John Stuart Mill · Politics
Mill’s refined utilitarianism: that the right action is the one producing the most happiness - but with a crucial distinction between higher and lower pleasures.
Utilitarianism offers a strikingly simple answer to the oldest question in ethics - what makes an action right? The answer: its consequences for happiness. An act is right insofar as it tends to increase happiness and pleasure, wrong insofar as it produces suffering. There are no actions right or wrong in themselves, no sacred rules handed down - only the test of whether the world contains more well-being or less because of what you did. Mill inherited this principle from Jeremy Bentham and set out to defend and refine it.
But how do we know which pleasures are higher? Mill’s answer is empirical and democratic in its own way: ask those who have experienced both. If nearly all people who have known both the pleasures of the intellect and the pleasures of the body would not trade down - would not become a contented simpleton even for a life of easy gratification - then the pleasures they prefer are genuinely higher. The competent judges have spoken with their preference. This yields Mill’s most famous line: it is better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied.
How could you ever prove that happiness is the standard of right and wrong? Mill knew that first principles cannot be proved in the strict sense - you cannot deduce the foundation of morality from something more basic, or you would just push the question back. But he offered what he called ‘considerations capable of determining the intellect,’ a kind of argument, and it is one of the most debated passages in all of philosophy. His reasoning runs: the only evidence that something is visible is that people see it; the only evidence that something is audible is that people hear it; and likewise, the only evidence that something is desirable is that people actually desire it. Now, each person desires their own happiness. Therefore happiness is desirable, and the general happiness is desirable to the aggregate of all persons. Happiness, he concludes, is a good - and the criterion of morality.
Critics pounced immediately, and the passage has become a textbook case of how arguments can go wrong. The most famous charge (from G. E. Moore) is that Mill commits a fallacy of equivocation on ‘desirable.’ ‘Visible’ means ‘able to be seen’; but ‘desirable’ does not mean ‘able to be desired’ - it means ‘worthy of being desired,’ ought to be desired. So the parallel breaks: that people do desire happiness shows it is able to be desired, not that it is worthy of desire. Mill seems to slide illicitly from a fact (people desire happiness) to a value (happiness is good) - the very is-ought gap Hume had warned against. A second worry: even if each person’s own happiness is good to them, how does it follow that the general happiness is good to anyone, or that I should care about others’ happiness at all? The move from ‘each desires their own’ to ‘all should promote the total’ looks like a leap. Defenders of Mill argue he is not attempting a strict logical proof at all but pointing to the only kind of evidence a first principle can have, and that he means happiness is the only thing desired as an end, which is the relevant kind of evidence for what is intrinsically good. The debate is unresolved, but the episode is instructive: it shows both the difficulty of grounding any ethical theory’s ultimate foundation, and how a great thinker, pressed to justify his bedrock, is driven to the very edge of what argument can do.
This is the opening of the lesson. The rest — the dialogue, the primary source, and the recall — is in the app.
You learned that Mill ranks pleasures by quality, not just quantity. Explain how he decides which pleasures are higher, and why he needed that move, in your own words.
Leads to Peter Singer.
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