Mill Philosophy Circle: My Undergraduate Essay on J.S. Mill to Celebrate his Posthumous Birthday

J. S. Mill was born on this day in 1806 so to mark his posthumous birthday, I'm sharing this one and only essay that I wrote on J.S. Mill during my Undergraduate philosophy degree. I printed the date in light purple ink so it's difficult to read but if you look closely, you'll see that, after my name, it reads '2nd year Ethics 13/10/10'. It was unfortunately one of those many short notice changes to an essay title/topic. It was supposed to be an essay on Hume and I had already started working on the essay when it was switched to J.S. Mill. Fortunately, this time the essay changed to one of my favourite philosophers, J.S. Mill, who I had studied during my A Level philosophy. Utilitarianism is one of those topics which are always on the A Level syllabus so I was very surprised J.S. Mill and Utilitarianism were not a bigger feature on my degree course.

Here's what I don't understand. J.S. Mill is a leading British philosopher yet the undergraduate course spent far more lecture time and essay writing time on the German philosopher Leibniz and presented him in a much more positive light. Yet we're are all claiming to be very British and promptly left the EU 🇬🇧. And J.S. Mill is not just arguably the most famous British philosopher, he was also an MP for Westminster and a prominent feminist who played a vital role in bringing about votes for women and arguing for women's rights in parliamentary debates. So how can you not devote a substantial amount of degree time and essay writing on him? J.S. Mill wrote about a wide variety of topics so his philosophy could be taught throughout a degree course.

You'll see that this is a marked essay, written over in red pen. However, here I haven't distracted the reader with the marker's comments because, on re-reading his comments, I thought they were completely irrelevant and unhelpful. Worse still, the tutorials were group tutorials which took place after essays were already written yet there was no individual feedback or discussion of our essays. The only individual feedback students received was the written comments and mark, unless the PhD student or lecturer marking it couldn't be bothered to return the essay, make any comments or tell you the mark. In the past, individual tutorials were common place!

There's really no point in asking students to write essays, especially if students are writing over 2-3,000 words each time, yet never discussing these essays in a tutorial. You learn nothing from the marking. The only usefulness of writing essays so frequently is that you get into the good habit of writing philosophy regularly. I tended to write longer essays than required because it is far more beneficial in the long run. It is much easier to go from writing 2-4,000 word essays into presenting research papers at conferences. Whereas a full-time student writing only 1,000 word essays will struggle to draw on that for writing up any research they later do after graduating. It definitely helped me post-degree that I was up and running and used to regularly writing detailed essays on a wide variety of topics for which I often independently found my own extra reading and had spent time doing my own research in order to add depth of thought and argument to each essay. For this, you need a several thousand word limit, otherwise there just isn't enough space to develop any of your ideas. Every essay had set reading you had to use so when looking at my references/bibliography you are not looking at a list of my own choice of reading material! Often the set reading was 2-3 articles. I might add to the reading but I had to include what was set.

On the last page, you will see that I received 70%, which is a 1st - firsts are the top grade, for those which don't understand the English university system. So, to give 3 European examples, in Spain, this essay would be graded as 8.5 +; in France it would be 16+; in the Netherlands, it would be 9-10. In the US, this essay is an A, in Canada it's an A to A+. Why grades cannot be internationally understood and preferably standardised, I don't know, especially between EU member states! People shouldn't have to keep looking it up and explaining their past grades at length, just for the international academic community to understand their grades. Universities and their staff should already understand international educational systems so not require individuals to keep figuring it out for themselves. And marking expectations vary too - presumably, a student could get a 10 in the Netherlands, whereas nobody in England would attain a 100% for a 'first', it's simply a British convention. Not to mention that marking varies hugely in quality, the effort put in and is highly subjective. Hence, when it comes down to it, university grades don't really represent actual student ability. This is even more true when you study at a university like mine, where the marker is given free rein by the college to write whatever they feel like, without any responsibility attached, because students are, in effect, given no powers or recourse to challenge the way their work has been marked or graded. Anything went when marking my essays and nobody in the entire college would ensure that my essays were even returned, never mind correct any nonsense comments/feedback, illogical grading or tutor attitude problems, no matter how obvious and provable it was. Yet these markers are surely used to peer reviewing academic research! If this is how they conduct their peer review, then the academic publishing system needs serious overhauling!

My blogs and ebooks are an interactive system whereby readers can leave peer review, comments, ask academic questions and chat with me as the author. Indeed, all my work is open to peer review anytime, there's no time limit on it, unlike conventional academic publishing systems. This is in keeping with the modern publishing system, including for academic ebooks, whereby readers are given the opportunity to engage interactively with the content. I used to allow all comments from anyone to be automatically published on my blogs. However, after I once received an extremely unpleasant, homophobic, misogynistic, anti-Semitic comment on a Spinoza blog post that I had written a few years earlier, I adapted the commenting system. So after that incident, I now have all comments monitored before they are published on my blogs. This is merely to uphold standards and prevent things, such as hate speech, bigotry or internet trolling harassment from being accidentally published. The monitoring system also helps filter out spam, bots, anonymous and fake accounts. Academic freedom is always ensured, no comments are filtered on the basis of their academic stance. The reason that there are no published comments is simply that nobody has submitted any so there has been nothing to monitor or filter out. Thus, I can assume that everyone understands everything perfectly and does not need anything explaining! My work, and, in particular my books are, therefore, considered perfect. I'll take that as a compliment.🙂💪💖🌠

Please also note that my work is my copyright automatically but I haven't just relied on the UK granting me my copyright automatically. I also don't only rely on Blogger to date my work or objectively 'witness' the date or content for me. I have actively registered my copyright in such a way that it is also protected through international law. This also makes it more straightforward for me to issue 'take down' notices and copyright infringement notices if I wish. It also seems to be little understood in the academic community that everyone has the right to possess the copyright to their ideas and work, irrespective of their qualifications or job title. Academic snobbery is not an excuse. Thus, my ideas and work must not be cited and referenced any differently or any less thoroughly than anyone else working or studying in academia/universities. Moreover, my work is readily, easily available, free and open access on the internet so it is implausible for a student or lecturer, including experienced researchers of any age, to have managed to overlook my work and fail to cite it. This additionally means that my work is also detectable by software scanning the internet to check for correct citation before publishing researchers' journal articles or books. Blogger is powered by Google so any Google search will find my work on my blogs (and find my academia.edu sites).

Now to JS Mill: