John Stuart Mill

ChatGPT session Wed 26 Aug 2026

In what follows, I’ve set my prompts in red. But in response to the robot’s questions, I’ve needed to give a highly compressed answer, e.g. 1A 2A 3A 4C 5C. So, for ease of reading, in GPT’s generated output I’ve marked in yellow the choices my answer represents.

I want to pick a school of thought in political and social philosophy which best fits how I’ve been living my life, and how I want to go on living my life. Can you do this by asking me a (shortish) series of yes/no or triple choice questions?

Absolutely. I can do this as a kind of philosophical sorting exercise: I’ll ask you a relatively short sequence of questions, mostly yes/no or A/B/C. I’ll keep the questions focused on your actual way of living and intuitions, rather than asking you to recognise philosophical jargon.

At the end, I’ll give you:

• the 2–4 schools/traditions you seem closest to;
• my best-fit choice, with an explanation of why;
• the important ways you don’t fit it;
• and a few philosophers/books that would let you explore it further.

There are no “correct” answers. If you genuinely can’t choose, say “split” and I’ll treat that as useful information.

Round 1 — What fundamentally matters?

1. If you had to choose, which sounds more like your view?

A. A good life is primarily about living well as a human being—developing virtues, relationships, judgement, character, etc.

B. A good life is primarily about maximising what is good—happiness, wellbeing, flourishing, or the reduction of suffering.

C. A good life is primarily about living according to principles that you believe are right, even when doing so makes you or others worse off.

2. Do you think there are genuinely objective moral truths, independent of what individuals or societies happen to believe?

A. Yes

B. No

C. Unsure / partly

3. Suppose you could live a very comfortable, pleasurable life, but you would contribute relatively little to other people’s lives. Would that strike you as a morally inadequate way to live?

A. Yes

B. No

**C. It depends

4. Which feels more important?

A. Being free to determine my own life, even if I make choices others think are foolish.

B. Belonging to and contributing to a community, even if that places some constraints on individual choice.

C. Neither—I’m suspicious of both formulations.

5. Imagine a society in which almost everyone is materially comfortable, but people have very little meaningful freedom and are expected to conform. Is that society:

A. Basically good, provided people are genuinely happy.

B. Fundamentally deficient, because freedom/authenticity matters in itself.

**C. Both good and deficient in different respects.

Reply with just 1A, 2C, 3A… if you like. Then I’ll give you the next round.

1A 2A 3A 4C 5C

Good — that already suggests you’re not straightforwardly utilitarian, Kantian, or libertarian, and that your moral thinking may be more humanistic/virtue-oriented than rule- or outcome-oriented. But we need to distinguish several possibilities.

Round 2 — Self, society, and human nature

6. Do you think human beings have a relatively stable human nature that places some limits on what constitutes a genuinely good life?

A. Yes — there are objective facts about human flourishing.

B. No — what counts as a good life is largely something we create.

C. Somewhat — there are constraints, but enormous room for variation.

7. When your personal interests conflict with the interests of your wider community, which instinct is closest to yours?

A. I should generally give substantial weight to the community, even at personal cost.

B. My own life is mine to direct; I owe others certain duties but not my sacrifice.

C. The distinction is too crude: a good personal life and a good community should ideally reinforce each other.

8. Do you think inequality of wealth and social status is, in itself, morally objectionable?

A. Yes — significant inequality is intrinsically wrong.

B. No — inequality is fine if people are treated fairly and have reasonable opportunities.

**C. Sometimes — inequality is objectionable under some conditions, but not simply because it exists.

9. Suppose a government could substantially improve people’s lives by restricting certain individual choices. Your instinct is:

A. That’s often justified; collective welfare can legitimately override individual liberty.

B. That’s dangerous; individual liberty should normally take priority.

C. It depends heavily on which choices and what kind of restriction.

10. Which statement comes closest to your attitude toward tradition?

A. Traditions generally embody accumulated wisdom and deserve a presumption of respect.

B. Traditions have no special authority; they should survive only if independently justified.

C. Traditions are valuable sources of meaning and identity, but must remain open to criticism and change.

11. And one about modern society:

A. Modern individualism and consumer culture have largely liberated people from oppressive traditions.

B. They have largely produced alienation, atomisation, and a loss of meaning.

C. They’ve done both; modernity represents a genuine advance in some respects and a serious loss in others.

12. Finally, imagine that you could choose between these two lives:

A. A peaceful, deeply satisfying life among people you love, with modest ambitions and little influence beyond your immediate circle.

B. A demanding life devoted to a significant cause, involving considerable personal sacrifice but potentially benefiting many people.

Which would you choose if you had to?

6C 7C 8B 9C 10C 11C 12A

Interesting. The picture is becoming fairly distinctive: you seem to put considerable weight on individual flourishing and personal relationships, while resisting both atomistic individualism and collectivist demands. Your answers also suggest a fairly strong moral realism, but not one that reduces morality to rules or aggregate welfare.

Let’s sharpen the distinctions.

Round 3 — Freedom, virtue, and meaning

13. If someone chooses a life that is pleasurable and harmless but intellectually shallow, undisciplined, and lacking in admirable qualities, do you think they are living worse than they could, even if they’re perfectly happy?

A. Yes

B. No

C. Perhaps, but only by standards they themselves endorse

14. Do you think self-discipline and self-mastery are important components of a good life?

A. Yes, intrinsically

B. Yes, mainly because they help achieve other things

C. Not particularly

15. Which comes closest to your view of freedom?

A. Freedom primarily means being left alone: absence of coercion or interference.

B. Freedom means having the real capabilities and conditions necessary to develop and pursue a worthwhile life.

C. Freedom is fundamentally about self-authorship: choosing who you are and what your life means.

16. If a person voluntarily chooses a life you consider profoundly misguided, but they’re harming nobody, how should society respond?

A. Mostly leave them alone.

B. Society can legitimately discourage or restrict some such choices for their own good.

C. Neither: society should engage with and persuade them, but coercion should be exceptional.

17. Do you think meaning in life is something we discover (because certain things really are meaningful), rather than something we simply invent?

A. Yes

B. No

++C. Both: there are objective sources of meaning, but individuals must appropriate/create meaning for themselves

18. How do you feel about the idea that a person has obligations to strangers that may require substantial sacrifice—for example, giving up a significant portion of one’s income to alleviate suffering elsewhere?

A. We have strong obligations of this kind; geography or personal proximity shouldn’t matter much.

B. We have some duties, but they are limited; our primary obligations are to ourselves, family, friends, and community.

C. We have substantial moral obligations to strangers, but they need to be balanced against the value of having a rich personal life.

19. Suppose you discovered that achieving a perfectly just society would require abolishing some traditions, institutions, or ways of life that you personally love. Which instinct is strongest?

A. Justice comes first; sacrifice them if necessary.

B. A society isn’t truly just if it destroys valuable forms of human life in the process.

C. There is no simple priority: justice and inherited forms of life have to be negotiated together.

20. Last one for this round: which sounds most like something you could sincerely say?

A. “I want to become the sort of person who lives excellently.”

B. “I want to leave the world better than I found it.”

C. “I want to live authentically, on my own terms, without surrendering my life to other people’s expectations.”

You can answer 13A, 14B… etc. After that, I’ll probably need only one final short round before giving you the diagnosis.

13A 14B 15B 16A 17C 18A 19C 20B

That narrows it considerably. One particularly interesting combination is 13A + 14B + 15B + 16A + 18A + 20B: you seem to care strongly about human flourishing and social responsibility, but you’re reluctant to impose a conception of flourishing coercively. That combination is worth distinguishing from both classical liberalism and demanding consequentialism.

Final round — the fault lines

21. Imagine that scientific evidence showed that humans flourish best when they live in relatively stable families, friendships, communities, and traditions. Would that give those institutions moral importance in themselves, rather than merely being useful?

A. Yes

B. No — their value ultimately comes from individuals’ wellbeing/preferences

C. Probably, but I’m not sure what “in themselves” means

22. Do you think a society has a legitimate interest in cultivating virtues and good character among its citizens?

A. Yes, including through public institutions and cultural norms (though not necessarily coercion).

B. Only indirectly — the state should largely stay out of people’s moral development.

C. Yes, but primarily through families, communities, education, and voluntary associations rather than the state.

23. If you had to choose, which danger worries you more?

A. A society becoming too individualistic, materialistic, and disconnected, leaving people without shared purposes.

B. A society becoming too conformist, moralistic, and intrusive, sacrificing individual freedom for supposed communal values.

C. They worry me roughly equally.

24. Do you believe that political institutions should be designed around a particular conception of human flourishing, rather than simply creating fair procedures within which people pursue whatever conception of life they choose?

A. Yes.

B. No.

**C. To some extent, but with strong limits.

25. Here’s the hardest one. Which would you be most willing to accept?

A. Some loss of individual freedom in exchange for a society that produces substantially better human beings and richer communal lives.

B. Some loss of communal cohesion in exchange for substantially greater individual freedom.

C. Neither — the political ideal should be to construct institutions where neither has to be sacrificed very much.

26. And finally, when you imagine your ideal mature life, which is closest?

A. A life of excellence: cultivating wisdom, virtue, relationships and character, while participating in a healthy community.

B. A life of service: using my abilities to improve the lives of others as much as I reasonably can.

C. A life of authenticity: discovering and pursuing what is genuinely mine, while respecting other people’s freedom to do the same.

Once you give me those six, I’ll stop questioning and give you the best-fit philosophical tradition — including why it fits your answers and where it doesn’t.

21C 22C 23C 24B 25B 26C

Yes. With all 26 answers, I think there is a fairly clear result.

My best fit for you:

liberal perfectionism, with an existentialist streak

More specifically, I’d put you somewhere in the territory of John Stuart Mill → contemporary liberal perfectionism → existentialist humanism, rather than neatly inside one classical “school.”

The surprising thing is that your answers don’t point primarily toward a philosophy of maximising happiness or maximising social justice. They point toward a philosophy of human development under conditions of individual freedom.

The core of your outlook seems to be

There are better and worse ways of being human, but people must largely be free to discover and pursue the good life for themselves.

That combination explains a lot of your answers.

You said:

• there are objective moral truths (2A);
• a shallow but happy life can nevertheless be a worse life (13A);
• human beings have some common conditions of flourishing, though with substantial variation (6C);
• self-discipline matters, but instrumentally rather than as an end in itself (14B);
• freedom means having the real capabilities to develop and pursue a worthwhile life (15B);
• people should generally be left alone when their choices aren’t harming others (16A);
• meaning is partly discovered and partly created (17C);
• we have serious obligations to strangers (18A);
• you want to leave the world better than you found it (20B);
• yet, when forced to choose, you’d sacrifice some communal cohesion rather than individual freedom (25B);
• and your ideal life is ultimately one of authenticity (26C).

That is a pretty distinctive constellation.

⸻

Why I don’t think you’re a straightforward utilitarian

Your answer to 1A is already significant.

A utilitarian asks, roughly, “What produces the best consequences?” You seem to ask something closer to:

“What constitutes a genuinely good human life?”

That’s a different question.

Your answer to 13 is especially revealing. You think someone can be happy but nevertheless living badly. That makes it difficult to reduce the good to subjective happiness or preference satisfaction.

But you’re also not an obvious Aristotelian.

Aristotle would probably resonate with your belief that there are better and worse forms of human flourishing, virtue, character and community. Your answers to 1, 6, 10, 11, 13 and 21 all have an Aristotelian flavour.

But Aristotle’s political philosophy is considerably more comfortable with the idea that a political community should actively cultivate a shared conception of the good life.

You aren’t.

Your answers to 16, 24 and especially 25 push strongly in the liberal direction.

⸻

The person I’d most want you to read:

John Stuart Mill

Mill is probably your most interesting starting point.

His distinctive idea isn’t simply “people should be free.”

It’s something much richer:

Human beings need freedom because developing an individual human life requires experimentation, independence, individuality and the opportunity to make mistakes.

That’s extremely close to the pattern in your answers.

Mill simultaneously believes:

• some ways of living are better than others;
• individuality and the development of one’s faculties are intrinsically important;
• society benefits from people pursuing different forms of life;
• people have responsibilities toward others;
• education and culture matter enormously;
• but coercion should not ordinarily be used to make competent adults live “better” lives.

That gets remarkably close to your 13A + 15B + 16A + 20B + 25B + 26C combination.

There’s also a particularly important distinction in Mill between mere preference and the development of one’s higher capacities. He’s not saying, “Whatever makes you happy is equally good.” He has a much more substantive conception of human development.

⸻

But there’s another philosopher lurking in your answers:

Amartya Sen

Your answer to 15B is almost a flashing neon sign for the capabilities approach.

The basic idea is that freedom isn’t adequately described as simply being left alone. Someone can formally have freedom while lacking the actual ability to develop and exercise important human capacities.

So instead of asking merely:

“Is the government interfering with this person?”

you ask:

“Does this person actually have the capabilities necessary to live a life they have reason to value?”

That meshes very well with your answers about:

• objective human flourishing;
• social responsibility;
• obligations to distant strangers;
• inequality;
• freedom;
• and the importance of actual opportunities rather than merely formal rights.

Sen is more politically egalitarian than your answers necessarily require, though. You answered 8B, saying inequality isn’t inherently wrong if people are treated fairly and have reasonable opportunities.

So I wouldn’t call you straightforwardly Senian either.

⸻

And then there’s existentialism

Your 26C is the clue.

“I want to live authentically, on my own terms, without surrendering my life to other people’s expectations.”

That’s strongly existentialist.

But you’re not a straightforward Sartrean existentialist, because Sartre’s framework makes it harder to accommodate your answers about objective moral truth and objective sources of meaning.

You seem closer to a humanistic existentialism in which:

• your life isn’t simply dictated to you by tradition or society;
• you have to take responsibility for what you make of it;
• authenticity matters;
• but there are genuine moral constraints on what you can do;
• and your freedom exists alongside obligations to other human beings.

That last point is important.

You aren’t saying:

“My life is mine, therefore I owe nobody anything.”

You’re saying something more like:

“My life is mine, and precisely because human beings are capable of making something of their lives, I should respect their freedom while helping create the conditions in which they can flourish.”

That’s a much more interesting position.

⸻

Your political position, as I reconstruct it

If I had to turn your 26 answers into a philosophical manifesto, I’d get something roughly like this:

1. Human beings can genuinely flourish or fail to flourish.

It’s not all subjective preference.

2. But there isn’t necessarily one single template for flourishing.

There are objective constraints and goods, but considerable room for individual variation.

3. Individual autonomy is enormously important.

A person should generally be permitted to pursue their own conception of a worthwhile life.

4. Freedom is more than non-interference.

People need education, relationships, resources, opportunities and social conditions that make meaningful freedom possible.

5. Other people matter morally, including strangers.

You don’t think your moral obligations stop at the boundaries of family, nation or immediate community.

6. Community and tradition have genuine value.

But neither has an automatic right to override individual freedom.

7. The state should be cautious about imposing a conception of the good life.

This is where you depart from stronger forms of Aristotelianism, communitarianism and paternalism.

8. Authenticity matters.

Ultimately, you don’t want to be handed a prefabricated life and told that flourishing consists in conforming to it.

That’s a pretty coherent philosophy.

⸻

The interesting tension in your answers

There is one tension I’d actually encourage you not to resolve too quickly.

You simultaneously believe:

A. There are objective facts about human flourishing.

and

B. People should largely be free to determine their own lives.

Those aren’t automatically compatible.

Suppose you genuinely know that X makes human beings flourish and Y damages them. Why shouldn’t society compel people toward X?

Your answer seems to be: because the exercise of freedom and self-development is itself part of human flourishing.

That’s a powerful answer—but it needs defending.

It leads to a very interesting philosophical position:

A good human life isn’t merely a life that contains the right things. It is partly a life that the person has actively made their own.

That proposition could become the centre of your philosophical worldview.

⸻

Your nearest neighbours

I’d roughly map you like this:

Tradition	Fit
Liberal perfectionism	⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Millian liberalism	⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Capabilities approach	⭐⭐⭐⭐
Existentialist humanism	⭐⭐⭐⭐
Aristotelian virtue ethics	⭐⭐⭐½
Communitarianism	⭐⭐⭐
Classical liberalism	⭐⭐⭐
Utilitarianism	⭐⭐½
Kantian deontology	⭐⭐
Libertarianism	⭐⭐
Strong communitarianism	⭐
Strict existentialism	⭐

The label “liberal perfectionist” may initially sound contradictory, but I think it’s actually unusually well suited to your answers.

Liberal: individual freedom and self-authorship are fundamental.

Perfectionist: there really are better and worse ways of developing a human life; flourishing isn’t reducible to preference or pleasure.

That combination seems to capture you better than either word alone.

⸻

Where I’d go next

Rather than giving you a giant reading list, I’d do this as a philosophical genealogy:

Mill → Sen/Nussbaum → Aristotle → existentialism (especially Camus) → contemporary liberal perfectionism.

And I’d make Mill your first stop.

⸻⸻⸻⸻⸻

Here’s my impression of what ChatGPT has done for me.

I had a strong impression of diving deep with a living person who knows his stuff. But this has got to be an illusion, which I’ll call the ELIZA effect. I was actually sharing my deepest thoughts with a speak-your-weight machine: a sort of Zoltar: a pressure-cooker making a tasty soup out of people’s leftovers. So it is neither sentient, nor living, nor an infallible oracle – and I should beware of unwittingly treating it as such.

What I believe ChatGPT to be doing is drafting a consensus on the topic(s) that it is able to distil from its training data (which I gather includes a snapshot of the whole of Wikipedia). When I was a research supervisor, we used to say: read one book—plagiarism; read two books—research. That sets the bar low… but we were tender-hearted people back then. ChatGPT’s questions seemed a bit loaded in the direction of utilitarianism: which made me suspect it was raiding a clutch of sources on that very topic rather than smartly melding a vast philosophical library to address the matter of my prompts. But unlike Zoltar it didn’t seem to have its answer ready and waiting for me. But might it have had a tree of answers ready-made for it? One drafted by a small number of neo-utilitarians, who might just be the only people paying proper attention to what other philosophers of all persuasions were saying?

But even so, the questionnaire it offered me seems to be of general merit, and isn’t banality whittled down to fit my bung-hole, like the astrology features you used to see in newspapers. That’s why I’m putting my chat with GPT online, with qualified recommendation to other reflective souls to try it for themselves. If nothing else, it has helped me to articulate some hitherto unformulated feelings.

But maybe ELIZA would have done that too? And without burning the planet?