 Mill also criticized Whewell’s claim that moral rules are necessary truths which are self-evident. Mill took this to mean that there can be no progress in morality—what is self-evident must always remain so—and thus to the further conclusion that Whewell believed the current rules of society to be necessary truths. Such a view would tend to support the status quo, as Mill rightly complained. (Thus he, rather unfairly. accused Whewell of justifying evil practices such as cruelty to animals, forced marriages, and even slavery.) But Mill was wrong to attribute such a view to Whewell. Whewell did claim that moral rules are necessary truths, and invested them with the epistemological status of self-evident “axioms” (see 1864, 58). However, as noted above, Whewell’s view of necessary truth is a progressive one. This is as much the case in morality as in science. The realm of morality, like the realm of physical science, is structured by certain Fundamental Ideas: in this case, Benevolence, Justice, Truth, Purity, and Order (see 1852, xxiii). These moral ideas are conditions of our moral experience; they enable us to perceive actions as being in accordance with the demands of morality. Like the ideas of the physical sciences, the ideas of morality must be explicated before the moral rules can be derived from them (see 1860a, 388). There is a progressive intuition of necessary truth in morality as well as in science. Hence it does not follow that because the moral truths are axiomatic and self-evident that we currently know them (see 1846, 38–9). Indeed, Whewell claimed that “to test self-evidence by the casual opinion of individual men, is a self-contradiction” (1846, 35). Nevertheless, Whewell did believe that we can look to the dictates of positive law of the most “morally advanced” societies as a starting point in our explication of the moral ideas. Although he surely had a biased view of what societies were “morally advanced,” he was not therefore suggesting that the laws of those societies are the standard of morality. Just as we examine the phenomena of the physical world in order to explicate our scientific conceptions, we can examine the facts of positive law and the history of moral philosophy in order to explicate our moral conceptions. Only when these conceptions are explicated can we see what axioms or necessary truths of morality truly follow from them. Mill was therefore wrong to interpret Whewell’s moral philosophy as a justification of the status quo or as constituting a “vicious circle.” Rather, Whewell’s view shares some features of Rawls’s later use of the notion of “reflective equilibrium.” (For more on Whewell’s moral philosophy, and his debate with Mill over morality, see Snyder 2006, chapter four.)