Utilitarianism - Early Modern Texts

1 UtilitarianismJohn Stuart MillCopyright Jonathan Bennett 2017. All rights reserved[Brackets]enclose editorial explanations. Small dots enclose material that has been added, but can be read asthough it were part of the original text. Occasional bullets, and also indenting of passages that are not quotations,are meant as aids to grasping the structure of a sentence or a thought. Every four-point ellipsis .. indicates theomission of a brief passage that seems to present more difficulty than it is launched: September 2005 Last amended: April 2008 ContentsChapter 1: General Remarks1 Chapter 2: What Utilitarianism is4 Higher and Lower Pleasures ..5 Happiness as an Aim ..8 Self-Sacrifice .. 11 Setting the Standard too High? ..12 Is Utilitarianism Chilly? ..13 Utilitarianism as Godless ..15 Expediency ..15 Time to Calculate? ..16 Bad Faith .. 17 Chapter 3: What will motivate us to obey the principle of utility?

2 18 Chapter 4: What sort of proof can be given for the principle of utility?24 UtilitarianismJohn Stuart MillChapter 5: The connection between justice and utility28 Punishment ..38 Wages ..39 Taxation ..39iiUtilitarianismJohn Stuart Mill1: General remarksChapter 1: General RemarksLittle progress has been made towards deciding the contro-versy concerningthe criterion of right and wrong. Among allthe facts about the present condition of human knowledge,the state of this controversy is most unlike what mighthave been expected and most indicative significant of thebackward state in which theorizing on the most importantsubjects still how little progress has beenmade! From the dawn of philosophy the question concerningthesummum bonum[Latin, = the greatest good ]or, what is thesame thing, concerning the foundation of morality, has been regarded as the main problem in speculativethought, occupied the most gifted intellects, and divided them into sects and schools, vigorously war-ring against one after more than two thousand years the same discus-sions continue!

3 Philosophers still line up under the sameopposing battle-flags, and neither thinkers nor people ingeneral seem to be any nearer to being unanimous on thesubject than when young Socrates listened to old Protagorasand asserted the theory of Utilitarianism against the popularmorality of the so-called sophist (I m assuming here thatPlato s dialogue is based on a real conversation).[Except onpage 14, popular is used in this work only to mean of the people , withno implication about being liked.]It is true that similar confusion and uncertainty, andin some cases similar disagreements, exist concerning thebasic principles of all the sciences even including the onethat is thought to be the most certain of them, namelymathematics without doing much harm, and usually with-out doinganyharm, to the trustworthiness of the conclu-sions of those sciences.

4 This seems odd, but it can beexplained: the detailed doctrines of a science usually arenot deduced from what are called its first principles and don t need those principles to make them evident. If thisweren t so, there would be no science more precarious, andnone whose conclusions were more weakly based, thanalgebra. This doesn t get any of its certainty from whatare commonly taught to learners as its elements or firstprinciples , because these, as laid down by some of its mosteminent teachers, are as full of fictions as English law and asfull of mysteries as theology. The truths that are ultimatelyaccepted as thefirstprinciples of a science are really thelastresults of metaphysical analysis of the basic notions thatare involve in the science in question. Their relation to thescience is not that of foundations to a building but of rootsto a tree, which can do their job equally well if they are neverdug down to and exposed to light.

5 But though in science theparticular truths precede the general theory, the reverse ofthat might be expected with a practical art such as moralsor legislation.[Here an art is any activity requiring a set of rules ortechniques, and practical means having to do with human conduct .]All action is for the sake of some end; and it seems natural tosuppose that rules of action must take their whole characterand colour from the end at which actions aim. When we arepursuing something, a clear and precise conception ofwhatwe are pursuing would seem to be the first thing we need,rather than being the last we are to look forward to. Onewould think that a test or criterion of right and wrong mustbe the means of discovering what is right or wrong, and not a consequence of having already discovered Stuart Mill1: General remarksThe difficulty can t be avoided by bringing in the popu-lar theory of a natural moral faculty, a sense or instinctinforming us of right and wrong.

6 For one thing, the criterion dispute includes a dispute about whether thereisany suchmoral instinct. And, anyway, believers in it who haveanyphilosophical ability have been obliged to abandon theidea that it the moral faculty or moral sense or moralintuition picks out what is right or wrong in this or that particular case in the way that our other senses pick upthe sight or sound that is actually present in the particularconcrete situation . Our moral faculty, according to all thoseof its friends who are entitled to count as thinkers, suppliesus only with the general principles of moral judgments; itbelongs withreasonand not withsense-perception; what wecan expect from it are the abstract doctrines of morality,and not the perception of morality in particular concretesituations. The intuitionist school of ethics insists on thenecessity of general laws just as much as does the inductiveschool (as we might label it).

7 They both agree that knowing the morality of an individual action is not a matter of directperception but of the application of a law to an individualcase. The two schools mostly agree also in what moral lawsthey recognize; but they differ on what makes those moral laws evident, and what give them their to the intuitionists, the principles of morals areevidenta priori: if you know the meanings of the terms inwhich they are expressed, you ll have to assent to to the inductivists, right and wrong are questionsof observation and experience just as truth and falsehoodare. But both schools hold equally that morality must bededuced from principles; and the intuitive school affirmas strongly as the inductive does that there is ascienceofmorals an organized system containing basic axiomsfrom which the rest can be rigorously deduced . Yet theyseldom attempt to provide a list of thea prioriprinciples thatare to serve as the premises of the science; and they almostnever make any effort to reduce those various principles toone first principle, one first all-purpose ground of , they either treat the ordinary precepts of moralsas though they hada prioriauthority or lay down as theall-purpose groundwork of those maxims some general moralprinciple that is much less obviously authoritative than themaxims themselves and hasn t ever been widely to support their claims there ought to be one fundamentalprinciple or law at the root of all morality; or if there are sev-eral of them, they should be clearly rank-ordered in relationto one another, and there should be aself-evidentprincipleor rule for deciding amongst them when they conflict in aparticular case.

8 The lack of any clear recognition of an ultimate standardmay have corrupted the moral beliefs of mankind or madethem uncertain; on the other hand, the bad effects of this de-ficiency may have been moderated in practice. To determinehow far things have gone in the former way and how far inthe latter would require a complete critical survey of pastand present ethical doctrine. But it wouldn t be hard to showthat whatever steadiness or consistency mankind s moralbeliefshaveachieved has been mainly due to the silent influ-ence of a standard that hasn t been consciously the absence of an acknowledged first principle, ethics hasbeen not so much a guide to men in forming their moralviews as a consecration of the views they actually have; butmen s views both for and against are greatly influenced bywhateffects on their happinessthey suppose things to have;and so the principle of utility or, as Bentham eventuallycalled it, the greatest happiness principle has had a largeshare in forming the moral doctrines even of those who2 UtilitarianismJohn Stuart Mill1: General remarksmost scornfully reject its authority.

9 Andeveryschool ofthought admits that the influence of actions on happinessis a very significant and even predominant consideration inmany of the details of morals, however unwilling they maybe to allow the production of happiness as the fundamentalprinciple of morality and the source of moral obligation. Imight go much further and say thata priorimoralists can tdo without utilitarian arguments (I am not talking about theones who don t think they need to argue at all!). It is not mypresent purpose to criticise these thinkers; but I can t refrainfrom bringing in as an illustration a systematic treatise byone of the most illustrious of thea priorimoralists, theMetaphysics of Ethicsby Kant. This remarkable man, whosesystem of thought will long remain one of the landmarksin the history of philosophical thought, lays down in thattreatise a universal first principle as the origin and groundof moral obligation:Act in such a way that the rule on which you actcould be adopted as a law by all rational when he begins to derive any of the actual duties ofmorality from this principle he fails, almost grotesquely, toshow that there would be any contradiction any logicalimpossibility, or even any physical impossibility in theadoption by all rational beings of the most outrageouslyimmoral rules of conduct.

10 All he shows is that the universaladoption of such rules would have consequences that no-onewould choose to bring the present work I shall, without further discussionof the other theories, try to contribute something towardsthe understanding and appreciation of the Utilitarian orHappiness theory, and towards such proof as it can be this can t be proof in the ordinary and popularmeaning of that word. Questions about ultimate ends can tbe settled by direct proof. You can prove something to begood only by showing that it is a means to something thatis admitted without proof to be good. The art of medicine isproved to be good by its conducing to health, but how is itpossible to prove that health is good? The art of music isgood because (among other reasons) it produces pleasure,but what proof could be given that pleasure is good? So if itis claimed that there is a comprehensive formula that covers every-thing that is good in itself, and whatever else is good is not good as an end but as ameans to something that is covered by the formula ,the formula may be accepted or rejected but it can t begiven what is commonly called a proof.