JONH STUART MILL (J.
S MILL)
John Stuart Mill was a 19th century philosopher known primarily for his ethical
philosophy of utilitarianism.
BIOGRAPHY:
John Stuart Mill was born in London on 20 May 1806. His father was James
Mill, a Scottish philosopher who gave his son an intensive education, beginning
with the study of Greek at the age of three. His father was friendly with Jeremy
Bentham, whose utilitarian philosophy was a huge influence on Mill.
In 1822, Mill was given a job in the examiner's office of the East India
Company, where his father also worked. He was employed by the company for
more than 30 years, eventually becoming head of his department, but his job
allowed him plenty of time for writing.
At the age of 21, Mill suffered a nervous breakdown. He turned to poetry for
consolation, particularly that of William Wordsworth. He also began to shape
his own philosophical views. In his writing, Mill championed individual liberty
against the authority of the state. He believed that an action was right provided
it maximised the greatest happiness of the greatest number of people.
In 1851, Mill married Harriet Taylor. They had been close friends for 20 years,
but were only able to marry when her first husband died. She was a great
influence on his work, particularly in the area of women's rights, of which she
was an early advocate. She died in 1858 and the following year he published
'On Liberty', his most famous work, which they had written together and which
he dedicated to her.
In 1858, following the Indian Mutiny, the East India Company was
dissolved and its functions taken over by the British government.
Now without a job, Mill moved to Avignon in France. He returned in
1865 when he was elected as member of parliament for Westminster.
He was considered a radical in parliament because of his support for
equality for women, compulsory education, birth control and land
reform in Ireland.
Mill was not re-elected in the general election of 1868, so he returned to France.
He divided his time between Avignon and London, studying and writing. He
died on 7 May 1873.
Utilitarianism (1863):
Another maneuver in his battle with intuitionism came when Mill published
Utilitarianism (1861) in installments in Fraser’s Magazine (it was later brought
out in book form in 1863). It offers a candidate for a first principle of morality,
a principle that provides us with a criterion distinguishing right and wrong. The
utilitarian candidate is the principle of utility, which holds 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.”
1. History of the Principle of Utility
By Mill’s time, the principle of utility possessed a long history stretching back
to the 1730’s (with roots going further back to Hobbes, Locke, and even to
Epicurus). In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, it had been explicitly
invoked by three British intellectual factions. Though all may have agreed that
an action’s consequences for the general happiness were to dictate its rightness
or wrongness, the reasons behind the acceptance of that principle and the uses to
which the principle was put varied greatly.
The earliest supporters of the principle of utility were the religious utilitarians
represented by, among others, John Gay, John Brown, Soame Jenyns, and, most
famously, William Paley, whose 1785 The Principles of Moral and Political
Philosophy was one of the most frequently re-printed and well read books of
moral thought of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries (to Mill’s
dismay, Bentham’s utilitarianism was often conflated with Paley’s). Religious
utilitarianism was very popular among the educated classes and dominated in
the universities until the 1830’s. These thinkers were all deeply influenced by
Locke’s empiricism and psychological hedonism and often stood opposed to the
competing moral doctrines of Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, Clarke, and Wollaston.
The religious utilitarians looked to the Christian God to address a basic
problem, namely how to harmonize the interests of individuals, who are
motivated by their own happiness, with the interests of the society as a whole.
Once we understand that what we must do is what God wills (because of God’s
power of eternal sanction) and that God wills the happiness of his creatures,
morality and our own self-interest will be seen to overlap. God guarantees that
an individual’s self-interest lies in virtue, in furthering the happiness of others.
Without God and his sanctions of eternal punishment and reward, it would be
hard to find motives that “are likely to be found sufficient to withhold men from
the gratification of lust, revenge, envy, ambition, avarice.” (Paley 2002 [1785],
39). As we shall see in a moment, another possible motivation for caring about
the general happiness—this one non-religious—is canvassed by Mill in Chapter
Three of Utilitarianism.
In contrast to religious utilitarianism, which had few aspirations to be a moral
theory that revises ordinary moral attitudes, the two late-eighteenth century
secular versions of utilitarianism grew out of various movements for reform.
The principle of utility—and the correlated commitments to happiness as the
only intrinsically desirable end and to the moral equivalency of the happiness of
different individuals—was itself taken to be an instrument of reform.
One version of secular utilitarianism was represented by William Godwin
(husband of Mary Wollstonecraft and father of Mary Shelley), who achieved
great notoriety with the publication of his Political Justice of 1793. Though his
fame (or infamy) was relatively short-lived, Godwin’s use of the principle of
utility for the cause of radical political and social critique began the
identification of utilitarianism with anti-religiosity and with dangerous
democratic values.
The second version of secular utilitarianism, and the one that inspired Mill,
arose from the work of Jeremy Bentham. Bentham, who was much more
successful than Godwin at building a movement around his ideas, employed the
principle of utility as a device of political, social, and legal criticism. It is
important to note, however, that Bentham’s interest in the principle of utility did
not arise from concern about ethical theory as much as from concern about
legislative and legal reform.
This history enables us to understand Mill’s invocation of the principle of utility
in its polemical context—Mill’s support of that principle should not be taken as
mere intellectual exercise. In the realm of politics, the principle of utility served
to bludgeon opponents of reform. First and foremost, reform meant extension of
the vote. But it also meant legal reform, including overhaul of the common law
system and of legal institutions, and varieties of social reform, especially of
institutions that tended to favor aristocratic and moneyed interests. Though
Bentham and Godwin intended it to have this function in the late eighteenth
century, utilitarianism became influential only when tied with the political
machinery of the Radical party, which had particular prominence on the English
scene in the 1830’s.
In the realm of ethical debate, Mill took his opponents to be the “intuitionists”
led by Sedgwick and Whewell, both Cambridge men. They were the
contemporary representatives of an ethical tradition that understood its history
as tied to Butler, Reid, Coleridge, and turn of the century German thought
(especially that of Kant). Though intuitionists and members of Mill’s a
posteriori or “inductive” school recognize “to a great extent, the same moral
laws,” they differ “as to their evidence and the source from which they derive
their authority. According to the one opinion, the principles of morals are
evident a priori, requiring nothing to command assent except that the meaning
of the terms be understood. According to the other doctrine, right and wrong, as
well as truth and falsehood, are questions of observation and experience.”
The chief danger represented by the proponents of intuitionism was not from the
ethical content of their theories per se, which defended honesty, justice,
benevolence, etc., but from the kinds of justifications offered for their precepts
and the support such a view lent to the social and political status quo. As we
saw in the discussion of the System of Logic and with reference to Mill’s
statements in his Autobiography, he takes intuitionism to be dangerous because
it allegedly enables people to ratify their own prejudices as moral principles—in
intuitionism, there is no “external standard” by which to adjudicate differing
moral claims (for example, Mill understood Kant’s categorical imperative as
getting any moral force it possesses either from considerations of utility or from
mere prejudice hidden by hand-waving). The principle of utility, alternatively,
evaluates moral claims by appealing to the external standard of pain and
pleasure. It presented each individual for moral consideration as someone
capable of suffering and enjoyment.
2. Basic Argument
Mill’s defense of the principle of utility in Utilitarianism includes five chapters.
In the first, Mill sets out the problem, distinguishes between the intuitionist and
“inductive” schools of morality, and also suggests limits to what we can expect
from proofs of first principles of morality. He argues that “ questions of
ultimate ends are not amenable to direct proof .”.All that can be done is to
present considerations “capable of determining the intellect either to give or
withhold its assent to the doctrine; and this is equivalent to proof.” Ultimately,
he will want to prove in Chapter Four the basis for the principle of utility—that
happiness is the only intrinsically desirable thing—by showing that we
spontaneously accept it on reflection. (Skorupski 1989, 8). It is rather easy to
show that happiness is something we desire intrinsically, not for the sake of
other things. What is hard is to show that it is the only thing we intrinsically
desire or value. Mill agrees that we do not always value things like virtue as
means or instruments to happiness. We do sometimes seem to value such things
for their own sakes. Mill contends, however, that on reflection we will see that
when we appear to value them for their own sakes we are actually valuing them
as parts of happiness (rather than as intrinsically desirable on their own or as
means to happiness). That is, we value virtue, freedom, etc. as things that make
us happy by their mere possession. This is all the proof we can give that
happiness is our only ultimate end; it must rely on introspection and on careful
and honest examination of our feelings and motives.
In Chapter Two, Mill corrects misconceptions about the principle of utility. One
misconception is that utilitarianism, by endorsing the Epicurean view “that life
has…no higher end than pleasure” is a “doctrine worthy only of swine.” Mill
counters that “the accusation supposes human beings to be capable of no
pleasures except those of which swine are capable ” He proffers a distinction
(one not found in Bentham) between higher and lower pleasures, with higher
pleasures including mental, aesthetic, and moral pleasures. When we are
evaluating whether or not an action is good by evaluating the happiness that we
can expect to be produced by it, he argues that higher pleasures should be taken
to be in kind (rather than by degree) preferable to lower pleasures. This has led
scholars to wonder whether Mill’s utilitarianism differs significantly from
Bentham’s and whether Mill’s distinction between higher and lower pleasures
creates problems for our ability to know what will maximize aggregate
happiness.
A second objection to the principle of utility is that “it is exacting too much to
require that people shall always act from the inducement of promoting the
general interest of society.” Mill replies that this is to “confound the rule of
action with the motive of it.” Ethics is supposed to tell us what our duties are,
“but no system of ethics requires that the sole motive of all we do shall be a
feeling of duty; on the contrary, ninety-nine hundredths of all our actions are
done from other motives, and rightly so done if the rule of duty does not
condemn them.” To do the right thing, in other words, we do not need to be
constantly motivated by concern for the general happiness. The large majority
of actions intend the good of individuals (including ourselves) rather than the
good of the world. Yet the world’s good is made up of the good of the
individuals that constitute it and unless we are in the position of, say, a
legislator, we act properly by looking to private rather than to public good. Our
attention to the public well-being usually needs to extend only so far as is
required to know that we aren’t violating the rights of others.
Chapter Three addresses the topic of motivation again by focusing on the
following question: What is the source of our obligation to the principle of
utility? What, in other words, motivates us to act in ways approved of by the
principle of utility? With any moral theory, one must remember that ‘ought
implies can,’ i.e. that if moral demands are to be legitimate, we must be the kind
of beings that can meet those demands. Mill defends the possibility of a strong
utilitarian conscience (i.e. a strong feeling of obligation to the general
happiness) by showing how such a feeling can develop out of the natural desire
we have to be in unity with fellow creatures—a desire that enables us to care
what happens to them and to perceive our own interests as linked with theirs.
Though Chapter Two showed that we do not need to attend constantly to the
general happiness, it is nevertheless a sign of moral progress when the
happiness of others, including the happiness of those we don’t know, becomes
important to us.
Finally, Chapter Five shows how utilitarianism accounts for justice. In
particular, Mill shows how utilitarianism can explain the special status we seem
to grant to justice and to the violations of it. Justice is something we are
especially keen to defend. Mill begins by marking off morality (the realm of
duties) from expediency and worthiness by arguing that duties are those things
we think people ought to be punished for not fulfilling. He then suggests that
justice is demarcated from other areas of morality, because it includes those
duties to which others have correlative rights, “Justice implies something which
it is not only right to do, and wrong not to do, but which some individual person
can claim from us as his moral right.” Though no one has a right to my charity,
even if I have a duty to be charitable, others have rights not to have me injure
them or to have me repay what I have promised.
Critics of utilitarianism have placed special emphasis on its inability to provide
a satisfactory account of rights. For Mill, to have a right is “to have something
which society ought to defend me in the possession of. If the objector goes on to
ask why it ought, I can give no other reason than general utility.” But what if
the general utility demands that we violate your rights? The intuition that
something is wrong if your rights can be violated for the sake of the general
good provoked the great challenge to utilitarian conceptions of justice, leveled
with special force by twentieth century thinkers like John Rawls.
BIBLIOGRAPHY:
1. Sabine, History of political theory.
2. Sukhvir singh, Western political thought.
3. Barker, Greek philosophy.
4. Bayles, M. D. (1968). Contemporary Utilitarianism. Anchor Books,
Doubleday.
5. Lyons, David (1965). Forms and Limits of Utilitarianism. Oxford University
Press (UK).
6. Rosen, Frederick (2003). Classical Utilitarianism from Hume to Mill.
Routledge.
