Mill was one of the most rock-and-roll guys of the nineteenth century. He learned to speak Ancient Greek before he was three years old. Apparently, his first words were ‘The pain has abated somewhat’. By the time he was eight, he was reading the old geometers in Latin. He was a better philosopher and economist than I will ever be by the time he exited puberty.
Mill’s father had put him through this education. Not surprisingly, Mill had a nervous breakdown when he left home. He recovered, though, and became a women’s-lib and anti-slavery writer, an eminent philosopher, political thinker, Member of Parliament, and cultivator of third-degree sideburns. He married his lifelong sweetheart when he was 45.
Utilitarianism, Chapter 2
Most people define utility as ‘useful’. Every utilitarian from Epicurus to Bentham has thought, instead, that utility means pleasure. That is its definition. ‘Utility’ does not mean something useful for pleasure—it is pleasure. The useful is the pleasurable.
The foundation of utilitarianism is this one rule, the Greatest Happiness Principle. It says this: 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.
Pleasure and freedom from pain are the only things people really want. Everything else we want because it brings us pleasure or prevents pain.
Of course, many smart people think that I am wrong. They think that this is a doctrine for pigs. They think that it is a philosophy of crassness and simplicity.
But Epicurians and utilitarians respond: our critics are the ones who think that people only get pleasure from getting stuffed and having sex. We think that many noble things are pleasant: intellect, sentiment, emotions, imagination, and morality are all pleasant. These are not the base pleasures of pigs at all.
I admit, though, that utilitarians could have done a better job of explaining this. We have said the intellectual goods are better only because the bodily goods are fleeting or expensive. That is not true.
Some types of pleasure are of higher quality than other types. There are some pleasant things that we would never trade for any amount of another pleasant thing. It is a matter of quality against quantity. The quality of some wonderful things is different. No sane person, for instance, would want to get rid of their intellect and be changed into an animal, even for all of the beast’s pleasures. No ethical person would be selfish, stupid and base, even if it came with advantages. Everyone prefers the noble pleasures of intellect, imagination and morality to the crude pleasures of the body. Nobody would give up any tiny part of these higher pleasures for an infinite amount of lower pleasure.
Certainly, a smart person is harder to make happy and easier to make sad. However, no smart person would prefer to be stupid. Perhaps it is pride. Maybe it is love of liberty. I think that it is a sense of dignity that prevents smart people from wishing they were stupid.
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 a different opinion, it is because they only know their own side of the question. The other party to the comparison knows both sides.
Of course, I know that some good, noble, educated people do succumb to lower pleasures. They do it because have weak characters, and it is only an exception. Of course, some young idealists become selfish, lazy, and obnoxious. This does not disprove my point. Sensitivity is like a tender plant, easily killed. We must all take care to ensure that our aspirations and our intellectual tastes are not damaged or destroyed when our way is blocked or our ambitions are thwarted by the workings of the world.
So it is settled. There are different types of pleasure, some higher, and some lower. As it turns out, though, this past discussion is not entirely necessary. The utilitarian standard is not our own happiness, but everyone’s happiness in total. The best actions lead to the greatest happiness of the best kind, keeping in mind all people.
Some people say that renunciation of all desire is preferable. First, they say, happiness is unattainable. Second, they ask, what right have you to be happy? A good point, I suppose. Well, even if we cannot be happy, we can be not unhappy. Further, a good life is not a life of constant bliss. It has its ups and downs. But only some of us have good life right now; the rest of us work in demonic industries and get no chance at happiness whatsoever.
Perhaps human beings, if they were taught to consider happiness for all their goal, would only want a small share of it. But great numbers of mankind have been satisfied with much less. There seem to be two parts of a satisfied life: tranquility and excitement. A cultivated mind, opened to the fountains of knowledge, takes interest in all of nature, art, poetry, history and the future.
It seems to me that every person born in a civilized country could have an intellectual life of pleasure. In a world in which there is so much of interest, so much to enjoy, and so much also to correct and improve, everyone who has this moderate amount of moral and intellectual ability is capable of a wonderful life. There is almost no great cause of human suffering that cannot be fixed if we put our minds to it.
Of course, nobody needs to be happy. The great bulk of us are not happy, even in the parts of the world not knee-deep in barbarism. In fact, being able to do without happiness is probably the best strategy to find it. Only that kind of attitude can make a person aware of the chances of life, and make him or her immune to ill fate and evil. The Stoics knew this well. They found happiness and tranquility in the worst days of the Roman Empire.
But again, it is not a person’s own happiness that matters. It is the happiness of all. A person should try to be an objective spectator. She should count herself and her own happiness as one among many. Jesus said to do as you would be done by, and to love your neighbour as yourself. That is our ideal, too.
Some people say that it is too hard to be a utilitarian. They think that it is impossible to act with society’s interests in mind all the time. That is a mistake: utilitarianism is a general rule that makes sub-rules. Motive, though, has nothing to do with the morality of an action. He who saves a fellow creature from drowning does what is morally right, whether his motive be duty, or the hope of being paid for his trouble. It is enough, too, to just keep in mind the people nearest the action you are considering. You do not need to consider, for instance, whether you are rescuing a saint or a monster from the water.
Some people say that utilitarians are cold. But the critics say this because we are interested only in the outcomes of an action, not who does the action. If the pope does wrong, we will say so. If Hitler did good, we would say so. In the long run, however, the best proof of a good character is good actions. On average, a good person will do good things; a bad person will do bad things. Sometimes, a good person will do a bad thing. We alone will say so.