Happiness for the millian

British Journal for the History of Philosophy

Volumn 7, Issue 3, 1999, Pages 491-502

  Scarre, Geoffrey ^a  

^a DURHAM UNIVERSITY   (United Kingdom)

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[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 61149353643     PISSN: 09608788     EISSN: 14693526     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/09608789908571041     Document Type: Article

References (15)

1. Roger Crisp, Mill on Utilitarianism (London: Routledge, 1997)
2. 'Mill on virtue as part of hap- piness', British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 4 (1996). Subsequent references to these works will be given as Mill and 'Virtue' respectively, with page numbers. The number- ing of Crisp's two theses is my own
3. John Stuart Mill, 'Bentham', Essays on Ethics, Religion and Society, ed. J. M. Robson, Col- lected Works, vol. X (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1969), 93
4. J. S. Mill, The Earlier Letters, 1812-1848, ed. Francis D. Mineka, Collected Works, vols. XII, XIII (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1963), 101,207-8
5. David Brink,'Mill's deliberative utilitarianism', Philosophy and Public Affairs,2\ (1992), 68; Robert W. Hoag, 'Happiness and freedom: recent work on John Stuart Mill', Philosophy and Public Affairs, 15 (1986), 191. Brink's position is unusual in ascribing to Mill an 'objective' conception of happiness, according to which 'happiness or welfare consists in the possession of certain character traits, the exercise of certain capacities, and the development of certain relations to others and the world' (Brink, ibid., 69), rather than in the possession of any sub- jective mental states. While I believe that Mill's idea of happiness was sufficiently close to the Greek notion of eudaimonia to entail that no one should be ascribed it unless his life measures up to certain objective criteria of quality, achievement and unity, it is less plaus- ible to regard as inessential his possession of subjective states of satisfaction at meeting his own desires and goals (ibid., 70)
6. Fred Berger, Happiness, Justice, and Freedom: The Moral and Political Philosophy of John Stuart Mill (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 38
7. Elizabeth S. Anderson, 'John Stuart Mill and experiments in living', Ethics, 102 (1991), 13, 12
8. Geraint Williams, 'The Greek origins of J. S. Mill's happiness,' Utilitas, 8 (1996), 12-13
9. John Stuart Mill (London: Routledge, 1989), 296 (italics in original);'The parts of happiness', Philosophical Books, 4 (1985), 197. Strictly speaking, an anticipation of pleasure should not be identified with the desire for the pleasure-giving object, but be seen as motivating it
10. To explain why something is desirable is to explain why it is worth wishing for. Some things, like the cold beer, are desirable because they are pleasant. But it does not follow that the intentional object of people's desire for such things is pleasure. When I desire a cold beer on a hot day, Bishop Butler would ascribe to me a 'particular passion or appetite' for the beer itself, rather than for pleasure; the pleasure, on his view, comes from the satisfaction of the appetite. (See Joseph Butler, Fifteen Sermons Preached at the Rolls Chapel, Preface, para- graph 37.) While it would certainly be wrong to suppose that my consumption of the beer is chosen merely as a means to my ultimate object, pleasure, the truth of Butler's analysis can be questioned. Arguably what I really desire is the pleasant experience of drinking the beer. (It is some support for this that if you ask me why I am drinking it I will probably answer 'Because it's pleasant'.) These issues need not be further canvassed in the present essay, though it is worth noting that a strict Butlerian is the polar opposite of a strict hedonist, holding that pleasure is never the intentional object of our desires
11. Note that those values are not necessarily abstract moral considerations about duty or oblig- ation but may be conceptions of the worth of human and other beings. Cf. Christine Kors- gaard: 'the world contains entities that can tell us what to do and make us do it' - these entities being 'people, and the other animals' (Christine Korsgaard, The Sources of Norma- tivity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 166
12. John Stuart Mill, Autobiography, ed. J. M. Robson, Collected Works, vol. I (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1981), 233
13. John Stuart Mill,'Whewell on Moral Philosophy', Essays on Ethics, Religion and Society, ed. J. M. Robson, Collected Works, vol. X, 178; Autobiography, ibid
14. John Stuart Mill, Later Letters, 1849-73, ed. Francis D. Mineka and Dwight D. Lindley, Col- lected Works, vols XIV-XVII (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1972), 745
15. Charles Dickens, Hard Times (London: Dent [Everyman's Library], 1969), 1