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John Stuart Mill is considered the most influential English-speaking philosopher of the nineteenth century. He defended the freedom of individuals against absolute state power. He was also an outspoken feminist, publishing The Subjection of Women in to promote equality between men and women. In addition to being a philosopher, he was also a political economist and politician. Mill was a child prodigy, raised studying the tenets of utilitarian philosophy with his father James Mill and the founder of the movement Jeremy Bentham.
A central theme throughout Mill's work is the notion that individuals should strive to improve the common good, bettering the lives of all people. In this class, we will be reading portions from Chapter 2 of Mill's book, On Utilitiarianism. The book was written to explain utilitarianism and defend it against criticism.
You can read a PDF of the text here if you prefer to work through that the password is in your instructor's email. The doctrine that the basis of morals is utility or the greatest happiness principle, a good man is hard to find essays that actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong in proportion as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness.
By 'happiness' is meant pleasure and the absence of pain; by 'unhappiness' is meant pain and the lack of pleasure. To give a clear view of the moral standard set up by the theory, much more needs to be said, especially about what things the doctrine includes in the ideas of pain and pleasure, a good man is hard to find essays, and to what extent it leaves this as an open question.
U tilitarianism is the theory that actions are right insofar as they produce happiness and wrong insofar as they produce unhappiness. For instance, suppose Jeffrey is choosing between going to the movies tonight or staying home and meditating. If Jeffrey enjoys the movies, but does not enjoy meditating, and nobody else will be affected, then he should go see a movie because it creates more happiness.
Pursuit of happiness is the relevant reason in deciding what to do. Think about this in your own life. Why do you choose burritos for dinner rather than wheat bran?
Why do you pay money for aspirin when you have a headache? We constantly look for trades that will increase pleasure and reduce suffering. Utility is the property in an object, action, or other activity that produces pleasure.
Disutility is the property that produces the opposite of pleasure pain, boredom, frustration, etc. The goal of utilitarianism is to try to maximize utility, thereby creating the most good for the greatest number of people.
The greatest happiness principle holds that we should pursue actions that produce the greatest amount of overall happiness. Crucially, utilitarians think we must take into account the utility of everyone everything affected by a given decision. We should maximize overall utility. Utilitarians think everything that experiences pleasure or pain should have its interests count when determining what to do. Sentience is the capacity of a creature to experience utility. People are sentient, as are many animals, a good man is hard to find essays.
Crucially, different creatures even different individuals might have more or a good man is hard to find essays of a capacity to experience pain or pleasure. Sentience can come in degrees.
Even individual people or animals might be more or less capable of experiencing levels of utility based on their experiences. For utilitarians, determining the right thing to do is a matter of adding up the potential utility an action will produce for the sentient creatures affected. For instance, suppose Jeffrey wants to go on vacation, but nobody is available to feed his cat Whiskers. Determining whether the vacation is the right thing to do means weighing Jeffrey's potential vacation pleasure against Whiskers pain at going without food and water.
Jeremy Bentham called this the "Felicific Calculus" -- the mathematical approach to happiness that characterizes utilitarian thinking. Utilitarianism has a view of the good life which Mill argues for, namely:.
that pleasure and freedom from pain are the only things that are desirable as endsand that everything that is desirable at all is so either for the pleasure inherent in it or as means to the promotion of pleasure and the prevention of pain.
The utilitarian system has as many things that are desirable, in one way or the other, as any other theory of morality. Remember the difference between instrumental and final ends from our discussion of Aristotle. Instrumental ends assist you in reaching another end or goal, while a final end is the reason we are pursuing something for its own sake. In utilitarianism, happiness is the final end for any action and everything else is an instrumental end.
Example: Jim's favorite pastime is cooking. He is not paid for it, does not receive any recognition, or any other type of reward for his work. He simply cooks for the sake of cooking, with no other purpose. Example: While Robin may be attending college so she can get a good job and have a successful life, the end goal of those actions are driven by the sense of joy and happiness of being successful.
Mill assumes that eventually if we keep asking the "why am I doing this? Premise 1 : Crucially, Mill like Aristotle assumes that there is some kind of intrinsic value all of our actions aim at. Value is not something we each determine for ourselves or something that is always extrinsic -- always dependent on other goals. Is this right? Premise 2 assumes we are ultimately driven by concern for pleasure.
Are there important projects in life that ultimately end in suffering, or at the very least have goals totally divorced from pleasure? Remember that for Aristotlethe goal of human life is to rationally pursue happiness over the course of a life. This happiness is defined by an individual's function, a good man is hard to find essays, which is achieved by living virtuously. This leads to eudaimonia. This is different from utilitarianism. For Mill, the final end is pursuing the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people, no matter a good man is hard to find essays it is "vicious" or "virtuous" by other standards.
If some action is considered a vice by Aristotle but produces more happiness, Mill's utilitarianism would endorse that action.
Aristotle also tends to focus more on the individual's development, whereas Mill is concerned with happiness overall. But aren't some kinds of pleasure just better than others? For instance listening to jazz rather than listening to Polka music? Or getting pleasure from reading Shakespeare rather than watching silly cat videos? In this section, a good man is hard to find essays, Mill explains that there are different levels of pleasures that ultimately weigh more less in our calculations about what to do.
Epicurus was an early Greek philosopher who argued that seeking moderate pleasure is the greatest good and pathway to a good life. It is an early version a good man is hard to find essays utilitarianism. Every Epicurean theory of life that we know of assigns to the pleasures of the intellect, of the feelings and imagination and of the moral sentiments a much higher value as pleasures than to those of mere sensation.
But it must be admitted that when utilitarian writers have said that mental pleasures are better than bodily ones they have mainly based this on mental pleasures being more permanent, safer, less costly and so on—i.
from their circumstantial advantages rather than from their intrinsic nature. And on all these points utilitarians have fully proved their case; but they could, quite consistently with their basic principle, have taken the other route—occupying the higher ground, a good man is hard to find essays, as we might say. It is quite compatible with the principle of utility to recognize that some kinds of pleasure are more desirable and more valuable than others.
In estimating the value of anything else, we take into account quality as well as quantity; it would be absurd if the value of pleasures were supposed to depend on quantity alone. What, according to you, makes one pleasure more valuable than another, merely as a pleasure, if not its being greater in amount?
Pleasure P1 is more desirable than pleasure P2 if: all or almost all people who have had experience of both give a decided preference to P1, irrespective of any feeling that they ought to prefer it. A virtue ethicist like Aristotle thinks there is a philosophical difference between pleasures which are worth pursuing as valuable the pleasures that correspond with virtue and pleasures not worth pursuing because they do not contribute to virtue.
For example, jazz is better than Polka, because the complexity of jazz develops our rational capacities. Polka does not.
Shakespeare develops our imagination and empathy. Cat videos on the Internet, however funnydo not. The difference between higher and lower pleasures is based on a theory of what humans need to flourish regardless of the data of what gives us pleasure. Mill thinks that different activities can be psychologically demonstrated to produce better forms of utility in us, and this is how he will distinguish jazz and polka, Shakespeare and YouTube.
We can distinguish higher and lower pleasures by studying how humans experience pleasure and which activities produce more lasting pleasure or better qualities of experience. This theory of higher and lower order pleasures helps Mill defend his overall moral theory -- that we should aim at ambitious forms of human development.
The view depends on three assumptions. First we ought to aim to produce the greatest overall happiness. Second, higher order pleasures will produce more overall happiness. Third, higher order pleasures require recognition of rights, human dignity, development, etc, a good man is hard to find essays. Now, it is an unquestionable fact that the way of life that employs the higher faculties is strongly preferred to the way of life that caters only to the lower ones by people who are equally acquainted with both and equally capable of appreciating and enjoying both.
Few human creatures would agree to be changed into any of the lower animals in return for a promise of the fullest allowance of animal pleasures; no intelligent human being would consent to be a fool, no educated person would prefer to be an ignoramus, no person of feeling and conscience would rather be selfish and base, even if they were convinced that the fool, the dunce or the rascal is better satisfied with his life than they are with theirs If they ever think they would, it is only in cases of unhappiness so extreme that to escape from it they would exchange their situation for almost any other, however undesirable they may think the other to be.
But the most appropriate label is a sense of dignity. All human beings a good man is hard to find essays this sense in one form or another, and how strongly a person has it is roughly proportional to how well endowed he is with the higher faculties.
Anyone who thinks that this preference takes place at a sacrifice of happiness—anyone who denies that the superior being is, other things being anywhere near equal, happier than the inferior one—is confusing two very different ideas, those of happiness and of contentment.
It is true of course that the being whose capacities of enjoyment a good man is hard to find essays low has the greatest chance of having them fully satisfied and thus of being contented; and a highly endowed being will always feel that any happiness that he can look for, given how the world is, is imperfect. It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool or the pig think otherwise, that is because they know only their own side of the question.
The other party to the comparison knows both sides. On a question as to which is the better worth having of two pleasures, or which of two ways of life is the more agreeable to the feelings apart from its moral attributes and from its consequencesthe judgment of those who are qualified by knowledge of both must be admitted as final—or, if they differ among themselves, the judgment of the majority among them, a good man is hard to find essays.
And we can be encouraged to accept this judgment concerning the quality of pleasures by the fact that there is no other tribunal to appeal to even on the question of quantity. What means do we have for deciding which is the more a good man is hard to find essays of two pains, or the more intense of two pleasurable sensations, other than the collective opinion of those who are familiar with both?
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Unable to find his suit, a short argument ensues between he and his wife. Lucius's position that saving the city is "for the greater good" aligns with Mill's thought that someone's self-sacrifice of their own happiness, such as the dinner party, is justified if it improves the overall wellbeing of society, such as saving the city The insights on team jelling and work environment have changed my thinking and teaching.” — Frederick P. Brooks, Jr., Author of 'The Mythical Man-Month'. "When Microsoft started growing seriously in the s, everybody there had read The Mythical Man-Month, one of the classics of software management Without a word, he began to eat, aching for food after a long day of work. My second grade self couldn't help but notice the juxtaposition in play: a man in old, well-worn clothes, with dusty hair and hands not completely cleaned, dining in a room meticulously and somewhat ornately furnished, the fruit of his labor. We both sat there in silence
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