Although he did not invent the utilitarian doctrine, philosopher John Stuart Mill remains its best-known proponent, largely because of his attempts to make it accessible to the general public and assuage common doubts about it through this widely publicized essay. In Utilitarianism, Mill lays out this deceptively straightforward philosophy with a specificity that he hopes will clarify his audience’s misinterpretations, whether innocent or deliberate. He emphasizes that utilitarianism is based on a single, central principle—the supremacy of happiness over all other goals—and that focusing on this principle can clarify a specific and achievable vision of the good or desirable life.
Utilitarianism is a simple philosophy, which essentially boils down to one principle: happiness, and nothing but happiness, is intrinsically good for human beings. Utilitarianism’s name comes from the concept of “utility,” which is synonymous with the collective happiness of all people. Mill defines happiness as “pleasure and the absence of pain.” Therefore, a utilitarian thinks that actions are good when they increase humanity’s net happiness, creating more pleasure than they cause pain, and evil when they cause more pain than pleasure. This “greatest happiness principle,” the core idea of Mill’s philosophy, is the only test that must be applied to determine whether an action is good or evil. The reasoning behind Mill’s theory is equally straightforward. Like many ethicists throughout history, Mill agrees that everyone ultimately acts for the sake of happiness, whether consciously or not. While other ethical theories try to base good and evil in something more fundamental than humans’ collective self-interest (like God’s laws, absolute moral virtues, or human nature), Mill thinks that ethics should accurately reflect the reality that people act for the sake of happiness—philosophers can then focus their energies on figuring out the best way to do so. Accordingly, he sees utilitarianism’s simplicity as a distinct advantage and quickly turns to practical concerns, clarifying his theory for his detractors and showing what it means for individuals and societies.
Based on his fundamental principle, Mill develops a specific (but not narrow) vision of what constitutes the best life for human beings. He defines it as “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.” First, Mill is careful to differentiate his doctrine from hedonism, a philosophy which holds that people should maximize bodily pleasures (for instance through excessive eating, drinking, and sexual activity). Mill believes such a “a life of rapture” is simply impossible, and that attempting to live according to hedonism would mean maximizing the quantity of pleasures while forgetting the quality of them. Unlike some of his predecessors (most notably Jeremy Bentham), Mill thinks that some pleasures are better than others—specifically, he argues that pleasures of the intellect are usually superior to pleasures of the body, because “all or almost all who have an experience of both [types of pleasure] give a decided preference” to intellectual ones. Therefore, for Mill, the good life is not about self-indulgence, but rather cultivation.
Since people are not born developed enough to appreciate the pleasures of intellectual life, Mill thinks that people must be properly educated and given enough freedom to pursue these higher pleasures. These freedoms include political liberties like freedom of speech and assembly, but also material liberties—that is, freedom from ills like poverty, disease, and trauma. And if given access to the whole range of human pleasures through the support and education of a relatively democratic society, Mill thinks people must build two other personality traits: generosity and “mental cultivation” (or an “inexhaustible” intellectual interest in the world). The first is important because it makes happiness infectious: generous people take pleasure in others’ happiness, while selfish people resent it. And the second is important because it allows people to think freely, take “a sincere interest in the public good,” competently pursue the intellectual pleasures that Mill puts at the top of his hierarchy, and learn not to set their sights too high (or “expect more from life than it is capable of bestowing”). In short, the best or happiest human life requires education, political and economic freedom, and the careful improvement of individual moral character. When one is fortunate enough to possess all these traits, Mill thinks there are two primary ways to live a life of maximal utility without trampling on others’ happiness. The two paths are “tranquility and excitement.” People can choose one or try to combine both. Those with tranquil lives, who suffer little pain, “can be content with very little pleasure,” while those with exciting lives “can reconcile themselves to [withstand] a considerable quantity of pain.” Accordingly, while the best human life requires many specific social and individual conditions, it is not so rigid as to deny people choices. The good life involves a particular set of forms, which can be filled by many kinds of content and accessible to many kinds of people with diverse interests and dispositions.
Mill’s greatest achievement in Utilitarianism, and arguably in his entire body of work, is that he presents a complete, wide-ranging ethical theory—from the greatest happiness principle to a detailed vision of what constitutes the ideal human life—in just a few pages. Indeed, while this is the central argument of his book and the principal takeaway for most contemporary readers, it takes up only a small portion of it, while the rest is dedicated to clarifying misinterpretations of the often-maligned theory. While many instinctively associate utilitarianism with an indifference to human feelings, Mill clarifies that in fact utilitarianism’s very purpose involves making happy, emotionally-fulfilling lives accessible to as many people as possible.
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Utilitarianism, Happiness, and The Good Life 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.
Questions of ultimate ends are not amenable to direct proof. Whatever can be proved to be good must be so by being shown to be a means to something admitted to be good without proof. The medical art is proved to be good by its conducing to health; but how is it possible to prove that health is good? The art of music is good, for the reason, among others, that it produces pleasure; but what proof is it possible to give that pleasure is good? If, then, it is asserted that there is a comprehensive formula, including all things which are in themselves good, and that whatever else is good is not so as an end but as a means, the formula may be accepted or rejected, but is not a subject of what is commonly understood by proof. We are not, however, to infer that its acceptance or rejection must depend on blind impulse or arbitrary choice. There is a larger meaning of the word “proof,” in which this question is as amenable to it as any other of the disputed questions of philosophy.
The creed which accepts as the foundation of morals “utility” or the “greatest happiness principle” holds that actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness; wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness. By happiness is intended pleasure and the absence of pain; by unhappiness, pain and the privation of pleasure.
It is quite compatible with the principle of utility to recognize the fact that some kinds of pleasure are more desirable and more valuable than others. It would be absurd that, while in estimating all other things quality is considered as well as quantity, the estimation of pleasure should be supposed to depend on quantity alone.
If I am asked what I mean by difference of quality in pleasures, or what makes one pleasure more valuable than another, merely as a pleasure, except its being greater in amount, there is but one possible answer. Of two pleasures, if there be one to which all or almost all who have experience of both give a decided preference, irrespective of any feeling of moral obligation to prefer it, that is the more desirable pleasure.
It is indisputable that the being whose capacities of enjoyment are low has the greatest chance of having them fully satisfied; and a highly endowed being will always feel that any happiness which he can look for, as the world is constituted, is imperfect. But he can learn to bear its imperfections, if they are at all bearable; and they will not make him envy the being who is indeed unconscious of the imperfections, but only because he feels not at all the good which those imperfections qualify. 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, are of a different opinion, it is because they only know their own side of the question. The other party to the comparison knows both sides.
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.
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.
The main constituents of a satisfied life appear to be two, either of which by itself is often found sufficient for the purpose: tranquillity and excitement. With much tranquillity, many find that they can be content with very little pleasure; with much excitement, many can reconcile themselves to a considerable quantity of pain. There is assuredly no inherent impossibility of enabling even the mass of mankind to unite both, since the two are so far from being incompatible that they are in natural alliance, the prolongation of either being a preparation for, and exciting a wish for, the other.
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 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 only proof capable of being given that an object is visible is that people actually see it. The only proof that a sound is audible is that people hear it; and so of the other sources of our experience. In like manner, I apprehend, the sole evidence it is possible to produce that anything is desirable is that people do actually desire it. If the end which the utilitarian doctrine proposes to itself were not, in theory and in practice, acknowledged to be an end, nothing could ever convince any person that it was so. No reason can be given why the general happiness is desirable, except that each person, so far as he believes it to be attainable, desires his own happiness. This, however, being a fact, we have not only all the proof which the case admits of, but all which it is possible to require, that happiness is a good: that each person’s happiness is a good to that person, and the general happiness, therefore, a good to the aggregate of all persons.
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.
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.
