Compare And Contrast Karl Marx And John Stuart Mill

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John Stuart Mill and Karl Marx are two of the most famous and influential philosophers of all time and while they share a few similarities, they are, for the most part, very different. Marx was totally different from just about everyone that had come before him while Mill, on the other hand, did take the basis of his beliefs from Jeremy Bentham, and his father, James Mill but just the basics, as he made major changes and found many flaws with the initial idea of utilitarianism. Mill did agree on it in it’s most basic form but also believed that there was much more to the idea than was presented by his influencers. Marx, on the other hand, looked at philosophy through an entirely new lens, from a perspective in which no one until him had considered. …show more content…
He also believes that things do not come down not right and wrong, they are simply a product of our social system and they must occur if it is the will of that system. In addition, I have some problems with Mill’s utilitarianism because it seems to have some open ends as I discussed before. For example, let’s use a current issue, immigration. With Donald Trump winning the presidential election, the issue of immigration is on everyone 's minds. According to utilitarianism; It would be moral to deport 30,000 people if 30,001 people were in favor of it. The issue is, there is no way to know just how much those pain and dismay those 30,000 immigrants will receive or how much pleasure those 30,001 people will receive, so how could you be absolutely sure that is the right thing to do. While Mill focuses on right and wrong, Marx focuses on the way society functions as a whole and although I don 't agree with everything Marx says, there are some good points in his argument. Marx recognizes, as the industrial revolution is going, on that machinery is taking the jobs of workers, and that as technology improves, the trend will continue to get worse. I agree that at some point in the future we will have issues employing people as technology takes jobs and lowers the …show more content…
Both Marx and Mill had the advantage of being two of the most current philosophers in history when you look at the grand scheme of things. I use the word advantage because they had the ability to look back at all the philosophers before them, pick apart their ideas and take something from one and something from another to formulate their ideas, however, neither idea is perfect, so as we go forward we will need to continue to look for the most solid sociological theory

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