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.
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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