In Utilitarianism, John Stuart Mill continually references his critics in an attempt to show that all other ethical systems ultimately rely on utilitarianism’s first principles: no matter how deeply they elaborate their moral values, at the end of the day all ethical theories see happiness and utility maximization as inherently good, thereby corroborating utilitarianism’s core idea. Non-utilitarians either use utilitarian principles to decide between competing moral values (for instance, when deciding whether stealing is permissible in order to save a life) or ultimately base their instincts about what is good and evil on the maximization of utility (for instance, by insisting that precisely those actions that maximize utility are just or correct). Mill shows that his critics—from skeptical laypeople to famous philosophers before him—are actually utilitarians themselves on a fundamental level. This allows him to circumvent arguments against his theory and further demonstrate that utilitarianism is the most logical, straightforward, and practically applicable moral philosophy.
Mill first takes up a number of objections to his theory in his second chapter, where he looks at his popular critics’ instinctual concerns about utilitarianism. According to Mill, these critics are not sophisticated philosophers offering competing ethical systems, but rather laypeople whose casual ethical judgments betray their misunderstanding of utilitarianism and whose instincts reveal that they ultimately agree with it. For instance, the most common objection against utilitarianism is the notion that “utility is opposed to pleasure,” when in fact utility refers to the maximization of pleasure. These critics instinctively know that pleasure is somehow connected to good and evil, but they reject Mill’s utilitarianism because they wrongly conflate his doctrine with the popular connotation of “utility” as pure functionality unconcerned with people’s feelings or desires. While they think they are attacking utilitarianism, Mill reveals, these critics are actually defending it. Similarly, later in the same chapter, Mill responds to the objection that utilitarianism would ask everyone to renounce their own happiness for the sake of others. He replies that, while self-sacrifice often leads to greater net happiness, it is not good in and of itself, since it is tragically wasteful to sacrifice oneself for the sake of nothing. Sacrifice is valuable because of what it achieves for other people—it would be pointless for everyone to self-sacrifice because there would be nobody left to enjoy the fruits of their sacrifice. So, the objection that utilitarianism implies sacrifice only makes sense because it relies on the principle of maximizing utility.
Mill’s final chapter, which interprets people’s moral instincts about justice, offers his most elaborate and powerful argument for utilitarianism’s superiority over other forms of ethical thought. Again, Mill’s central purpose is to show that, although people may initially worry that utilitarianism would tell them to ignore their moral instincts, in fact those instincts are correct—precisely because of utilitarian principles: societies maximize their citizens’ collective happiness by following their instincts about what is just and unjust. Specifically, while Mill’s critics think it would be wrong to calculate the consequences of each course of action instead of following their instincts about what is right, Mill thinks that their instincts almost always point to what is best for utility. This is because the consistent application of laws that “forbid [hu]mankind to hurt one another” is crucial to preserving public trust in institutions. For instance, while an illegal search of a suspected criminal might appear to minimize harm and maximize utility in the short term, in fact it erodes people’s sense of trust in society in the long term, and therefore it affects all people’s ability to live happy lives. Accordingly, instincts about justice point to how the consistent application of rules protects “the essentials of human well-being” and maximizes utility. The difference is that, whereas Mill’s detractors believe that justice is real—that is, a specific and absolute value that can be pinned down, understood, and used to reform society—Mill thinks that the principles people cite when they talk about justice and injustice are actually reflections of the more fundamental utilitarian principle of maximizing happiness.
Mill not only shows his contemporary political opponents that his utilitarian philosophy agrees with their ethical conclusions, but he also enters a far older and more wide-reaching debate. Mill demonstrates how other famous ethical theories, like Kant’s rule-based deontology and Aristotle’s theory of virtue ethics, ultimately have to appeal to utilitarian principles. Above all, Mill makes frequent implicit references to Kant. In short, Kant thought that morality needed to be based in a priori, universal principles that inherently applied to all human beings—but Mill argues that Kant had no “rule for deciding between [his] various principles when they conflict,” and could only settle such questions by looking at what was best for the greater good. Similarly, Mill responds to the other most prominent theory of ethics, the Aristotelian notion that personal virtue (or character) is the ultimate defining feature of good and evil. Mill argues that virtue is an important ingredient of a utilitarian philosophy, but not “good in itself.” Like justice, virtue is good only because it is a “means to the ultimate end” of happiness: people should be virtuous because the love of virtue is the mindset “most conducive to the general happiness.” Therefore, while Kant and Aristotle are usually correct about what is right and wrong, they simply miss the first principle behind their correct ethical instincts, just like all the less-sophisticated critics Mill answers in his second and final chapters. In this short book, then, Mill manages to answer not only the critics who worry that utilitarianism means endless self-sacrifice and the political thinkers who wonder what a seemingly case-by-case utilitarian philosophy would mean for societies whose justice systems are based in systems of blanket moral rules—but also the most respected moral philosophers in European history.
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Criticism and the Principles of Utility Quotes in Utilitarianism
It is not my purpose to criticize these thinkers; but I cannot help referring, for illustration, to a systematic treatise by one of the most illustrious of them, the Metaphysics of Ethics by Kant. This remarkable man, whose system of thought will long remain one of the landmarks in the history of philosophical speculation, does, in the treatise in question, lay down a universal first principle as the origin and ground of moral obligation; it is this: “So act that the rule on which thou actest would admit of being adopted as a law by all rational beings.” But when he begins to deduce from this precept any of the actual duties of morality, he fails, almost grotesquely, to show that there would be any contradiction, any logical (not to say physical) impossibility, in the adoption by all rational beings of the most outrageously immoral rules of conduct. All he shows is that the consequences of their universal adoption would be such as no one would choose to incur.
A state of exalted pleasure lasts only moments or in some cases, and with some intermissions, hours or days, and is the occasional brilliant flash of enjoyment, not its permanent and steady flame. Of this the philosophers who have taught that happiness is the end of life were as fully aware as those who taunt them. The happiness which they meant was not a life of rapture, but moments of such, in an existence made up of few and transitory pains, many and various pleasures, with a decided predominance of the active over the passive, and having as the foundation of the whole not to expect more from life than it is capable of bestowing. A life thus composed, to those who have been fortunate enough to obtain it, has always appeared worthy of the name of happiness.
I must again repeat what the assailants of utilitarianism seldom have the justice to acknowledge, that the happiness which forms the utilitarian standard of what is right in conduct is not the agent’s own happiness but that of all concerned. As between his own happiness and that of others, utilitarianism requires him to be as strictly impartial as a disinterested and benevolent spectator. In the golden rule of Jesus of Nazareth, we read the complete spirit of the ethics of utility. “To do as you would be done by,” and “to love your neighbor as yourself,” constitute the ideal perfection of utilitarian morality. As the means of making the nearest approach to this ideal, utility would enjoin, first, that laws and social arrangements should place the happiness or (as, speaking practically, it may be called) the interest of every individual as nearly as possible in harmony with the interest of the whole; and, secondly, that education and opinion, which have so vast a power over human character, should so use that power as to establish in the mind of every individual an indissoluble association between his own happiness and the good of the whole, especially between his own happiness and the practice of such modes of conduct, negative and positive, as regard for the universal happiness prescribes; so that not only he may be unable to conceive the possibility of happiness to himself, consistently with conduct opposed to the general good, but also that a direct impulse to promote the general good may be in every individual one of the habitual motives of action, and the sentiments connected therewith may fill a large and prominent place in every human being’s sentient existence.
The internal sanction of duty, whatever our standard of duty may be, is one and the same—a feeling in our own mind; a pain, more or less intense, attendant on violation of duty, which in properly cultivated moral natures rises, in the more serious cases, into shrinking from it as an impossibility. This feeling, when disinterested and connecting itself with the pure idea of duty, and not with some particular form of it, or with any of the merely accessory circumstances, is the essence of conscience.
Happiness is not an abstract idea but a concrete whole; and these are some of its parts.
It results from the preceding considerations that there is in reality nothing desired except happiness. Whatever is desired otherwise than as a means to some end beyond itself, and ultimately to happiness, is desired as itself a part of happiness, and is not desired for itself until it has become so. Those who desire virtue for its own sake desire it either because the consciousness of it is a pleasure, or because the consciousness of being without it is a pain, or for both reasons united; as in truth the pleasure and pain seldom exist separately, but almost always together—the same person feeling pleasure in the degree of virtue attained, and pain in not having attained more. If one of these gave him no pleasure, and the other no pain, he would not love or desire virtue, or would desire it only for the other benefits which it might produce to himself or to persons whom he cared for.
In all ages of speculation one of the strongest obstacles to the reception of the doctrine that utility or happiness is the criterion of right and wrong has been drawn from the idea of justice.
