the values embodied in first principles.