Mill's hedonism

Boston University Law Review

Volumn 90, Issue 4, 2010, Pages 1705-1729

  Sturgeon, Nicholas L ^a  

^a Department of Obstetrics Gynecology   (United States)

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EID: 78049298016     PISSN: 00068047     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Review

References (114)

1. DAVID LYONS, IN THE INTERESTS OF THE GOVERNED, at vii (rev. ed. 1991);
2. DAVID LYONS, RIGHTS, WELFARE, AND MILL'S MORAL THEORY 3 (1994).
3. See JOHN STUART MILL, UTILITARIANISM ch. II ¶2, ch. IV¶ 2 (Liberal Arts Press 1957) (1863).
4. See id. ch. II¶ 4-7.
5. See id. ch. IV¶ 4.
6. David O. Brink, Mill's Deliberative Utilitarianism, in MILL'S UTILITARIANISM: CRITICAL ESSAYS 149, 149 (David Lyons ed., 1997) (arguing that Mill is not a hedonist);
7. see also TERENCE IRWIN, III THE DEVELOPMENT OF ETHICS: A HISTORICAL AND CRITICAL STUDY: FROM KANT TO RAWLS 389-407 (2009) (suggesting that Mill abandons hedonism in Chapter II, and that he vacillates between hedonism and eudaimonism in Chapter IV).
8. The most frequent target for the charge of boneheadedness, of course, is Chapter IV, paragraph three of Utilitarianism, with its alleged proof that the general happiness is a good. See MILL, supra note 2, ch. IV¶ 3. I pass by that topic here, because the standard allegation against Mill is not that that passage conflicts with his hedonism but just that it provides a bad argument for it. (In fact, for reasons I mention briefly below, see infra note 15 and accompanying text, I think there is nothing foolish in the view that desire could be (defeasible) evidence of desirability. I also explain below why I think Mill's case for his hedonism does not rest specially on Chapter IV.)
9. See MILL, supra note 2, ch. I ¶5.
10. See id. ¶2.
11. See id.
12. See id. ¶5.
13. There is a more specific problem given Mill's account of direct proof about value, which is that "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." Id. Anyone who thinks that something could be shown to be intrinsically valuable by arguing that it conduces to something else that is good, is unclear on the concept of intrinsic value.
14. Id. Explaining the "larger meaning of the word proof to which we may have recourse, Mill says that "[t]he subject is within the cognizance of the rational faculty; and neither does that faculty deal with it solely in the way of intuition." Id. "Solely in the way of intuition" might seem to leave an opening for intuition to help out, but Mill never suggests this.
15. Id.
16. See id. ch. IV.
17. If we are discussing a moral theory as well as a theory of value, then we can also confront this entire package with more specific judgments of right and wrong in which we have some confidence. I believe that Mill does this, too, in much of Chapters II, III and V.
18. See MILL, supra note 2, ch. II ¶4.
19. Strictly, Mill says that even a purely quantitative hedonist can secure this result. See id. Many readers have doubted that he actually believes this to be so. But, in any case, Mill clearly thinks that he needs to accommodate a stronger thesis, that the life of swine is not fit for a human being, and that this is so for reasons other than the "circumstantial advantages" of the distinctively human pleasures. See id. For this he needs, on his own view, to abandon a purely quantitative hedonism.
20. See id.
21. See id. ch. I ¶2. I have said that Mill is inconsistent on this issue. There are two ways this claim could be construed. In a broad sense, it seems inconsistent to say that one ought never to do something (such as argue in a certain pattern), and then do it. Mill is in this way inconsistent. But it is also reasonable to think that, by arguing in this way in Chapter II, he implicitly affirms that it is appropriate so to argue; and this means that he affirms mutually inconsistent propositions. I have also said that Mill alters the principle of utility in response to the criticism he considers in Chapter II, paragraph three. This is what all his contemporaries and most subsequent commentators have taken him to be doing. Still, someone might suggest that it is not what Mill presents himself as doing. He has said clearly that "[t]o give a clear view of the ... [Greatest Happiness Principle], much more requires to be said; in particular, what things it includes in the ideas of pain and pleasure; and to what extent this is left an open question." Id. ¶ 2. So it might be claimed that although Mill is filling in details in a new way, and so altering the principle to that extent, he does not see himself as contradicting a principle that - in earlier versions - simply said nothing about quality. However, this cannot be right. Mill begins with Bentham's version of the principle in Chapter II paragraph three, and Bentham had explicitly held that only quantity - intensity and duration - mattered to the intrinsic value of a pleasure. JEREMY BENTHAM, AN INTRODUCTION TO THE PRINCIPLES OF MORALS AND LEGISLATION ch. IV ¶ I-IV (Clarendon Press 1907) (1780). Bentham lists other features that matter to the value of a pleasure - e.g., propinquity or remoteness, fecundity - but these are pretty clearly not the ground of the intrinsic value of the pleasure.
22. See ROGER CRISP, MILLON UTILITARIANISM 22 n.1 (1997). Mill has to see himself as correcting a mistake in replacing Bentham's version of the principle with his own.
23. See MILL, supra note 2, ch. IV¶ 3.
24. From the distinction above made between self-love, and the several particular principles or affections in our nature, we may see how good ground there was for that assertion, maintained by the several ancient schools of philosophy against the Epicureans, namely, that virtue is to be pursued as an end, eligible in and for itself. For, if there be any principles or affections in the mind of man distinct from self-love, that the things those principles tend towards, or that the objects of those affections are, each of them, in themselves eligible, to be pursued upon its own account, and to be rested in as an end, is implied in the very idea of such principle or affection. JOSEPH BUTLER, Preface to FIFTEEN SERMONS PREACHED AT THE ROLLS CHAPEL AND A DISSERTATION OF THE NATURE OF VIRTUE 15, ¶ 42 (T.A. Roberts ed., 1970) (1726). In the next sentence Butler restricts this claim to "natural" affections. Id.
25. Brink, supra note 5, at 178 n.l. Brink supplements the list of Mill's contemporaries in J.B. SCHNEEWIND, SIDGWICK'S ETHICS AND VICTORIAN MORAL PHILOSOPHY 186 n.43 (1977).
26. CRISP, supra note 19, at 32 n.8, adds more names. It would be easy to extend the list. For a few dissenters, see infra note 54.
27. See Brink, supra note 5, at 149.
28. MILL, supra note 2, ch. II ¶ 4.
29. See id.
30. Id.
31. Id. ¶ 5.
32. Id. ¶ 6.
33. Some readers will think "very large margin" an understatement, for they think that Mill ascribes a lexical priority in value to the higher pleasures. E.g., CRISP, supra note 19, at 24-32; Brink, supra note 5, at 153. I am not convinced. There would be a strong case for this reading if Mill said that the competent judges would prefer any amount of the higher pleasure, no matter how small, to any amount of the lower, no matter how large. But he falls significantly short of saying this. For one thing, the trade-offs that he says competent judges would refuse to make are not of small degrees of higher pleasure, but are much more momentous - an instructed person becoming an ignoramus, for example.
34. See MILL, supra note 2, ch. II ¶ 6. For another, the amount of a lower pleasure of which our nature is capable may well be finite; and if so, there may for all Mill says here be an amount of lower pleasure - though one inaccessible to beings of our nature - that would compensate for some loss of a higher one .
35. MILL, supra note 2, ch. II ¶ 2.
36. HENRY SIDGWICK, THEMETHODS OF ETHICS 94 (7th ed. 1962).
37. MILL, supra note 2, ch. II ¶ 6.
38. But see id.
39. Id. It does not matter to my argument exactly what the distinction is between happiness and "content"; I appeal simply to the fact that Mill insists that there is one. But, noticing Mill's ascription to the "superior being" of a vastly greater capacity for happiness, one might - as perhaps only a crude first approximation - take content or satisfaction to consist in a ratio of happiness to capacity for happiness. See id. The superior being's capacity is very great, that of the fool quite limited; the superior being might then have a lower measure of satisfaction (perhaps ten percent), the fool a much higher one (say ninety percent), even though the absolute level of happiness for the superior being is greater, even much greater.
40. See id. ¶ 5.
41. See id. ¶ 6.
42. Readers sometimes miss this point, despite Mill's emphasis. Norman O. Dahl, for example, thinks that, for Mill, Socrates's life is less pleasant that the fool's. Norman O. Dahl, Is Mill's Hedonism Inconsistent?, 7 AM. PHIL. Q. 37, 39 (1973). J.J.C. Smart thinks that Mill attributes to Socrates more happiness than the fool, but with less pleasure - and so must be assuming that Mill here without notice abandons his hedonistic account of happiness.
43. J.J.C. Smart, An Outline of a System of Utilitarian Ethics, in UTILITARIANISM: FOR AND AGAINST 1, 15 (J.J.C. Smart & Bernard Williams eds., 1973). Brink writes of "contentment or pleasure (the mental state)," as if these could be the same thing for Mill.
44. See Brink, supra note 5, at 154-55. He also argues that Mill must regard Socrates's life as deficient in pleasure because he says that Socrates's life is attended with discontent or dissatisfaction.
45. See id. at 180 n.12.
46. A careful reader will notice that what Mill calls a mistake is thinking "that the superior being, [that is, the one pursing higher pleasures,] in anything like equal circumstances, is not happier than the inferior." MILL, supra note 2, ch. II ¶ 6. This seems to allow, against the general direction of my reading, that at least in very unequal circumstances, the choice of the higher pleasures could come at a cost in overall happiness. But, a preliminary point, this is clearly not enough to resolve the puzzle. For it allows that a preference for the higher pleasures could come at a cost in happiness in some extreme cases; but Mill's discussion of the gulf between the higher and lower pleasures has surely suggested that, for his competent judges, sacrifice of quantity of pleasure for quality will be routine. And, second, there seems good reason anyway to think that the exception he allows in this passage does not challenge the heart of Mill's "no-cost-in-pleasure" thesis about these choices. His reference to "circumstances" here is plausibly taken to mean, as it certainly does in his talk of the "circumstantial advantages" of the higher pleasures in Chapter II, paragraph four, that his point is about the extrinsic value of the higher (and lower) pleasures involved, due to consequences that may be beyond one's foresight or control. See id. ¶ 4. A choice for the higher pleasures might put someone in the way of an injury that deprived her of the capacity for enjoying the higher pleasures, for example, and in that way led to a net cost in pleasure if compared to an alternative involving some lower pleasures as well as some higher ones. Mill is in any case careful never to say that his competent judges would knowingly make a sacrifice of happiness, though he allows that they might accept a loss of "content."
47. Smart, supra note 37, at 13. Irwin mentions both readings, but suggests that the weaker one, though making Mill consistent on these issues, is not distinctively utilitarian. IRWIN, supra note 5, at 403. The weaker reading is the one defended by Wendy Donner. Wendy Donner, Mill's Utilitarianism, in THE CAMBRIDGE COMPANION TO MILL 255, 264, 266 (John Skorupski ed., 1998).
48. See HENRY SIDGWICK, OUTLINES OF THE HISTORY OF ETHICS FOR ENGUSH READERS 247 (Enlarged ed. 1960). (I know of no commentator who thinks that Mill uses "greatest" in the manner of P.T. Barnum just to mean "best.")
49. See, e.g.. CRISP, supra note 19, at 32;
50. Brink, supra note 5, at 152;
51. Donner, supra note 39, at 263, 268.
52. MILL, supra note 2, ch. II ¶ 8.
53. Id.
54. Id.
55. See id.
56. See supra note 19 and accompanying text.
57. Mill emphasizes in introducing the notion that quality belongs to the nature of the pleasures that have it, so we could add that here if we wish. See MILL, supra note 2, ch. II ¶ 4. But it is hard to see how on his view this could be distinctive of quality. At any rate, nothing in his discussion requires that it be distinctive. The problem about intensity, when it comes to the higher pleasures, does not seem to be that they don't have it (to some degree), or that they don't have it intrinsically, but that they don't have enough of it to establish them as everywhere superior, except by appeal to their extrinsic value because of their "circumstantial advantages." See id. Quality by contrast is supposed to be something they not only have intrinsically, but have to a sufficient degree that it insures their superiority even without appeal to those other advantages.
58. Mill writes that quality divides pleasures into "kinds," in the plural. See id. He may just mean that there is a division into higher and lower pleasures; or he might mean that there are different ranks of value even within the superior pleasures. But he might have in mind that what he calls quality actually comprises several different factors, which combine with intensity to determine how pleasant, and therefore how valuable, a pleasure is. My reading could accommodate this complication.
59. This statement may require refinement if one thinks (as I do not) that Mill takes the higher pleasures to be lexically prior to the lower ones in pleasurableness.
60. MILL, supra note 2, ch. II ¶ 8.
61. Id.
62. Id.
63. See id. ("And there needs be the less hesitation to accept this judgment respecting the quality of pleasures, since there is no other tribunal to be referred to even on the question of quantity.").
64. Although the historically predominant view of Mill's quantity-quality distinction accuses him of falling into inconsistency, he has had a few defenders. I have already mentioned interpreters who resolve the first problem by attributing to Mill only a weaker form of hedonism; among the problems with this approach is that it does not address the second problem, as my proposal does. See supra note 39 and accompanying text (discussing other authors' findings of Mill's weaker form of hedonism). My reading also differs from other "friendly" readings of Mill of which I am aware. Ernest Sosa takes pleasures superior in quality to be on that account more pleasant - and takes this to solve the second problem as well as the first - but does so by understanding qualitative differences to be very large quantitative differences; my account keeps quantity and quality distinct. But see Ernest Sosa, Mill's Utilitarianism, in MILL's UTILITARIANISM: TEXT AND CRITICISM 154, 164 (James M. Smith & Ernest Sosa eds., 1969). Dahl also takes qualitatively superior pleasures to be more pleasant. But he maintains that Mill would be involved in no inconsistency in denying that the greatest pleasure is always the best.
65. See Dahl, supra note 37, at 40. He also attributes to Mill the view that a pleasure of greater quantity is always the greater pleasure.
66. See id. at 47. I disagree on both counts. Two discussions that seem closer to mine are by John Skorupski and by Crisp.
67. See CRISP, supra note 19, at 30-34;
68. JOHN SKORUPSKI, JOHN STUART MILL 304-05 (1989). Both see that Mill speaks interchangeably of quantity and intensity (or intensity and duration), and both hold that Mill can say that the higher pleasures are more pleasant (Crisp says that Mill need not "flinch" from saying this).
69. See CRISP, supra note 19, at 33. But Crisp's account is entangled in a way I am not certain I understand with his view (which I doubt, see supra note 29 and accompanying text) that Mill assigns lexical priority in value to the higher pleasures. And, in both discussions, details are missing: for example, neither brings out a point that seems to me crucial, that one pleasure can be lesser in quantity without thereby being less pleasant, or less of a pleasure, than another, and neither mentions what I have called the second problem for Mill's view. It may for all this be that I am elaborating an argument for a conclusion that is in no serious disagreement with theirs.
70. MILL, supra note 2, ch. II ¶ 9.
71. Id.
72. See id. ch. IV.
73. See id. ¶ 3.
74. Id. ¶ 4.
75. See id. ¶ 4-6.
76. Mill says that the issue between him and his opponents is "whether mankind do desire nothing for itself but that which is a pleasure to them, or of which the absence is a pain." Id. ¶ 10. It seems clear from his discussion, in fact, that all of the goods admitted in Chapter IV, paragraphs five through eight, to be, in some sense, desired for their own sakes, are desired for oneself. This is obvious for money, power, and fame: the miser who desires possession of money as an end is understood to desire that he or she possess it, for example, not that others do so. This pattern is most strikingly continued in the case of virtue, for presumably Mill's associationist account of how we come to desire virtue as an end can be extended to explain why we would desire that others have it as well as ourselves. But Mill's interest appears to be entirely in explaining how we can come to desire, for its own sake, to be virtuous ourselves.
77. See id. ch. II ¶ 15-18. Acting for others' sake would not require any desire for the good of others, thanks to an important complexity in Mill's moral psychology, if it were done solely from a settled habitual will favoring their good. For Mill's view is that motivation by habit, unlike motivation by desire, need not be aimed at one's own happiness. But he thinks that a habitual pursuit of virtue can arise only from one's initially desiring virtue, so presumably would say the corresponding thing about concern for others' good.
78. See id. ch.IV ¶ 11.
79. I speculate that the happiness of others is not mentioned as an end in Chapter IV of Utilitarianism for dialectical reasons. Mill's opponents want to establish that people care about ends other than happiness. But it would not help them achieve this goal to argue that people care intrinsically about the happiness of others (even if, on their understanding of him, Mill would deny this), because that, after all, would not be an example of people desiring for its own sake anything other than happiness. So Mill anticipates their focusing on a different favorite example, virtue.
80. See JOHN STUART MULL, Whewell on Moral Philosophy, in 10 ESSAYS ON ETHICS, REUGION AND SOCIETY: COLLECTED WORKS OF JOHN STUART MILL 165 (J.M. Robson ed., 1969).
81. See id. at 184. This is the passage not from Utilitarianism that I warned in my Introduction that I would draw on.
82. MILL, supra note 2, ch. IV ¶ 5.
83. See id. ¶ 6.
84. Id. ¶ 7.
85. Id.
86. Id. ¶ 6.
87. This point does not require G.E. Moore's surely unfair construal, that Mill would have to mean that "these actual coins, which he admits to be desired in and for themselves, are a part either of pleasure or of the absence of pain." GEORGE EDWARD MOORE, PRINCIPIA ETHICA 71 (1903). What the miser desires for its own sake is presumably a state, that of possessing money. But it still needs to be explained what would be meant by calling this state part of anyone's pleasure.
88. MILL, supra note 2, ch. IV ¶ 7.
89. Id. ¶ 6.
90. This passage is not an isolated one. A few sentences earlier, describing the process by which something comes to be desired as an end, Mill writes: What was once desired as an instrument for the attainment of happiness has come to be desired for its own sake. In being desired for its own sake it is, however, desired as part of happiness. The person is made, or thinks he would be made, happy by its mere possession; and is made unhappy by failure to obtain it. Id. Of course, part of what is at issue in reading Mill is what "happy" and "unhappy" mean in the last of these sentences. One might think that he cannot be talking about pleasure and the absence of pain, as the previous sentence speaks of happiness as having parts, and it is not clear what it would mean for pleasure and the absence of pain to have parts. But in the first sentence, happiness seems clearly to be pleasure; at least, no commentator I know of has thought that when Mill speaks of money, say, as initially merely instrumental to happiness, he has in mind anything but a hedonistic account of what it is instrumental to. But that suggests that happiness in the third sentence is, after all, pleasure and the absence of pain. Or, again, consider these two sentences together: 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 ....
91. Id. ¶ 8.
92. Here again, Mill seems to be providing an entirely hedonistic account of what is involved in desiring virtue as part of happiness. Finally, there are passages that say nothing about happiness having parts, but which summarize this entire discussion as having argued that no "desire can possibly be directed to anything ultimately except pleasure and exemption from pain." Id. ¶ 11.
93. Irwin sees Mill as vacillating between a eudaimonist and a hedonist view from sentence to sentence in the passage I have just quoted. See IRWIN, supra note 5, at 406-07 n.29. Part of his reason for seeing a strong eudaimonist strain in Chapter IV of Mill's Utilitarianism derives from his conviction that Mill had already abandoned hedonism in Chapter II; so the argument of my previous section is also relevant here.
94. SIDGWICK, supra note 31, at 93 n.l. Crisp offers a similar account. See CRISP, supra note 19, at 86-88.
95. MILL, supra note 2, ch. IV ¶ 6.
96. Id. ¶ 6-7. In his first statement of his utility principle in Chapter II, Mill has it saying that "pleasure and freedom from pain, are the only things desirable as ends; and that all desirable things ... are desirable either for the pleasure inherent in themselves or as means to the promotion of pleasure and the prevention of pain." Id. ch. II ¶ 2. His wording does not make absolutely clear whether he is distinguishing two or three categories of desirable things. (The answer would clearly be three if he had written "all other desirable things.") I am inclined, however, to read this as a three-way distinction: putting the absence of pain to one side, there are (1) pleasure itself, (2) things with pleasure inherent in them, and (3) things that are means to pleasure. (Irwin also appears to see a three-way distinction here. See IRWIN, supra note 5, at 399.) If we assume that three categories are meant, my view is that is that the distinction Mill wants in Chapter IV, paragraphs five through eight, is between desiring something for being in category (3) above, and desiring it for being in category (2), where being in category (2) - having pleasure inherent in it - is being the sort of thing whose possession is a source of immediate pleasure, rather merely being, as with category (3), an instrumental means to pleasure.
97. MILL, supra note 2, ch. IV¶ 6.
98. These are not the only ways in which money, say, can give rise to pleasure. What about the disproportionate pleasure some take in spending money on items from which they expect little benefit? The idea, I think, would be that just as it is possible to desire money for the pleasure of having it, apart from the benefit from anything it will buy, so it is possible to value spending it - to love shopping -just for the pleasure inherent in doing so, apart from any benefit from what one is buying.
99. MILL, supra note 64, at 184.
100. Id.
101. Id.
102. Id.
103. Id.
104. That Mill views this sense as respectable and important is indicated by his use of it in correcting Whewell: "In Dr. Whewell's view of morality," he writes, "disinterestedness has no place." Id. at 184 n.*. He clearly intends that, in his own theory, disinterested desire does have a place.
105. MILL, supra note 2, ch. IV ¶ 5-8.
106. CRISP, supra note 19, at 86.
107. IRWIN, supra note 5, at 399.
108. SlDGWICK, supra note 31, at 93 n.l.
109. BUTLER, Preface, supra note 21, at 12-15, ¶ 35-41; BUTLER, Sermon 11, supra note 21, at 99-110, ¶ 1-11.
110. Mill writes in Chapter IV of Utilitarianism of pleasure in the "mere possession" of virtue or money. See MILL, supra note 2, ch. IV. But we need a different term for what immediately pleases, in a quite similar way, about another's good. (And "possession" will hardly do, anyway, for music, one of the examples in Chapter IV.)
111. Bentham, too, allows that there are "[p]leasures of benevolence or goodwill," appearing to have a similar phenomenon in mind. See BENTHAM, supra note 19, at 36. A complete account would need to discuss what it is to take pleasure in some state of affairs. Here I leave this at an intuitive level, taking it as obvious that the immediate pleasures that Mill speaks of as arising through association are pleasures in virtue, in the good of others, in possessing money, and so on.
112. I am influenced here by a point common to many philosophical discussions of linguistic reference, that when we discover that the world contains nothing that quite fits some definition we had thought attached to one of our terms, we do not always conclude that our term refers to nothing; sometimes we decide that we need a better definition, shaped in part by what the world has to offer. I think that Mill has made a plausible case that if we lived in what we might call a Mill-world rather than a Butler-world - that is, in a world in which all desires had at bottom to be for one's own pleasure - we should not conclude that our term, "disinterested benevolence," refers to nothing; that we should decide instead, on balance, that he has provided a reasonable account of that very phenomenon.
113. See MILL, supra note 2, ch. IV ¶ 5. I think that this case can be made even taking account of the point from above, that Mill discusses the desire for virtue that he thinks some acquire as if it were solely a desire for virtue in oneself. See supra note 61 and accompanying text. This would mean that the immediate pleasure that someone with this desire takes in virtue would be limited to pleasure in his or her own virtue. But, first, Mill may not really be limited to this rather narcissistic picture of the lover of virtue. He may well think (and plausibly) that a lover of virtue will take pleasure in it no matter who displays it; the focus on a desire for virtue in oneself may be an artifact brought about by his opponent's focus on that sort of example. And, second, even immediate pleasure just in one's own virtue (and immediate distress at its absence), even if it is focused on oneself, is not in the mature person based on, or derived from, any perception of the advantage of being virtuous. So the term "disinterested" would still seem to apply.
114. See MILL, supra note 2, ch. IV ¶ 8.