John Stuart Mill's Utilitarianism is a classic defence of utilitarian ethics published between 1861 and 1863. Mill sought to popularise and defend the modern utilitarianism that his teacher, Jeremy Benson, them had foundered. Utilitarians maintain that you can judge whether an action is morally right or wrong by the amount of net pleasure or pain it produces. Mill says that all action is for the sake of some end. and rules of action, it seems natural to suppose, must take their whole character and colour from the end to which they are subservient. To understand what we should do morally, we should know how to judge our actions.
Mill says that actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness. By happiness is intended pleasure and the absence of pain, by unhappiness pain and the privation of pleasure. Mill spends a lot of the book defending utilitarianism against the claim that it is wrong to reduce all ethical problems to the question of pleasure. Before Mill, Bentham believed that pleasure could be quantified mathematically, so that moral judgments could be made based on how much pleasure or pain an act would produce. He formulated the philosophic calculus, or hedonistic calculus.
The amount of pleasure derived from an act could be measured by variables like intensity, duration, duration, certainty, propinquity, vicissundity, purity the guarantee that ill effects won't be felt and extent. Bentham thought that policymakers could legislate according to how much societal pleasure would be produced. But he was criticised for reducing human experience to simple pleasures. His critics called utilitarianism. utilitarianism a pig philosophy, suggesting that Bentham's logic predicts that people would sit around eating or chasing base pleasures all day.
The problem was that Bentham had said that quantity of pleasure being equal, pushpin, a popular children's game at the time, is as good as poetry. The contemporary philosopher Roger Crisp gives the example of Hayden and the Oyster to illustrate the problem. In Crisp's story, you're a soul in heaven before your body.
born waiting to be allocated a life. The angel says that you can be the great, cheerful and popular composer Joseph Hayden, or an oyster that experiences mild pleasure like floating in a warm bath. You choose Hayden and the angel sighs, bemoaning that he'll never get rid of the oyster. Look, he says, I'll offer you a deal.
Hayden will die at 77, but the oyster will live as long as you want. This poses a problem for the utilitarian. No matter how much pleasure is derived from being those of Hayden, if the oyster lives forever, at some point the amount of pleasure it has experienced will have surpassed that of Hayden, yet almost all would still choose the life of Hayden. Mill's answer to the problem is that some pleasures are intrinsically more valuable than others, and that once we are aware of certain higher pleasures, we won't be happy to leave them uncultivated.
He wrote that it is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied. to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied, and if the fool or the pig is of a different opinion, it is only because they only know their own side of the question. Characteristically, Mill then lays out a principle to differentiate between higher and lower pleasures.
A pleasure is a higher pleasure if it would be chosen over another pleasure even if it was accompanied by discomfort, and if it would not be traded with a higher quantity of the other pleasure, Mill says that it is an unquestionable pleasure. questionable fact that those who are equally acquainted with and equally capable of appreciating and enjoying both, do give a most marked preference to the manner of existence which employs their higher faculties. Few human creatures would consent to being changed into any of the lower animals, for a promise of the fullest allowance of a beast's pleasures. No intelligent human being would consent to being a fool.
No instructed person would be an ignoramus. No person of feeling and conscience would be selfish and base, even though they should be persuaded that the fool, the dunce, or the rascal is better satisfied with his lot than they are with theirs. Some pleasures, Mill said, are incomparable, but critics said that some people choose lower over higher pleasures, or give up certain pleasures altogether. To this, Mill says that yes, some people like aesthetics, will give up a life of happiness willingly, but that they do this for a greater end, the happiness of others or God. So utilitarianism is a moral standard for judging the happiness of all people, not just each single person.
Mill argues that people do desire things like virtue as well as happiness, but that virtue is a part of the abstract whole of happiness. Mill's utilitarianism has been criticized for being elitist. Who's to say I wouldn't choose... a life of endless chocolate cake over a life of being Joseph Hayden. And utilitarianism in general has been criticised as justifying the murder of one person if it maintained the happiness of two.
But Mill would say that utilitarianism is more subtle than that. A society that isn't sure whether one of its members could be murdered at any time by the government just for the sake of another's happiness would surely be a less happy society than the one where everyone is protected. Ursula K. Le Guin's short story, Those Who Walk Away from Omelus, depicts a city where everyone is happy, healthy and rich.
She asks the reader to imagine their own perfect city. Omelus sounds in my words like a city in a fairy tale, long ago and far away, once upon a time. Perhaps it would be best if you imagined it as your own fancy bits, assuming it will rise to the occasion, for certainly I cannot suit you all.
But the success of this fairy tale city depends on one child living in a dungeon in perpetual filth, darkness and misery. And when each citizen of Omelus is of age, they have to see this child, but show it no love, and consent to its continued life of misery for the sake of the happiness of the rest of the city. Le Guin's story ends by describing those who forsake the city when they see the child.
The place they go towards is a place even less imaginable to most of us. of us than the city of happiness. I cannot describe it at all.
It is possible that it does not exist, but they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelus. And while Le Guin's short story is a powerful attack on the problems of utilitarianism, it is not an attack Mill would agree with, as his two most famous works, Utilitarianism and On Liberty, are an attempt together to show that the first principle of liberty is principle of utility is the protection of the rights of all. If you like these videos and would like to support me making more, you can follow me on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook by clicking the links in the description below. You can like this video and subscribe to the Then and Now channel to see more.
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