This is the fifth installment of my series How It Will Go, documenting the regularity of students’ responses to certain figures/texts and, in the occasional rare instance that it happens, noting whatever variations I witness.
Today’s episode: John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism
Context in which I teach this figure text: Like Kant, I teach some variation of J.S. Mill’s Utilitarianism in almost every course. I always teach it immediately after Kant, an arrangement which is historically accurate but also (for my purposes) fortuitous, since I find that students on the whole are “default Utilitarians.” If I’ve done my job right with Kant, then they should have temporarily put aside their consequentialist inclinations and drunk the Categorical Imperative Kool-Aid by the time we get to J.S. MIll.