mill i

His Conception of Utility

§1. Introductory Remarks: J. S. Mill (1806–1873)

1.Mill was the eldest child of the utilitarian philosopher and economist James Mill, who, along with Bentham, was among the leaders of the Philosophical Radicals. Mill was educated entirely by his father and never attended a school or university. His father made him tutor his younger siblings, and Mill was kept so occupied that he was deprived of a normal childhood.

Under his father’s tutelage, he gained at an early age full mastery of the utilitarian theory of politics and society as well as of its associationist psychology of human nature. He also mastered all his father could teach him about Ricardian economics, and by the age of sixteen Mill was a formidable intellectual figure in his own right.

2.Recall what we have said before: that in studying the works of the leading writers in the philosophical tradition, one guiding precept is to identify correctly the problems they were facing, and to understand how they viewed them and what questions they were asking. Once we do this, their answers will most likely seem much deeper, even if not always entirely sound. Writers who, at first, strike us as archaic and without interest, may become illuminating and repay serious study.

Thus, as with all political philosophers, we must ask what Mill took as his questions and what he was trying to accomplish through his writings. In particular, we should note Mill’s choice of vocation. He did not aim to be a scholar, or, as Kant did, to write original and systematic works in philosophy, economics, or political theory, however original and systematic his works may in fact be. Nor did Mill wish to become a political figure or a man of party.

3.Instead Mill saw himself as an educator of enlightened and advanced

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opinion. His aim was to explain and defend what he took to be the appropriate fundamental philosophical, moral, and political principles in accordance with which modern society should be organized. Otherwise he thought the society of the future would not achieve the requisite harmony and stability of an organic age, that is, an age unified by generally acknowledged political and social first principles.

The idea of an organic age (as opposed to a critical age) Mill took from the Saint-Simonians.1 Mill thought modern society would be democratic and industrial and secular, that is, one without a state religion: a non-con- fessional state. This was the kind of society he thought he saw coming into being in England and elsewhere in Europe. He hoped to formulate the fundamental principles for such a society so they would be intelligible to the enlightened opinion of those who had influence in political and social life.

4. I have said that it was not part of Mill’s chosen vocation that his writings should be significant works of scholarship, or original contributions to philosophical or social thought. In fact, however, I believe that Mill was a deep and original thinker, but his originality is always repressed, and this for two reasons:

First, it is required by his choice of vocation: in order to address those who have influence in political life—those who (as he says in his review of Tocqueville’s Democracy in America) have property, intelligence, and the power of combination (the ability to combine with other people to get things done, especially in government)2—his writings cannot appear too original, too scholarly, or too difficult. Otherwise, he loses his audience.

Second, Mill’s originality was repressed by his complicated psychological relation to his father. It was, I think, impossible for him to make an open public break with the utilitarianism of his father and Bentham. Doing so would have given comfort to those Mill regarded as his political opponents, the Tories who held the intuitionist conservative doctrine which he consistently opposed.3 However, Mill did publicly express serious reservations about Bentham’s doctrine in two essays, “Bentham” (1838) and “Coleridge”

1.A French sect, followers of Saint-Simon, who believed that historically organic periods are followed by critical periods, or periods characterized by doubt and skepticism.

2.John Stuart Mill, Collected Works (CW) (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1963– 1991), Vol. XVIII, p. 163.

3.See Mill, Whewell on Moral Philosophy (1852). CW, X.

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(1840); but not surprisingly he was more critical still in his anonymous “Remarks on Bentham’s Philosophy” (1833).4

5. In his chosen vocation Mill surely succeeded to an extraordinary degree. He became one of the most influential political and social writers of the Victorian Age. For our purposes, understanding his vocation helps us to understand the defects of his works: their often loose and ambiguous terminology, and their almost incessant lofty style and sermonizing tone untroubled by self-doubt, even when the most intricate questions are being discussed. Those who disliked him said he sought to convince, and when that failed, to convict.

These defects are most disturbing in the later essays (after 1850, say), which are widely read, and three of which we will be discussing: Utilitarianism, On Liberty, and The Subjection of Women. By this time Mill had England’s ear. He knew it and meant to keep it. But the most creative period of Mill’s life is roughly 1827–1848. Anyone who doubts Mill’s extraordinary gifts has only to consider the works of this period, beginning with the Essays on Some Unsettled Questions of Political Economy (late 1830–31, the 5th essay partially rewritten in 1833, but not published until 1844), then the many brilliant essays of the 1830s and A System of Logic in 1843, and on to The Principles of Political Economy in 1848.

Despite his defects, it is a great mistake to assume a superior manner in reading Mill. He is a great figure and deserves our attention and respect.

J. S. Mill: Biographical Data 1806 Born May 20, in London.

1809–1820 Period of intensive education at home by his father. 1820–1821 Year in France in the household of Sir Samuel Bentham. 1822 Studied law. First publication in newspapers.

1823 Begins his career in East India Company.

1823–1829 Period of study with friends in “Utilitarian Society” and at Grote’s house.

1824 Founding of Westminster Review, for which he wrote until 1828. 1826–1827 Mental crisis.

1830 Met Harriet Taylor. In Paris during the Revolution of 1830. 1832 Death of Bentham; first Reform Bill.

4. This appeared first anonymously as Appendix B in Edward Lytton Bulwer’s England and the English (London: Richard Bentley, 1833), in CW, X.

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1833 Publication of “Remarks on Bentham’s Philosophy.”

1836 Death of Mill’s father.

1838 Publication of “Bentham” and “Coleridge” (1840).

1843 Publication of A System of Logic. Eight editions in his life.

1844 Publication of Essays on Some Unsettled Questions of Political Economy, written 1831–32.

1848 Publication of Principles of Political Economy. Seven editions. 1851 Married Harriet Taylor, whose husband John Taylor had died in

1849.

1856 Became Chief Examiner of East India Company.

1858 Retired from East India Company. Death of Harriet Taylor. 1859 Publication of On Liberty.

1861 Publication of Utilitarianism and On Representative Government.

1865 Elected Member of Parliament for Westminster. Defeated in

1868.

1869 Publication of The Subjection of Women.

1871 Died May 7, in Avignon.

1873 Publication of Autobiography.

1879 Publication of Chapters on Socialism.

§2. One Way to Read Mill’s Utilitarianism

1. I want to propose a way to read the essay Utilitarianism that connects it with Mill’s earlier criticisms of Bentham, first in his “Remarks on Bentham’s Philosophy” (1833), and then later in his essay “Bentham” (1838), written two years after his father’s death in 1836. This essay along with his essay “Coleridge” (1840) marks the most open break Mill was to make with the utilitarianism of Bentham and his father. I say open break because I think the form of utilitarianism he developed, as will become clear in due course, was very a different doctrine from theirs. This, however, is a matter of interpretation and not widely shared.

In “Remarks on Bentham’s Philosophy” (which I shall refer to as RB in textual citations), Mill first defines Bentham’s philosophy, saying, “The first principles . . . are these;—that happiness, meaning by that term pleasure and exemption from pain, is the only thing desirable in itself; that all other things are desirable solely as a means to that end: That the production,

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therefore, of the greatest possible happiness, is the only fit purpose of all human thought and action, and consequently of all morality and government; and moreover, that pleasure and pain are the sole agencies by which the conduct of mankind is governed.”(RB, ¶2). He then makes these objections, among others, to Bentham’s view. First, he objects that Bentham nowhere attempts to give a serious philosophical justification of the principle of utility, and that Bentham displays a curt and dismissive tone with his opponents. Mill argues that those who hold other philosophical and moral doctrines deserve better than this (RB, ¶¶3–6).

2.Second, he objects that Bentham interprets the principle of utility in the narrow sense of what Mill calls the principle of specific consequences, which approves or disapproves of an action solely from a calculation of the consequences to which that kind of action, if generally practiced, would lead. Mill grants that this principle is appropriate in many cases, for example, from the point of view of a legislator who is concerned to encourage or to deter certain kinds of conduct by legal inducements or penalties; and Mill grants the merit of Bentham’s work in advancing the study of jurisprudence and legislation (RB, ¶¶8–9).

Mill’s objection is that this interpretation of the principle of utility is much too narrow for dealing with the fundamental political and social questions of the age; for these questions concern human character as a whole. Here we must not be concerned primarily with how to provide legal incentives for good conduct, or how to deter people from committing crimes, but with how to arrange basic social institutions so that the members of society come to have a character—with aims, desires, and senti- ments—such that they are incapable of committing crimes, or are already inclined to engage in the desired conduct. These broader questions force us to go beyond the principles of specific consequences and to take into account the relation of actions to the formation of character, and from this to consider the guidance of conduct in general by means of political and social institutions. Legislation must be seen in the greater historical context and connected with “the theory of organic institutions and general forms of polity . . . [which] must be viewed as the great instruments of forming national character, of carrying forward the members of the community to perfection, or preserving them from degeneracy” (RB, ¶12; see generally RB, ¶¶7–12).

3.Mill says, third, that Bentham is not to be ranked high as an analyst

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of human nature, that he wrongly supposed that we are moved entirely by a balance of desires concerning future pleasures and pains, and that he mistakenly tried to enumerate motives (human desires and aversions), which are in principle innumerable both in number and kind. He also ignored some of the most important social motives, such as conscience, or the feeling of duty, with the result that his view is psychologically egoistic in tone (RB, ¶¶23–30).

Mill further objects that Bentham fails to see that the greatest hope for human improvement lies in a change in our character and in our regulative and predominant desires. This failure on Bentham’s part is connected with his failure to see political and social institutions as a means for social education of a people and as a way to adjust the conditions of social life to their stage of civilization (RB, ¶35).

4.Finally, Mill says that Bentham’s prevailing error is to fix on only a part of the motives that actually move people and to regard them as “much cooler and more thoughtful calculators than they really are.” This tendency, which is connected with his idea of the artificial, or reasoned, identification of interests, leads Bentham to think of legislation as achieving its effect through citizens’ rational calculation of rewards and penalties, leading to laws and governments providing the necessary legal protections. He underestimates the role and effects of habit and imagination, and the central importance of people’s attachment to institutions, which depends on the continuity of their existence and their identity in their outward form. It is this continuity and identity that adapt them to a people’s historical recollections and helps their institutions to sustain their authority (RB, ¶¶36–37). Bentham overlooks the way in which long-standing institutions and traditions make possible the innumerable compromises and adjustments without which no government, Mill believes, can long be carried on. For Mill, Bentham is a “half-thinker” who said much of great merit, but, while presenting it as the whole truth, actually left it to others to supply half of the truth (RB, ¶¶36–37).

5.Keeping in mind this critique of Bentham, we can, I suggest, regard each chapter of Utilitarianism as Mill’s attempt to reformulate part of the doctrine of Bentham and of his own father so as to meet his own objections to it, as he had stated them in the “Remarks” of 1833. Mill always professes to be a utilitarian and to be revising the doctrine, as it were, from within. One controversy about these revisions is whether they are really

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consistent with utilitarianism, given a reasonably general characterization of it, or whether they amount to a substantially different doctrine; and if so, what this doctrine is. I put this question aside for the time being.

Chapter I of Utilitarianism addresses the first criticism of Bentham: that is, Mill says that he will address the question of the justification of the principle of utility, and he sketches what is needed in I: ¶¶3–5. This chapter together with Chapters IV and V complete his justification. (The whole argument is found in I: ¶¶3–5; IV: ¶¶1–4, 8–9, 12; V: ¶¶26–31, 32–38.) (In textual references, chapter numerals are followed by paragraph numbers. As usual, you will have to number your own paragraphs.)

Mill’s argument here foreshadows the argument that Henry Sidgwick develops in great detail later in his Methods of Ethics (1st edition 1874; 7th and last edition 1907). Roughly, this argument is that everyone, including those who belong to the intuitionist school (this covers conservative writers like Sedgwick and Whewell who are among Mill’s opponents), concedes that one major ground of right conduct is that it tends to promote human happiness. Hence, if there is some other first principle that may conflict with the principle of utility, we must have some way of deciding, in cases of conflict, which principle is to take priority and to settle the case. Both Mill and Sidgwick argue that there is no principle except the principle of utility that is sufficiently general, and that has all the features required to serve as a regulative first principle.

Mill and Sidgwick both argue further that the principle of utility is the principle we tend to use in practice, and that our use of it gives whatever order and coherence our considered moral judgments actually possess. They maintain that common sense morality when people do reflect and balance is secondary and is implicitly utilitarian. As I shall note next time, Mill presses this kind of argument in V: ¶¶26–31 in connection with the various precepts of justice.

6. Chapter II contains in its initial paragraphs Mill’s reformulation of the idea of utility. I focus on ¶¶1–18, which, for our purposes, are the most relevant. They may be divided as follows.

¶1: Introduction.

¶2: States the principle of utility in roughly the form Bentham gave it, which Mill is going to revise.

¶¶3–10: Addresses the objection that utilitarianism is a doctrine fit only for swine. In the course of meeting this objection Mill presents his account

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