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WorkJohn Stuart Mill

Utilitarianism

Three magazine articles defending the creed Mill was raised in, with one amendment: some pleasures are worth more than others.

by John Stuart Mill105 passages held

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First published
(aged 55)
Original language
English

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Overview

Jeremy Bentham, founder of the creed in which James Mill raised his son, counted pleasures by quantity alone. Opponents had an old reply ready, one first used against the followers of the Greek philosopher Epicurus: a doctrine that makes pleasure the only good is a doctrine fit for swine. Mill's answer to it is the best-known passage of Utilitarianism, which he assembled from papers written in the last years of his marriage, published in three successive numbers of Fraser's Magazine in 1861 and reissued as a small book in 1863. He keeps Bentham's principle, that an action is right so far as it tends to increase happiness and wrong so far as it does the opposite, and adds that pleasures differ in kind. Those of the mind rank above those of the body, and the test is the preference of people who have known both. The opponents Mill had chiefly in view held that right and wrong are known by intuition, without any reckoning of consequences. Prominent among them was William Whewell, Master of Trinity College, Cambridge. Against that school Mill argues that the moral rules people actually defend are defended, when pressed, by their effects on happiness. In the long final chapter he argues that justice, the hardest case for his view, is the name for those rules that protect what people need most, their security above all. One chapter offers what Mill calls a proof of the principle: the only evidence that a thing is desirable is that people desire it, each person desires their own happiness, and so the general happiness is a good to all. That passage has been attacked ever since. Henry Sidgwick, the Cambridge moral philosopher, questioned the step from each person's happiness to everyone's. G. E. Moore, in Principia Ethica of 1903, charged Mill with confusing what is desired with what ought to be desired. Sidgwick, Moore and the Oxford philosophers Bradley and Green all held that ranking pleasures by quality gives up the claim that pleasure alone is the measure. The book was heavily criticised when it appeared, and it is still widely set in university ethics courses.

Key concepts

What is the Greatest Happiness Principle?

It is the rule that actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, and wrong as they tend to produce the reverse. By happiness Mill means pleasure and the absence of pain. The happiness that counts is that of everyone concerned, with the agent's own weighing no more than anyone else's: he must be as impartial as a disinterested and benevolent spectator. Mill finds the same spirit in the golden rule.

What is the difference between higher and lower pleasures?

Higher pleasures are those of the intellect, of the feelings and imagination and of the moral sentiments; lower pleasures are those of mere sensation. Mill holds that they differ in quality, so that a higher pleasure can outweigh a larger quantity of a lower one. Which is which is settled by people who have experienced both: if nearly all of them prefer one, even at the cost of more discontent, that one is the more desirable.

What is a sanction in Mill's ethics?

A sanction is whatever gives a moral rule its binding force, the source of the motive to obey it. External sanctions are the hope of favour and the fear of displeasure from other people or from God. The internal sanction is conscience, a pain felt in one's own mind on violating duty. Mill argues that these work for the utilitarian standard exactly as for any other, and that education can attach conscience to the general happiness.

What does Mill mean by secondary principles?

Secondary principles are the ordinary moral rules, such as those against lying and stealing, which sum up what human experience has learned about the effects of actions. Mill holds that the principle of utility is applied through them and seldom directly. Every moral system needs such subordinate rules, he says. The first principle is called on mainly when two of them conflict, and then it alone can decide between them.

What separates duties of perfect and imperfect obligation?

A duty of perfect obligation is owed to a definite person, who has a corresponding right. A duty of imperfect obligation, such as charity, binds us without giving any particular person a claim on us at any particular time. Mill uses the distinction to mark off justice from the rest of morality. Justice covers what someone can demand as his right, and an injustice is always a wrong done to an assignable individual.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

Happiness, and why some pleasures count for more

If pleasure is the only good, is a contented pig better off than a troubled Socrates? Mill keeps the creed he inherited and changes what counts as pleasure.

Actions are right, Mill says, in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, and happiness means pleasure and the absence of pain. To the old sneer that this is a doctrine worthy of swine he replies that pleasures differ in kind as well as in amount. The judges are those competently acquainted with both kinds, who will not give up the higher for any quantity of the lower. It is better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. He explains the preference by a sense of dignity, and admits that the capacity for the nobler feelings is a tender plant, easily killed.

  • utilitarianism
  • happiness
  • pleasure
  • utility
  • virtue
  • desire

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Why anyone should obey it, and what proves it

What makes a person feel bound by the general happiness, and can such a first principle be proved at all? Mill answers with a psychology of conscience and an argument his critics never let rest.

Every moral standard, Mill argues, is enforced in the same way: from outside by reward and punishment, and from within by conscience, a pain felt on violating duty. Conscience can attach itself to utility as to any other rule, and it has a natural basis in the social feelings, the wish to be in unity with our fellow creatures. Ultimate ends admit no ordinary proof. The only evidence that a thing is visible is that people see it, and the only evidence that a thing is desirable is that people desire it. Each person desires his own happiness, so the general happiness is a good to all.

  • moral psychology
  • conscience
  • sympathy
  • moral motivation
  • moral obligation
  • moral education
  • education
  • habit
  • will
  • religion
  • moral foundations
  • moral epistemology
  • moral reasoning
  • moral principles

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Justice, the hardest case

If right means useful, why does injustice feel like something quite different from mere harm? Mill takes the feeling seriously and traces it to an animal impulse widened by sympathy.

The sentiment of justice, Mill argues, is the animal desire to retaliate for a hurt, extended by human sympathy and intelligence to harms done to anyone. A right is a claim that society ought to defend, and the reason it ought is general utility. What gives justice its peculiar intensity is the interest at stake: security, which nobody can do without. Justice alone does not settle disputes. People appeal to rival maxims on punishment, pay and taxation, and only utility can decide between them. Its rules can even be overridden: to save a life it may be a duty to steal food or to kidnap the only doctor.

  • justice
  • rights
  • punishment
  • equality
  • impartiality
  • law
  • retribution
  • obligation
  • social utility
  • moral judgment

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Within this work

passages held
105
distinct concepts
174
by passages held, corpus-wide
#492

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “happiness” and “utilitarianism”.
Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 18 pairings. 87 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
ConceptPaired conceptShared passages
happinessutilitarianism15
justiceutility9
utilitarianismvirtue9
justicerights8
justicepunishment7
happinessvirtue6
justicemoral psychology6
moral psychologyutilitarianism5
justiceutilitarianism3
moral psychologyvirtue3
rightsutility3
moral psychologyrights2
moral psychologyutility2
happinessmoral psychology1
punishmentutilitarianism1
rightsutilitarianism1
utilitarianismutility1
utilityvirtue1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

  1. 1843 A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive

    It was the first book of his own, and it made his name in 1843. Its claim that every belief must answer to experience is the ground on which the later books on morals and politics stand.

     EN
  2. 1844 Essays on Some Unsettled Questions of Political Economy (Essays on some unsettled Questions of Political Economy)

    Written at twenty-three and twenty-four, these five essays waited until the System of Logic had found him readers. Their argument on trade returns, four years later, in the Principles of Political Economy.

     EN
  3. 1848 Principles of Political Economy

    Seven editions carried this treatise from 1848 to 1871, revised as his view of socialism moved. It is read here in the text of the seventh, the last Mill revised himself.

     EN
  4. 1859 On Liberty

    One of the two books Mill expected to outlast the rest, the other being the System of Logic. Its defence of individuality against majority opinion runs on into Considerations on Representative Government and The Subjection of Women.

     EN
  5. 1861 Considerations on Representative Government

    Written two years after On Liberty, it faces the same danger, a majority that overrides everyone else, and meets it with electoral machinery. It is his fullest statement on how a free people should be governed.

     EN
  6. 1861 Utilitarianism you are here EN
  7. 1862 The Contest in America

    Occasional journalism from Fraser's Magazine, written in haste before a journey to Greece. It shows Mill as a polemicist, arguing against the prevailing opinion of his own class.

     EN
  8. 1865 Auguste Comte and Positivism

    Two essays from the Westminster Review of 1865, written eight years after Comte's death. They close a relationship that began with admiring letters in 1841 and left its mark on the System of Logic.

     EN
  9. 1869 The Subjection of Women

    The most contested of his books in its day, published in 1869 after his one term in Parliament. It carries the reasoning of On Liberty into marriage and the household.

     EN
  10. 1879 Socialism

    Left unfinished at his death, these are the posthumous "Chapters on Socialism", first drafts for a book planned in 1869. They return to a question that the Principles of Political Economy had reopened from one edition to the next.

     EN
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