Utilitarianism

Overview

Utilitarianism is a hundred and twenty pages in five chapters, published as three magazine articles in 1861 and as a book in 1863. It is a defence rather than a discovery. The principle had been stated by Bentham decades earlier, and Mill had been raised on it in the most literal sense: his father James Mill and Bentham designed his education as an experiment, he was learning Greek at three, and he had a nervous collapse at twenty in which he asked himself whether achieving all the reforms he was working for would actually make him happy and answered no.

That collapse is behind this book. Mill came out of it convinced that Bentham’s psychology was too thin, that poetry and feeling and individual character matter, and that the principle could survive being made more generous. Whether it survives or is quietly replaced is the question every reader ends up with.

The essay is written for an educated general audience, not for philosophers. Mill spends most of it answering objections rather than building a system, which makes it easy to read and occasionally hard to pin down, because his argument is often a concession followed by a repair.

The argument

Chapter 1: the problem. Two thousand years of dispute about the foundation of morality, and no agreement. Mill notes that even those who deny a first principle rely on one covertly, and that intuitionist theories in particular smuggle in utility whenever their rules conflict.

Chapter 2: what utilitarianism is. The statement of the principle: actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness and wrong as they tend to produce the reverse, where happiness means pleasure and the absence of pain.

Then the objection Mill takes most seriously, that this is a doctrine worthy only of swine. His answer is the book’s most famous and most contested move. Pleasures differ in quality as well as quantity. If nearly everyone who has experienced two kinds of pleasure prefers one, and would not give it up for any quantity of the other, then that pleasure is higher. The test is competent judges, and the verdict, Mill says, is unanimous: it is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied, and better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied, and if the fool disagrees it is because he knows only his own side.

He then clears away a series of further objections in quick succession. That happiness is unattainable: he means a life with many enjoyments and few pains, not rapture. That utilitarianism is godless: if God wants his creatures happy, utility is a more religious doctrine than any other. That there is no time to calculate: we have had the whole history of the species to work out the tendencies of actions, and the secondary rules we inherit are that accumulated calculation. That it makes people cold: the theory concerns the rightness of acts, not the worth of agents, and a man who saves a drowning stranger for a fee does the right act and is not admirable.

Mill also insists, against a common caricature, that the standard is not the agent’s own happiness but the happiness of all concerned, assessed with the impartiality of a disinterested spectator, and that he takes the golden rule to be the complete spirit of the ethics of utility.

Chapter 3: why be moral? Where the sanction comes from. External sanctions are the usual ones, law, opinion, God. The internal sanction is conscience, a feeling of pain at violating duty. Mill argues this feeling is largely acquired rather than innate, and then faces the obvious worry that anything acquired can be dissolved by analysis. His answer is that there is a natural basis for it in the social feelings of mankind, the desire to be in unity with our fellow creatures, which grows stronger as societies develop.

Chapter 4: the proof. Mill says at the start that first principles do not admit of proof in the ordinary sense, and then offers what he calls considerations capable of determining the intellect.

The argument runs: the only evidence that something is visible is that people see it, and likewise the only evidence that something is desirable is that people desire it. Each person desires their own happiness. Therefore happiness is a good to that person, and the general happiness a good to the aggregate of persons. He then deals with the objection that people desire other things too, arguing that virtue, money and fame are desired as parts of happiness rather than as means to it, so nothing is desired except as a part of or means to happiness.

G. E. Moore attacked this as a plain fallacy: visible means capable of being seen, but desirable means worth desiring, so Mill has slid from what is desired to what ought to be. The further objection, about the leap from each person’s happiness to the general happiness, was pressed by Sidgwick. Mill’s defenders argue that he is not attempting a deductive proof and says so. The passage remains the most-discussed page in the book.

Chapter 5: justice. The longest chapter and the best. Mill takes the strongest objection to his theory, that justice feels categorical and independent of consequences, and concedes its force before answering it.

He surveys what we call just and unjust, legal rights, moral rights, desert, breach of faith, impartiality, equality, and finds no common thread in the content. Then he analyses the sentiment: it is made of two elements, the desire to punish someone who has done harm, which grows out of the natural instinct of retaliation, and the belief that there is a definite individual who has been wronged. What distinguishes justice from other obligations is the presence of an assignable right.

And why do those rights feel so absolute? Because what they protect is security, the most vital of all interests, the one without which nothing else can be enjoyed for a moment. The urgency of the feeling is proportional to the importance of the interest, and that is why justice seems different in kind when it is different in degree.

How to read it

Read chapter 2 and chapter 5, in that order, and give chapter 5 as much time as chapter 2. It is the part that answers the strongest objection and it is routinely skipped.

Read chapter 4 knowing the standard attack, and decide whether Mill is offering a proof or something weaker that he has flagged as weaker.

Read it next to On Liberty and notice the strain. In that book Mill defends individual liberty in terms that sound like rights and then insists that his case rests on utility after all, taken broadly and anchored in what he calls the lasting interests of a progressive species. Whether the two books are consistent is the main question in Mill scholarship.

Read Bentham to see what Mill is amending. Bentham’s willingness to treat pushpin as good as poetry, provided the quantity of pleasure is equal, is the position the higher pleasures argument exists to escape.

The pressure point to watch: if one pleasure is better than another for reasons other than amount of pleasure, then the standard is no longer pleasure alone, and the theory may have been abandoned in the act of defending it.

Questions it raises

• Can pleasures differ in quality without smuggling in a standard other than pleasure?
• The test of a higher pleasure is what competent judges prefer. What makes a judge competent, and who decides?
• Is the proof in chapter 4 a fallacy, a rhetorical gesture, or something better than either?
• If motives are irrelevant to rightness, is utilitarianism missing something about what makes a person good?
• Justice is explained as utility plus the feeling of retaliation plus an assignable right. Does that account for why we think an innocent person may not be punished even when it would help everyone?
• Mill asks us to be as impartial as a disinterested spectator between our own happiness and everyone else’s. Is that a reasonable demand to make of a person?