Transcript John Stuart Mill

John Stuart Mill
On Liberty
Utilitarianism
Overview
 Problem of Rights
 Utilitarianism
The Problem of Rights
Agent
Preference
Wants to do something
Patient
Preference
Preferences of those affected
by the act
The Problem of Rights
 The difficulty with rights talk is that we have
no real way of distinguishing the merit of
separate and conflicting rights claim
 For example, let’s look at religious right –
freedom of conscience
 Suppose my religious practice disgusts
everyone else in the surrounding community.
Should I continue to practice?
The Problem of Rights
 Isn’t that making me – in effect – a dictator in
that the social decision is what I say it should
be, no matter how many votes to the contrary
 We need to develop a higher order
principle/theory to decide the tough questions
 Utilitarianism is that theory
Utilitarianism
 Utilitarianism has 2 basic
premises:
 “Actions are right in
proportion as they tend to
promote happiness,
wrong as they tend
produce the reverse of
happiness”
 Greatest Happiness
Principle
 As Mill notes, it is an idea
deeply rooted in the Western
tradition, going back at least
to Epicurus (341 – 270
B.C.E.)
Utilitarianism
 More immediately, in the 18th
century David Hume argued
that pleasure/pain is the
basis of all our actions
 Jeremy Bentham (coined the
term, developed systematic
theory)
 James Mill (J.S. Mill’s father)
 John Stuart Mill was
Bertrand Russell’s godfather
Utilitarianism
 As an ethical theory, it attempts to provide a
rational rather than a religious basis for
morality
 Which means we will be able to sanction and
judge acts as good or bad on something
other than religious grounds.
 This is crucial since “common sense” morality
requires a religious premise
Utilitarianism
 But note that once we reject that religious
premise, the morality no longer has any hold
over us
 That is, if we’re not worried about getting
nailed in the afterlife, why bother being
moral?
 Why should I care about how my actions
affect other people?
Utilitarianism
 Bentham’s original version rested on notion of
psychological hedonism:

An act is good which sets off all the pleasure
pods in my head
 As a social theory, then, Utilitarianism
distinguishes the morality between alternative
states of affairs by examining the amount of
pleasure and pain it produces
 That act which produces the most pleasure is
the one to be preferred
Utilitarianism
 Dialysis machine example



Contingent relation does not entitle someone
to special treatment
Wrong to have decision based on who I or
you happen to be
Wrong because we are not being impartial
 Child in Outer Mongolia example


Sacrifice child for cat?
Wrong as better for girl than the cat
Utilitarianism
 We shouldn’t count our own preferences for
more than we count others (since if we did so
we’d be dictating the social outcome)
 Question that arises, then, is how do we
achieve utilitarian objectivity?
 In rights based accounts, it is the notion of
moral sympathy – I wouldn’t want my rights
violated so I shouldn’t violate others’ rights
Utilitarianism
 If we are going to have to decide between
different social states, how can we make sure
the decision on which state to adopt is an
impartial (objective) one?
 How do we become impartial?
 Bentham formula:

Everyone to count for one, no one to count for
more than one
Utilitarianism
 Two points to note
1.
Democracy is integral to utilitarianism

2.
The way we determine what to do is to take a
vote, and whatever the majority wants wins
It doesn’t matter where goods/bads happen
to fall, so long as en toto more pleasure is
produced than pain.
Utilitarianism
 In other words, utilitarianism is a
consequentialist theory
 What makes a given action just is the
consequences, the action produces, where
the merits of the consequences are assessed
by how much pleasure is produced
 Rights theory, on the other hand, is a
deontological theory, one where the
correctness of the action is defined
independently of its consequences
Suppose you are a District Attorney in
a community that is composed of easily
recognizable majority/minority
communities.
A member of the majority community
has been killed and witnesses have
reliably identified a member of the
minority community as the perpetrator,
but the police have been unable to find
the exact person
The majority community is screaming
for vengeance and on the verge of
rioting.
We know that in the course of the riot,
at least 10 people from the minority
population will be killed in mob
violence.
As the DA you suggest the following
course of action to the mayor:
 In order to avert the riot and save lives, you
take a member of the minority community at
random, accuse that person of the crime, and
stage a very public arrest/execution
 As the mayor, what do you do?
 As the D.A. what should you do?

Volunteer for execution?
Utilitarianism
 A bit more generally, then, suppose you are faced
with the following decision:
A
You dead, everyone else alive
B
You alive, everyone else dead
 Choosing “B” would be a moral catastrophe as it
would incredibly limit the amount of happiness that
could be produced, insofar as only one person could
now experience the pleasure where before billions
could experience it
Utilitarianism
 Doesn’t matter, morally speaking, who is
having wants, just as long as we satisfy as
many wants as possible
 The idea is to act so as to produce the
greatest happiness for the greatest number
 For our moral calculations, we need to view
people as vessels of utility satisfaction
Utilitarianism
 What we most want is to
experience things in a
certain way (i.e., pleasure
over pain)
 Here we reach one of Mill’s
major revisions to Bentham’s
theory
 For Bentham, a want is a
want is a want
 No difference between
wanting to stay home
and watch Smackdown
and reading War and
Peace
Utilitarianism
 For Bentham, as long as a given set of
choices produces equal amounts of pleasure,
then we can be indifferent in our choices
between them
 So to decide on what social state of affairs we
want, simply take a vote, everyone votes on
own preference
 And when “X” wins over “Y”, we know that “X”
would produce more happiness and so
should be adopted as a social policy
Utilitarianism
 We “vote” in lots of different ways
 Can vote with our money for instance (in the economic
sphere)
Beethoven
Britney
VS.
The fact that people buy more Britney than Beethoven shows that they
prefer that type of music and so stores should stock more of that type
Utilitarianism
 TV Watching
vs
Neilson ratings shows that people would rather watch O’Reilly’s spin
on politics, rather than watch actual politics means we should broadcast
much more of the former rather than the latter.
Utilitarianism
 Mill argues that that view is silly
 He makes a rather significant change in
utilitarian theory by introducing qualitative
differences among wants
 For Mill, utilitarians should aim not at simply
satisfying wants, but satisfying “better” wants.
 How do we distinguish between wants?
Utilitarianism
“Of two pleasure, 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” (p. 531).
Utilitarianism
 In other words, to compare wants, find
someone who has, for instance, read Tolstoy
and watched professional wrestling and see
which is preferred
 On the whole, people who have done both
will prefer Tolstoy
 Maybe not a perfect example, but how about
if instead we compare
Utilitarianism
Utilitarianism
“Now it is an unquestionable fact that those who are
equally acquainted with, and equally capable of
appreciating and enjoying, both, do give a most
marked preference to the manner of existence which
employs their higher faculties. Few human creatures
would consent to be changed into any of the lower
animals, for a promise of the fullest allowance of a
beast’s pleasures; no intelligent human being would
consent to be a fool; no instructed person would be
an ignoramus, no person of feeling and conscience
would be selfish and base, even though they should
be persuaded that the fool, the dunce, or the rascal is
better satisfied with his lot than they are with theirs.”
Utilitarianism
 This implies that we only count wants given perfect
information
 Need to look at authentic wants, not whims
 Some wants should count for more than others:
“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.”
Utilitarianism
 Mill, unlike Bentham, argues that we need to
devise a social decision process by which we
not only satisfy wants at time t, but also one
that changes or develops our wants so that at
t2 we have more utility.
 We get more utility by creating more
satisfaction
 We create more satisfaction by creating and
satisfying better wants
Utilitarianism
 How do we do that?
 Through democracy!
 Mill sees democracy as the means to satisfy
wants and shape future wants
 Democracy is a way of making us more
efficient pleasure machines.