Beyond his defense of utilitarianism, John Stuart Mill is largely remembered for championing the ideas of individual freedom, civil rights, and unbridled capitalism that became foundational to what the English-speaking world often calls liberal democracy. While his ideas are now often used to argue for protecting individual property rights rather than pursuing what seem to be the interests of the majority, throughout Utilitarianism Mill consistently thinks about how to make society benefit as many of its citizens as possible. He envisioned a society in which citizens coalesced around collective interests, values, and institutions, and he conceived his central project in life as promoting the creation of such a society through utilitarianism. Accordingly, this book continually examines what utilitarian philosophy implies for politics and advances a vision of government designed specifically to look out for the common good by cultivating the greatest happiness for all citizens through the promotion of education and individual rights.
Because utilitarianism takes everyone’s happiness as its central value, moral thinking is always social thinking for Mill, and elaborating a utilitarian philosophy also requires explaining how to build the society most conducive to the general good. Utilitarianism defines utility as the collective happiness of all people, considered as equals. This is because, if happiness is an intrinsic good (which Mill argues that it is), then all happiness is equally valuable. All people are capable of experiencing pleasure, pain, and happiness, so all of their interests must be taken into account. Therefore, from Mill’s perspective as an ethical thinker trying to define what is good and bad for humans, he must look at societies as well as individuals. While the vast majority of individual actions affect very few people, people must consider everyone they affect when their actions do implicate others. Namely, those in positions of power must think about the broad effects of their actions. Since Mill thinks that utilitarianism is the best guide to morally correct action, he of course thinks that the politically powerful should follow it—and must therefore look at the collective good when designing and implementing policies for their societies.
Mill begins transitioning from an individual moral perspective to a social one by examining what makes people obey moral rules. This line of inquiry leads him to advocate for the perpetuation of moral conscience through public institutions. He sees two explanations for why people follow moral rules: the “external sanction” of threatened punishment and the “internal sanction” of the individual moral conscience. While he agrees that the former can be used to promote moral behavior, as through a justice system, he believes that the latter is more important. Namely, while some people only avoid committing violent crimes because they fear punishment from the state or their communities, most avoid such crimes because they see them as morally wrong. Mill concludes that, if utilitarians want to promote the collective good, they should try to spread moral conscience. And he believes that this conscience is largely formed through “education and opinion.” Common sense reflects “the social feelings of mankind,” so in practice, it usually aligns with what is actually right (even if the people who follow it do not understand the first principle of utility-maximization that establishes why it is right). But in theory, people can be taught anything, or “cultivated in almost any direction,” which presents both a danger and an opportunity to utilitarianism. That is, people can be taught shoddy moral values that create an unethical society, but they can also be taught to care for one another and promote the collective utility. Therefore, Mill sees it as crucial that societies “cultivate” people’s moral consciences in order to make them see an unbreakable connection between their own happiness and that of everyone else. This is, of course, his purpose in spreading the utilitarian philosophy, so that each person learns a “feeling of unity with all the rest.” Mill thinks this feeling—as an extension of utilitarianism itself—should be “taught as a religion.”
Ultimately, Mill believes that creating a maximally happy society requires building institutions whose cornerstone is moral conscience and public trust. Specifically, he thinks these institutions must ensure access to education and protection of individual liberties. First, he advocates for public education because he thinks it not only allows the government to make people think in terms of the common good, but also gives people the level of mental cultivation necessary to appreciate life’s finer pleasures. Secondly, he argues for individual liberties because he considers them necessary to create a sense of general, collective trust: people must believe that general rules will be enforced, which in practice means laws must protect civil liberties. While he does not outline which liberties should be protected and why in this text, he does lay the groundwork for the argument he makes elsewhere.
When the full sweep of Mill’s argument is considered, from his central principle of maximizing happiness to the implications this idea has for the structure of contemporary societies, it is easy to see the essential connection between utilitarianism and classical liberalism, the two doctrines that he is famous for espousing. While both have been updated, challenged, and misinterpreted over the years, they remain at least nominally foundational to the political ideologies of most contemporary democracies. And Mill also played a crucial rule advancing them, specifically by promoting egalitarian social policies as a Member of Parliament. At the same time, it is also easy to see how one man might fall far short in attempting to declare one social structure best in every political and cultural context—and far easier still considering Mill’s day job as a colonial functionary, in which he promoted the conversion of Indian lives and labor into British profit because he believed Indians were “barbarians” with no moral value. If nothing else, the contradiction between Mill’s philosophy and his own life demonstrates the profound difficulty of exporting philosophies, even ones as supposedly universal and simple as utilitarianism, to places one has never been.
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The Common Good Quotes in Utilitarianism
Capacity for other nobler feelings is in most natures a very tender plant, easily killed, not only by hostile influences, but by mere want of sustenance; and in the majority of young persons it speedily dies away if the occupations to which their position in life has devoted them, and the society into which it has thrown them, are not favorable to keeping that higher capacity in exercise. Men lose their high aspirations as they lose their intellectual tastes, because they have not time or opportunity for indulging them; and they addict themselves to inferior pleasures, not because they deliberately prefer them, but because they are either the only ones to which they have access or the only ones which they are any longer capable of enjoying.
In a world in which there is so much to interest, so much to enjoy, and so much also to correct and improve, everyone who has this moderate amount of moral and intellectual requisites is capable of an existence which may be called enviable; and unless such a person, through bad laws or subjection to the will of others, is denied the liberty to use the sources of happiness within his reach, he will not fail to find this enviable existence, if he escapes the positive evils of life, the great sources of physical and mental suffering —such as indigence, disease, and the unkindness, worthlessness, or premature loss of objects of affection.
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 great majority of good actions are intended not for the benefit of the world, but for that of individuals, of which the good of the world is made up; and the thoughts of the most virtuous man need not on these occasions travel beyond the particular persons concerned, except so far as is necessary to assure himself that in benefiting them he is not violating the rights, that is, the legitimate and authorized expectations, of anyone else.
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.
The deeply rooted conception which every individual even now has of himself as a social being tends to make him feel it one of his natural wants that there should be harmony between his feelings and aims and those of his fellow creatures. If differences of opinion and of mental culture make it impossible for him to share many of their actual feelings—perhaps make him denounce and defy those feelings—he still needs to be conscious that his real aim and theirs do not conflict; that he is not opposing himself to what they really wish for, namely, their own good, but is, on the contrary, promoting it. This feeling in most individuals is much inferior in strength to their selfish feelings, and is often wanting altogether. But to those who have it, it possesses all the characters of a natural feeling. It does not present itself to their minds as a superstition of education or a law despotically imposed by the power of society, but as an attribute which it would not be well for them to be without. This conviction is the ultimate sanction of the greatest happiness morality.
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.
The sentiment of justice, in that one of its elements which consists of the desire to punish, is thus, I conceive, the natural feeling of retaliation or vengeance, rendered by intellect and sympathy applicable to those injuries, that is, to those hurts, which wound us through, or in common with, society at large. This sentiment, in itself, has nothing moral in it; what is moral is the exclusive subordination of it to the social sympathies, so as to wait on and obey their call. For the natural feeling would make us resent indiscriminately whatever anyone does that is disagreeable to us; but, when moralized by the social feeling, it only acts in the directions conformable to the general good: just persons resenting a hurt to society, though not otherwise a hurt to themselves, and not resenting a hurt to themselves, however painful, unless it be of the kind which society has a common interest with them in the repression of.
The principle, therefore, of giving to each what they deserve, that is, good for good as well as evil for evil, is not only included within the idea of justice as we have defined it, but is a proper object of that intensity of sentiment which places the just human estimation above the simply expedient.
All persons are deemed to have a right to equality of treatment, except when some recognized social expediency requires the reverse. And hence all social inequalities which have ceased to be considered expedient assume the character, not of simple inexpediency, but of injustice, and appear so tyrannical that people are apt to wonder how they ever could have been tolerated—forgetful that they themselves, perhaps, tolerate other inequalities under an equally mistaken notion of expediency, the correction of which would make that which they approve seem quite as monstrous as what they have at last learned to condemn. The entire history of social improvement has been a series of transitions by which one custom or institution after another, from being a supposed primary necessity of social existence, has passed into the rank of a universally stigmatized injustice and tyranny. So it has been with the distinctions of slaves and freemen, nobles and serfs, patricians and plebeians; and so it will be, and in part already is, with the aristocracies of color, race, and sex.
