My "Takeaway" from Last Evening's Meeting on "Utilitarianism" by John Stuart Mill

I would like to thank the eighteen participants in last night's discussion. We seem to have touched on all of Mill's parries against the anti-Utilitarians. Mill wrote the piece in order to refute, one by one, the major objections to Utilitarian philosophy. Those objections are:

(1) Won't most people inevitably prefer the lower pleasures to the higher ones?
(2) How do you measure pleasure and pain?
(3) What good is self-sacrifice if it doesn't help anyone?
(4) Isn't Utilitarianism "too high a standard for humanity"?
(5) Is Utilitarianism a "godless doctrine"?
(6) Is it a merely an expedient one?
(7) Who has time to "calculate and weigh effects" of actions?

Mill can be tough sledding. He writes extremely systematically and to miss the point of one sentence in his singularly long-winded paragraphs is to miss his entire argument. I commend all of you for persevering.

Questions about "Utilitarianism," by John Stuart Mill

Now it is an unquestionable fact that those who are equally acquainted with and equally capable of appreciating and enjoying both [i.e., two different pleasures], do give a marked preference to the manner of existence which employs the highest faculties (p.35, all citations from the Great Books Reading and Discussion Program, Fourth Series, Volume 2)

--Do you agree with Mill that this is an "unquestionable fact"?

It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, are of a different opinion, it is because they only know their own side of the question. The other party to the comparison knows both sides (p.36)

--Is Mill saying that every human knows what it's like to be a fool? A pig?

Men lose their high aspirations as they lose their intellectual tastes, because they have not time or opportunity for indulging them; and they addict themselves to inferior pleasures, not because they deliberately prefer them, but because they are either the only ones to which they have access or the only ones which they are any longer capable of enjoying. It may be questioned whether anyone who has remained equally susceptible to both classes of pleasures ever knowingly and calmly preferred the lower, though many, in all ages, have broken down in an ineffectual attempt to combine both (p.37)

--How does one maintain enthusiasm for "high aspirations"?

Unquestionably it is possible to do without happiness, it is done involuntarily by nineteen-twentieths of mankind, even in those parts of our present world which are least deep in barbarism (p.39) .

--Does Mill equate unhappiness with barbarism?

The Utilitarian morality does recognize in human beings the power of sacrificing their own greatest good for the good of others. It only refuses to admit that the sacrifice is itself a good. A sacrifice which does not increase or tend to increase the sum total of happiness, it considers as wasted (p. 40).

--Is self-sacrifice only justified if it leads to greater societal happiness?

The objectors to utilitarianism cannot always be charged with representing it in a discreditable light. On the contrary, those among them who entertain anything like a just idea of its disinterested character sometimes find fault with its standard as being too high for humanity (p.42)

--Does utilitarianism really set a standard that is too high?

Is utilitarianism, as Mill states (p. 43), like religion in that rather than telling people what is right and wrong, it merely equips them to judge between right and wrong?

Do you agree with Mill's argument (p.44) that lying is always inexpedient?

Does Mill draw a reasonable analogy (p. 45) when he compares utilitarianism to Christianity in stating that just as a good Christian doesn't need to read through the Bible everytime he must make an ethical judgement, the good Utilitarian needn't weight every single possible consequence of his actions on the common good?

We are told that a utilitarian will be apt to make his own particular case an exception to moral rules, and when under temptation, will see a utility in the breach of a rule, greater than he will see in its observance (p. 47).

--Would a utilitarian be more likely to commit such a breach of a rule than a follower of a religion that believes in an afterlife?

The desire of virtue is not as universal, but it is as authentic a fact as the desire of happiness. And hence the opponents of the utilitarian standard deem that they have a right to infer that there are other ends of human action besides happiness, and that happiness is not the standard of approbation and disapprobation (p.49).

--How might virtue take priority over happiness?


For Textual Analysis

pages 35-37, from Now it is an unquestionable fact to ... in an ineffectual attempt to combine both.

pages 41-42, from I must again repeat ... to giving effect to their mandates.
pages 43-45, from Again utility is often summarily stigmatized to one or the other preponderates.
pages 45-47, Again, defenders of utility to as absurdity has ever reached in philosophical controversy.

From Futility to Utility

John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) has given us his Autobiography, in which he describes his rigorous early classical education under the tutelage of his father James, an eminent author and philosopher in his own right. As a result of his hermetic upbringing, John suffered a mental breakdown at the age of 20. He recovered and had a productive life both in the world of commerce, as a career employee of the British East India Company, and the world of ideas, as author of numerous articles and books. He also served as a Member of Parliament and as Lord Rector of the University of St. Andrews. The irony of the latter is that as a young man Mill had foregone a traditional "Oxbridge" (Oxford/Cambridge) education.

A seldom appreciated aspect of Mill's work is that he advocated for equal rights for women. He did so in his essay "The Subjection of Women" (1869), and credited his wife Harriet Taylor Mill as a co-author. Mill was alone among the famous social theorists of his era -- all of them male -- in holding this position.

Our selection this month is taken from Mill's essay "Utilitarianism," first published as a series in three parts in Fraser's, a popular literary magazine. "Utilitarianism" was published in book form in 1863 by Parker, Son and Bourn of London in 1863.

The text begins, "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." The work can be profitably read either as a survey of the Utilitarian school of political philosophy of Jeremy Bentham and others OR as Mill's personal critique of that school. One of Mill's biographers has called him "a thinker who fuses logic and imagination to depict a vision of the world" (1).

(1) August, Eugene, John Stuart Mill, a Mind at Large, New York : Scribner's, 1975.