>>>>Bentham's utilitarianism is nothing if it's not perfectly consistent, and as we'll
see when we come to our debates, it can through the rigorous application of its logic lead
to some perhaps unsettling conclusions. And we'll see why this is so in the thought of
John Stuart Mill, a figure who represents the finest expression of British utilitarianism
in the 19th century. And it's no accident that Mill would become the most able exponent
of utilitarian philosophy, because he was raised from the time he was in the cradle
to become a utilitarian philosopher. Mill had very little choice in the matter. His
father, James Mill, was an acolyte, a defender, and an ally of Bentham, close friends with
Bentham and lifelong ally in their political and philosophical struggles. And James Mill's
son John was raised from the crib to believe in utilitarianism, and he would. He would
come to embrace and to articulate the utilitarian philosophy. Of course, there's a story of
how this would at times come to depress him particularly in the middle of his life, and
he would see it as an arid and almost inhuman unrealistic way of looking at all of life,
trying to measure everything in terms of pleasure and pain. But nevertheless he would certainly
become reconciled and would deepen utilitarianism to the point that we have to ask if it is
even still fundamentally Benthamite utilitarianism. Mill's utilitarianism builds on Bentham's
and says that the foundation of utilitarianism is the greatest happiness principle, that
that act or that law is just which produces the greatest happiness in the greatest numbers.
But Mill, who's one of the great economic and one of the great political thinkers of
the mid-19th century, would try to refine many of the coarser aspects of Bentham's utilitarianism.
And take just one example: the nature of pleasure. For Bentham, all pleasure is the same. For
Bentham all pleasure is sensational, all pleasure is something physical. It's a physical experience
of pleasure of well-being. And for Bentham, the measure of the pleasures is fundamentally
quantitative; and so Bentham's utilitarianism is a purely quantitative utilitarianism. The
greatest amount of pleasure is what justifies an act and so Bentham doesn't distinguish
between various types of pleasure. Mill sees this as problematic, and he sees that this
leads to unsettling conclusions. Because for Bentham all pleasure is pleasure, two units
of pleasure are the same. Five units a pleasure is the same as five units of pleasure, and
it doesn't matter in those consist. And so whether it's reading a play of Shakespeare
or sitting around and drinking a Bud Light and yelling at a basketball team, for Bentham,
there's no way to distinguish. But this bothers John Mill, and indeed it's a profound problem
in Bentham's utilitarianism, because it can't distinguish what would seem intuitively to
us perhaps to be different kinds of pleasures. And so you have to decide if you're utilitarian.
Am I going be a utilitarian on the model of Bentham, and I don't judge whether you get
those pleasures from a beautiful symphony or from the WWF, the World Wrestling Federation?
I don't care. I can't judge, all pleasures are equal. Mill's utilitarianism argues instead
that there are differences of kind in our achievement of pleasure. In other words, there
are qualitatively different pleasures. That all pleasures aren't of equal units, that
there aren't two units of pleasure here and there aren't two of pleasure there, that there
are in fact, as he says, higher and lower pleasures. That there are some pleasures that
are, we might say more refined, and others that are less, that are lower, that appeal
to our baser instincts. And so for Mill there are intellectual pleasures, which are higher
pleasures and there are lower pleasures, which are tied to our appetites closer to our baser,
bodily needs. And so Mill will say there is a difference between reading a play of Shakespeare
and watching fake wrestling, and for Mill one is a kind of intellectual pleasure and
one is a kind of bodily, basal pleasure. And for Mill we can say that qualitatively one
is superior to the other, and so Mill wants to say that all that matters in the calculus
is the balance of pleasure and pain, but that some pleasures are better than others. And
so his rule for this, which you have to decide if you find this intuitively plausible, is
that imagine someone who has experienced both kinds of pleasures. So one person has gone
to a performance of a beautiful Beethoven symphony, and the next night goes happens
to go watch Hulk Hogan wrestle. Somebody who's experienced both, he says, will always tell
you which is a higher. And so it's not simply a prejudice, it's not simply your cultural
elitism that says that the Beethoven symphony is a kind of higher pleasure, but rather it
is the truth that there is something qualitatively different in that kind of intellectual pleasure.
Well, how can this be? Mill argues that humans have certain natural capacities and that humans
experience a kind of higher pleasure when they fully develop and experience and use
those capacities. Capacities like reason, and so for Mill there's a sense in which some
pleasures are achieved through the fulfillment of our nature, and in particular it is those
pleasures which are achieved through the fulfillment of the highest aspects of our nature, that
which most separates us from animals and other creatures that are the higher pleasures. Now
to some may sound familiar. It's been said that this represents a way of letting Aristotle
in through the back door, because it envisions man not simply as a machine that seeks pleasure
and avoids pain, but as a particular kind of creature that is endowed with certain capabilities
and that the fulfillment of pleasures through those capabilities is the fulfillment of our
nature, and in a way, is an achievement of a kind of set of higher pleasures. And so
Mill's version of utilitarianism represents a certain kind of fulfillment of Bentham's
calculus, but at the same time represents a betrayal of the fundamental idea that all
pleasures are the same.