Utilitarianism

Summary

Utilitarianism is a short defence of the ethical theory Mill inherited from Jeremy Bentham and his own father. It was first published in three instalments of Fraser's Magazine in 1861 and as a book in 1863. Mill writes less to build a system than to rescue one. His opening chapter observes that after two thousand years moralists still disagree about the first principle of right and wrong. Intuitionists and inductivists alike, he argues, quietly rely on consequences, and he cites Kant's universal law as an example. Chapter II states the creed: actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, understood as pleasure and the absence of pain. Mill then answers a series of objections. To the charge that this is 'a doctrine worthy only of swine', he replies that pleasures differ in quality as well as quantity. The verdict of 'competent judges' who have known both kinds places pleasures of intellect, feeling and moral sentiment above those of sensation; hence his line about Socrates dissatisfied and the fool satisfied. Against the claim that happiness is unattainable, he describes a realistic happiness of tranquillity and excitement. He argues that most of its obstacles, poverty and disease included, are removable by social reform and science. He insists that the standard is the general happiness, not the agent's own, and that the golden rule of Jesus expresses its spirit. He separates the rightness of an act from the worth of the motive behind it. He argues that inherited moral rules work like a ready-calculated Nautical Almanac, so no one need compute consequences afresh for every act. Chapter III asks what makes anyone feel bound by the principle. Mill's answer is the same as for any morality: external sanctions of reward and opinion, and the internal sanction of conscience. He grounds this in a cultivable 'feeling of unity' with others and cites Comte's religion of humanity. Chapter IV offers the much-criticised 'proof': the only evidence that something is desirable is that people desire it. Virtue, money, power and fame, first desired as means, become parts of happiness through association. Chapter V, the longest, takes up the strongest objection, that justice is independent of utility. Mill surveys the meanings of justice and traces the sentiment of justice to a natural impulse of retaliation, moralised by sympathy and widened to society. He concludes that justice names the most important class of social utilities: rights, which society ought to defend. The essay remains the standard introduction to consequentialist ethics, and its tensions still drive debates over welfare, rights and public policy.

Top Lessons

• Only those who know both can rank pleasures

  Mill refuses to count pleasures by intensity alone. Quality is settled by the preference of people experienced in both kinds, the same method we use to compare two pains. The test is powerful and unsettling: it gives authority to experience but risks letting the educated declare their own tastes superior.

• Right acts and good motives are different questions

  The rescuer who saves a drowning man for pay still does right; the motive bears on our view of the agent, not on the act. The distinction lets Mill answer the charge that utilitarianism demands saintly impartiality at every moment: most good actions concern a few particular people.

• Rules are the almanac of experience

  No sailor recalculates the stars at sea, and no one need test every act against the greatest happiness. Received moral rules record humanity's long experience of consequences and remain improvable. This passage is the seed of later rule-utilitarianism and of every clinical guideline that encodes outcomes into protocol.

• Means harden into ends through habit

  Money is desired at first for what it buys and later for itself; virtue can follow the same path and become part of happiness. In Chapter IV Mill adds that will is 'the child of desire' but can pass under the dominion of habit. It is an associationist psychology that explains both the miser and the person of settled virtue.

• Justice is utility at its most urgent

  Mill grants that justice feels different from expediency: sharper, more absolute, tied to retaliation. He explains that feeling instead of dismissing it. Rights protect the essentials of security, so they bind more strongly than other utilities, but not without limit. To save a life one may steal medicine or even compel the only doctor to act.

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Medical Lens

Utilitarianism is the ancestor of modern health economics and much of public-health ethics. Its welfare calculus underlies quality-adjusted life years, cost-effectiveness thresholds, triage and resource allocation, and its tension with rights in Chapter V maps onto the clash between population benefit and individual consent. Mill's insistence that pains and pleasures can only be compared by those who have felt them anticipates patient-reported outcomes and the 'disability paradox', in which people with disabilities rate their lives higher than outsiders predict. The associationist psychology of Chapter IV, inherited from James Mill and David Hartley, explains how means become ends and will becomes habit; it is an early theory of conditioning relevant to addiction. The biography matters too: Mill's depression at twenty, which he attributed to an analytic education that had worn away his feelings, lies behind the essay's stress on cultivated feeling and mental culture. That reading draws on his Autobiography and is interpretive.

• Chapter II (higher and lower pleasures)

  The competent-judge test; the claim that pains, like pleasures, can only be ranked by the experienced; the 'tender plant' of the nobler feelings that dies for want of sustenance.

• Chapter II (whether happiness is attainable)

  Tranquillity and excitement as the two constituents of a satisfied life; the 'need of excitement' as a disease; selfishness and lack of mental cultivation as the main causes of an unsatisfying life; a passing reference to Novalis's recommendation of suicide.

• Chapter II (the removable evils)

  Poverty and disease presented as largely conquerable by education, social institutions, 'proper control of noxious influences' and science; those who care for others keep their interest in life on the eve of death.

• Chapter III

  Conscience analysed as a learned feeling of pain at violating duty, encrusted with associations from childhood, religion and self-esteem.

• Chapter IV (will, desire and habit)

  Will as 'the child of desire' that can come under the dominion of habit; the example of those 'who have contracted habits of vicious or hurtful indulgence' acting against their own deliberate preference.

• Chapter V (justice and expediency)

  A duty to steal medicine or compel the only qualified doctor to save a life; rights as protection of security; the injustice of sacrificing an individual without consent for others' benefit, raised in the discussion of punishment.