III.

After Bentham

Other notable exponents of utilitarianism were the British jurist John Austin and the British philosophers James Mill and his son John Stuart Mill. Austin set forth a strong defence of the utilitarian theory in his Province of Jurisprudence Determined (1832). James Mill interpreted and popularized the theory in a number of articles contributed for the most part to the Westminster Review, a periodical founded by Bentham and others to promote the spread of the utilitarian philosophy. John Stuart Mill, who made utilitarianism the subject of one of his philosophical treatises (Utilitarianism, 1863), is the ablest champion of the doctrine after Bentham.

Mill applied utilitarianism to morality in a far more detailed way than Bentham. In addition, he contributed to the theory by recognizing distinctions of quality, in addition to those of intensity, among pleasures. Thus, whereas Bentham maintained that the “quality of pleasure being equal, push-pin [a child’s game] is as good as poetry”, Mill contended that some pleasures are “higher” or more valuable than others. The higher pleasures are those associated with activities that realize specifically human capacities, for example, art, science, and philosophy. The lower pleasures are those that human beings share with animals. Mill dramatized this distinction between different kinds of pleasures with his statement that it is “better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied”. When Mill spoke, therefore, of the greatest happiness of the greatest number as the criterion of morality, what he meant by “greatest happiness” was not simply the greatest amount of a single kind of pleasure and the least amount of pain, as found in Bentham’s works and in his own earlier formulations. In the calculation of the total amount of happiness produced by an action, higher pleasures would weigh much more heavy than lower pleasures.

The British philosopher Henry Sidgwick, a contemporary disciple of Mill, gave a comprehensive presentation of Mill’s utilitarianism in his Methods of Ethics (1874). Somewhat later, the British philosophers Herbert Spencer and Sir Leslie Stephen, the former in his Data of Ethics (1879), the latter in his Science of Ethics (1882), sought to synthesize the utilitarian theory with the principles of biological evolution as expounded in the works of Charles Darwin. Both the American philosopher and psychologist William James and the American philosopher, psychologist, and educator John Dewey were influenced by utilitarianism. Dewey substituted intelligence for pleasure, or happiness, both as the supreme value and as the most reliable method of achieving other desirable values.

After a period in the early 20th century when utilitarianism was eclipsed by intuitionist theories of morality, it was revived in the second half of the century. When efforts to found morality or legislation on conscience, pure reason, or God’s will run into difficulties raised by scepticism, utilitarianism seems a natural grounding. Versions of utilitarianism are still defended by many philosophers today, in spite of the wide variety of attacks that have been made against it.

One objection to utilitarianism is that happiness is impossible to measure. To avoid this problem, modern utilitarianism is usually formulated in terms of “desire-satisfaction” or “preference-satisfaction” rather than happiness. Another objection is that utilitarianism justifies any action, no matter how seemingly bad, if the action produces more happiness than unhappiness overall. So, for example, it might be argued that the utilitarian could condone the killing of a terminally ill person in order to transplant that person’s various organs into a number of people who might otherwise die slow and painful deaths. A response to this is to distinguish “act” utilitarianism from “rule” utilitarianism. Act utilitarianism holds that the utilitarian criterion is to be applied directly to individual acts: an act is right or wrong depending on whether doing that particular act would create more happiness overall than doing anything else. Rule utilitarianism, on the other hand, states that the utilitarian criterion is to be applied to whole systems of social rules: an act is right or wrong depending on whether it is allowed by a system of social rules that, if conformed to by everyone, would produce more happiness overall than any other system of rules. Rule utilitarianism therefore evaluates a whole system of social rules—a social morality—by how much happiness it produces, whereas act utilitarianism attempts to evaluate each individual action in the same way. It is argued that although act utilitarianism would justify killing the ill person in the example to utilize that person’s organs, rule utilitarianism would not, since a system of social rules that condoned such action would lead to widespread insecurity and unhappiness in the long run.