Scott Rosenberg replies to my reply to his wonderful appreciation of JS Mill. I’d said that I find Mill’s rationalism overly optimistic. Scott writes:

I think it’s probably impossible that Mill, given who he was and how he was raised to be the Ultimate Utilitarian, could avoid seeming overly rational to us – steeped as we are in all the irrationality that followed his era, in heaps of Freud and gobs of Nietzsche and decades of 20th-century horrors that have made us justifiably suspicious of Victorian progressives’ optimism. And yet it’s also clear to me that “On Liberty” intended to expand the boundaries of that utilitarianism in what, to Mill himself at least, probably felt like profoundly non-rational ways – to encompass all of the eccentric traits and organically developed characteristics that make us individuals

Yup.

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