Question
Utilitarianism, part II
John Stuart Mill (1806–1873)
I. Historical Background
a. His father James Mill was a well-known intellectual and great friend of Jeremy Bentham. He had John Stuart homeschooled by Bentham.
b. Mill wrote during the mid 19th century when industrial capitalism was beginning to show its truly abhorrent nature. He recognized the inadequacy of Bentham’s theory for dealing with many of these new social issues.
i. Mill advocated for the improvement of working class conditions, and was also the first Member of Parliament to advocate for women’s suffrage.
II. A summary of the text Utilitarianism : Chapter 1
a. Mill begins the text by noting that philosophers and societies in general throughout history have often lacked any consensus as to the foundation of morality.
i. He notes that there is a general agreement that morality must be deduced from principles even though there is confusion as to what that principle is.
ii. He believes that since almost everyone admits that human happiness is a prime consideration in moral discourse then the greatest happiness should be recognized as the fundamental principle.
iii. The rest of his text seeks to spell out utilitarianism and the rational grounds for accepting it.
III. Chapter 2: What is Utilitarianism?
a. “The creed which accepts as the foundation of morals, Utility, or the Greatest Happiness Principle, holds that actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness.”
i. The “theory of life” upon which this moral theory is grounded states “that pleasure and freedom from pain are the only things desirable as ends”.
b. But Mill then asks, supposing human life has no greater end than self-seeking pleasure (defined in Bentham’s reductive terms), how is this not a “doctrine worthy only of swine?”
i. Mill argues that the source of pleasure for human life is different from other forms of animal life— unlike Bentham, the different sources and forms of pleasure matter! But what is the basis for this assertion?
1. “Human beings have faculties more elevated than the animal appetites, and when once made conscious of them, do not regard anything as happiness which does not include their gratification.” (he’s already drifting closer to Aristotle! )
2. These elevated capacities are the reason why humans desire more than “those of mere sensation” and assign a much higher value to:
a. “pleasures of the intellect,”
b. “of the feelings of the imagination,”
c. “and of the moral sentiments” (fellow feeling or social sympathy)
3. Therefore, Mill states that it would be absurd to reduce all pleasures to a homogenized standard of quantifiable sensation alone (as Bentham did), rather than estimating their value in nuanced terms of whether they satisfy higher qualities as well.
4. “it is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied.”
ii. How are we to decide between lower and higher pleasures? After appealing to the need for developing our elevated faculties, Mill now (oddly) appeals to nothing more than the experience of those who are familiar with both kinds of pleasures (yet so far the assumptions in his work suggests more than this):
1. Mill argues that most people who have experienced higher and lower pleasures are willing to hold out for the higher over the lower and that this is proof that the higher are more pleasurable in a qualitatively distinct sense.
a. But already there is a tension within his reasoning:
i. Either higher pleasures are better because they are true to, and help activate, those objectively higher human potentials—that is, because they meet the needs of our “ elevated social, imaginative, and intellectual capacities”.
ii. Or, higher pleasures are better, not because they are true to inherent potentials/capacities that make us distinctively human, but just because people who experienced them subjectively report that they are more pleasurable (because experienced consumers just happen to prefer them, that’s why).
b. With the second criterion, it becomes difficult to answer the question as to how we recognize truly higher pleasures (especially when there may not be much of an experience of them yet)? It would seem that we have to wait on a majority poll, and so follow the herd.
i. Do we recognize them as higher because it appears that most people happen to prefer them? Or do we recognize something as a higher quality and preferable because it accords with a higher potential in human nature regardless of whether the majority of society currently recognize it?
ii. Could utilitarianism make sense of the desirability of MLK’s vision, his appeal to higher forms of social solidarity, even though such was not yet fully experienced or commonly desired within a segregated society?
1. Was MLK’s vision compelling because most people just so happened to desire it? Or was it compelling because it awakened us to higher potentials regardless of whether they were widely desired yet?
iii. When Mill endorses higher pleasures by appeal to the need to develop humanity’s more “ elevated ” social, imaginative and intellectual capacities , he begins to leave utilitarianism behind:
1. This is because happiness is now determined as to whether it truly fulfills by actualizing those higher potentials in our human nature that remain normative regardless of whether they happen to be valued by a current majority.
IV. Chapter 3: What is the ultimate sanction for the Principle of Utility?
a. What are the sources of obligation? Why should we follow moral principles?
i. Some do it for receiving the approval of others or of God: a system of rewards and punishments that Mill calls “external sanctions” (Aristotle – “external ends”).
ii. Others do it according to an inner sense of conscience (without an external authority) that incurs a painful feeling if they violate it. This Mill calls the “internal sanction” of subjective feelings within the conscience.
1. If there is no natural basis for morality then it is not worth paying attention to it.
iii. But moral feelings for Mill are not simply an innate sense of pure duty (like Kant thinks) but rather they are the natural development of our nature, which he believes is inherently social and thus can be influenced in many different ways.
1. The basis in our nature is a natural inclination toward treating others as equal, which he calls a “contagion of sympathy”.
2. This natural social sympathy that humans have for each other, however, only can grow so long as there is an “improving state of the human mind”
a. – hence the objective need for educating desire , otherwise we will remain easily habituated into the market’s self-centered antagonism and divisiveness, unable to identify with the feelings of other people while blindly consuming what the market determines for us.
b. “a person in whom the social feeling is at all developed , cannot bring himself to think of the rest of his fellow creatures as struggling rivals with him for the means of happiness, whom he must desire to see defeated in their object in order that he may succeed in his.” (again, he is sounding more and more like a virtue theorist)
3. Here we see Mill providing more nuance than Bentham, who couldn’t really account for why exclusively self-seeking individuals would want to consider also the greater good of the social whole:
a. We saw earlier that Bentham was content with the status quo and thought the private pursuit of money was a primary good—indeed an end in itself—for individualistically attaining more pleasure and less pain.
b. Mill, however, sees that humans naturally desire social relations around higher communal ends rather than around mere commerce (he says the pursuit of money can “render the individual noxious to the other members of the society”).
i. And he even sees that the belief that money and the market can flatly determine all values is ruinous to democracy.
ii. General happiness by way of developing our elevated social capacities seems to require a higher form of democratic society rooted in the very social means of creating surplus.
V. Hence we come to his later writings on The Principles of Political Economy (ca. 1848) where he argues for an economy based in the “cooperative principle”:
“The form of association, however, which if mankind continue to improve , must be expected in the end to predominate, is not that which can exist between a capitalist as chief, and work-people without a voice in the management, but the association of the labourers themselves on terms of equality, collectively owning the capital with which they carry on their operations, and working under managers elected and removable by themselves.”
“the healing of the standing feud between capital and labour; the transformation of human life, from a conflict of classes struggling for opposite interests, to a friendly rivalry in the pursuit of a good common to all; the elevation of the dignity of labour; a new sense of security and independence in the labouring class; and the conversion of each human being’s daily occupation into a school of the social sympathies and the practical intelligence .”
“Eventually, and in perhaps a less remote future than may be supposed, we may, through the cooperative principle, see our way to a change in society, which would combine the freedom and independence of the individual, with the moral, intellectual, and economical advantages of aggregate production; and which … would realize, at least in the industrial department, the best aspirations of the democratic spirit.”
Mill, Principles of Political Economy with some of their Applications to Social Philosophy, bk. IV, ch. 7.
a. Therefore, the more Mill implies a virtue paradigm beyond Bentham’s crude utilitarianism the more he pushes the economy and its business structures in the direction of cooperatives—a return of the means of production to collective ownership .
i. Or we could also say that the more Mill advocates for cooperative social production, the more he implies the higher qualities of virtue ethics beyond Bentham’s reductive utilitarianism.
ii. This is because he begins to see, like Aristotle, that the organization of economic activity around private profit exploits and deforms our inherently social and creative nature—our elevated capacities—within an undemocratic labor process.
b. The sanction for the principle of utility then seems to come from outside Bentham’s reductive utilitarian framework itself. Mill’s presupposed framework so far:
i. All subjectively experienced pleasures are not equal
ii. Some are higher not just quantitatively but qualitatively, and ought to be pursued
iii. This is not simply because certain people happen to subjectively report that they are higher (despite Mill’s own claims), but rather because they are truer to those normatively elevated capacities that objectively define human nature beyond base instincts or mindless habituation, and which ought to be developed in order to progress and flourish socially as democratic agents .
1. Mill then has a normative sense of what it means to be human that moves critically beyond the consumerist dictates of market society.
iv. Hence, in another work Mill proclaims: “I regard utility as the ultimate appeal on all ethical questions; but it must be utility in the largest sense, grounded on the permanent interests of man as a progressive being.” and also “the end of man … is the highest and most harmonious development of his powers to a complete and consistent whole.” Mill, On Liberty
a. But it would also challenge the principle of utility at its core:
i. Happiness would no longer be equated with mere subjective pleasures of the appetites alone but more in line with virtue theory as the fullest realization of our distinctive powers.
ii. This would also challenge majority rules and consumerist society, since the basis for pursuing higher pleasures is rooted in whether it is true to our objectively elevated potentials and not whether most people happen to like something at a given time (the herd can be wrong!).
1. This does not mean it goes against democratic processes but rather provides the more consistent basis of our social nature driving the democratic process—that which must then be worked out collectively.
image1.jpeg
image2.png
image3.svg