MILL: HIGHER AND LOWER PLEASURES

UTILITARIANISM: MILL’S VIEW OF HIGHER AND LOWER PLEASURES


Utilitarianism gets its name from the word ‘utility’, which means happiness rather tahtn usefulness. Broadly speaking utilitrianism has three basic featues.
1. It is Consequentialist: this means that it’s the results or consequences of the action that count in deciding whether it’s right.
2. It holds that happiness/utility is good in itself: this means that happiness is worth pursuing and increasing for its own sake. Antother way of putting this is to say that happiness is intrinsically, or inherently, good. Everything else is good merely insofat as it is a means to the production of happiness, which is the ultimate goal. So things such as money, power, friendship, and so on are only instrumental goods because they are ways and means, i.e. instruments, for achieving happiness.
3. The principle of utility (greatest happiness principle) is the most fundamental moral principle according to utilitarianism, and by applying it ti your actions you can find out whether they are right or wrong.
Because of the heavy criticism directed at Bentham’s utilitarianism, Mill wanted to improve on it by making a number of modifications which would side-step those problems. He made some major changes:
1. He added quality to quantity of pleasure by distinquishing between higher and lower pleasures. He did this to combat the ‘pig philosophy’ critcism levelled at Bentham.
2. He dropped the hedonic calculus. This was to avoid criticisms that is was unworkable.
3. He switched from Bentham’s act utilitarianism, according to which each act is tested separately against the principle of utility, to rule utilitarianism, wehreby it’s te rules or policies that govern types of action, which the principle of utility tests. This was to cmbat accusations that utilitarianism condoned injustice.(Now and then Mill talks like an act utilitarian, causing some debate as to his real position).
The canonical statement of Mill's utilitarianism can be found in Utilitarianism. This philosophy has a long tradition, although Mill's account is primarily influenced by Jeremy Bentham and Mill's father James Mill. Mill's famous formulation of utilitarianism is known as the "greatest-happiness principle". It holds that one must always act so as to produce the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people, within reason. Mill's major contribution to utilitarianism is his argument for the qualitative separation of pleasures. Bentham treats all forms of happiness as equal, whereas Mill argues that intellectual and moral pleasures are superior to more physical forms of pleasure. Mill distinguishes between happiness and contentment, claiming that the former is of higher value than the latter, a belief wittily encapsulated in the statement that " 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 of a different opinion, it is because they only know their own side of the question."
Mill defines the difference between higher and lower forms of happiness with the principle that those who have experienced both tend to prefer one over the other. This is, perhaps, in direct contrast with Bentham's statement that "Pushpin is as good as Poetry", that, if a simple child's game like hopscotch causes more pleasure to more people than a night at the opera house, it is more imperative upon a society to devote more resources to propagating hopscotch than running opera houses. Mill's argument is that the "simple pleasures" tend to be preferred by people who have no experience with high art, and are therefore not in a proper position to judge. Mill supported legislation that would have granted extra voting power to university graduates on the grounds that they were in a better position to judge what would be best for society. It should be noted that, in this example, Mill did not intend to devalue uneducated people and would certainly have advocated sending the poor but talented to universities: he believed that education, and not the intrinsic nature of the educated, qualified them to have more influence in government.
CRITICAL ASSESSMENT
Mill faces three major problems regarding his distinction between higher and lower pleasures.
A. It abandons hedonism: This is a problem for Mill because he wants to maintain Bentam’s hedonistic view of happiness, nmnamely that happiness and pleasure are the same thing, and that this is the only thing good in itself. But if only pleasure counts, how is it possible to prefer something which gives you less pleasure over something which gives you more? Higher pleasures give you less, so it seems the only way you can justify these is to invoke values other than pleausre that compensate for the lesser pleasure –for example, values such as the greater artistry and profoundity to be found in Shakespearean tragedy. But if hedonism say spleaure is the only standard for judging actions, then Mill is inconsistent in trying to stick to hedonism while at the same time using standards other than pleasure to justify the higher pleausures.
B. It makes pleasure even harder to calculate: It was hard enough, if not impossible, to calculate pleasures quantitatively when we had only one scale, i.e. the hedoinc calculus, but is becomes out of the question when we try to use two or morescales to compare qualitative with quantitative pleasures. This would be like suing a weather vane to weigh out ingredients for a cake, or a tailor using a barometer to fit a customer for a suit. These things are incommensurable, i.e. they cannot be compared because they don’t talk the same language. The aesthetic beauty of a flame cannot be costed aainst the amount of heat, and the profundity of a Shakespearean tragedy cannot be costed against the amount of pleasure you get fomr earting a pizza instead.
C. It makes it impossible to decide between higher and lower pleasures: it’s useless to distinquish between higer and lower pleasures if we can’t tell, or can’t agree, which is which. Chaos would soon ensue, so we need a decision procedure for judging this.

REFERENCES
Stewart, Noel. Ethics: An Introductions to Moral Philosophy. USA: Polity Press, 2009.