ABSTRACT
Strictly speaking, the principle given here provides only the …rst stage in the theory Mill intends to expound, for it only gives a criterion for appraising the value of actions, leaving the assessment of agents and of traits of character to subsequent discussion. Yet there are already important sources of ambiguity and future dif…culty. One that is relatively easy to amend stems from the fact that Mill fails explicitly to consider the range of options available to an agent: a better version of the Principle would state that an action is right if and only if it produces at least as much happiness as any alternative action available to the agent. In unlucky circumstances, even the best available action may lead to considerable unhappiness, while, for someone more fortunately situated, just about anything that could be done might produce abundances of bliss. Mill’s standard, inherited from Bentham, is that rightness is always a matter of causing as much happiness as possible. My suggested amendment of the Principle ¶attens out a crucial ambiguity, on which later passages in Utilitarianism appear to trade. Instead of talking directly about producing (or “promoting”) happiness, Mill adverts to tendencies to yield happiness or unhappiness. His proposal can be read either as recognizing that an individual action may have multiple effects, some positive, others negative, and that the “tendency” of that individual act is to be measured by the sum of the happiness engendered across all these causal pathways, or as focusing instead on types of acts and thinking of their “tendency” as the average total happiness they produce, when a range of contexts is considered (West 2004: Ch. 4; Berger 1984). Imagine that someone endows an annual prize for the best new opera written by a composer under forty. In the spirit of the …rst version of the Principle, we would appraise the action by looking at the various ways in which this particular endowment affects human happiness: maybe there are positive effects in the fortunes of winners and enhanced opportunities for opera-lovers, perhaps
negative effects in intensi…ed rivalries among younger musicians and the distortion of budding careers. On the basis of the second version, we’d consider a far broader class of actions and their total consequences, looking perhaps at the general trend of instituting prizes for artistic achievement and the broad effects on human happiness. (So we could consider prizes offered to people under forty, prizes offered for composing operas, prizes offered to musicians, and so on.) We might then explore the consequences of a rule enjoining acts of this general type. Which perspective does Mill have in mind? Utilitarianism can easily give the impression that Mill is undecided. Sometimes, particularly when he wants to commend the ¶exibility of Utilitarianism to allow for divergence from supposedly exceptionless moral principles, the emphasis is clearly on appraising particular actions. Thus, in replying to the objection that Utilitarianism promotes the Expedient at the expense of the Right, Mill explains that an individual breach of principle, telling a lie to avoid damaging consequences, say, has a number of different effects: it may contribute to happiness by saving human lives, but we must always set this against the damage done to the general institution of requiring people to tell the truth: “. . . in order that the exception may not extend itself beyond the need, and may have the least possible effect in weakening reliance on veracity, it ought to be recognised, and, if possible, its limits de…ned; and if the principle of utility is good for anything, it must be good for weighing these con¶icting utilities against one another, and marking out the region within which one or the other preponderates” (Mill 1963-91: Vol. 10, 223; see also p. 259). The principle deployed in the imagined instance is plainly one that considers the varied effects of individual acts. Elsewhere, however, Mill seems to judge actions according to the type to which they belong. In considering cases in which the public interest is served by general abstinence from behavior that would be individually bene…cial – as in famous examples about the use of common land – Mill recognizes that a few isolated people might enjoy additional private interest, without any diminution of the general good. Applying the principle in the form that concentrates on particular actions seems to commend free riding: instead of a situation in which all those involved receive the same large utility derived from the public good, we have an outcome in which the majority receives the same high level of happiness as before and the small minority of free riders does even better. Mill backs away from this conclusion:
In the case of abstinences indeed – of things which people forebear to do, from moral considerations, though the consequences in the particular case might be bene…cial – it would be unworthy of an intelligent agent not to be consciously aware that the action is of a class which, if practised generally, would be generally injurious, and that this is the ground of the obligation to abstain from it. (Mill 1963-91: Vol. 10, 220; see also Ch. 5)
Here, Mill speci…cally does not say that the individual action of a member of the minority has two different effects on overall happiness, a small boost for the agent and a large loss in terms of undermining a social practice. Instead he focuses on a type
of act, abstention, and on the overall consequences of rules that either require acts of this type or else permit deviations from it. Sometimes, apparently, the in¶exibility of rules is valuable. A second tangled issue in Utilitarianism derives from Mill’s principal amendment to Bentham. In the wake of his famous breakdown, poignantly described in the Autobiography, Mill came to believe that his own education had been misconceived, precisely because of its neglect of an important dimension of human value (Mill 1963-91: Vol. 1, 136-55; see also the paired essays “Bentham” and “Coleridge” in Mill 1963-91: Vol. 10). Bentham had insisted that pleasure and pain are to be measured with respect to two factors: intensity and duration. Even at this stage, there’s a technical dif…culty, since it’s not evident how one is to collapse the two dimensions into a single measure of happiness. When exactly is a shorter, but more acute, pleasure preferable to a longer, less acute, one? Mill compounds this dif…culty, it seems, by introducing a third dimension. Responding to the frequent objection that Bentham, like Epicurus before him, represented “human nature in a degrading light,” Mill suggests, in direct opposition to Bentham’s refusal to distinguish allegedly “higher” pleasures from “lower” ones, that “some kinds of pleasure are more desirable and more valuable than others” (Mill 1963-91: Vol. 10, 210, 211). Poetry, it turns out, is superior to pushpin or to other delights of the alehouse. We now appear to have more dif…cult issues to settle: how are we going to rate this higher pleasure of its particular intensity and its duration against another lower pleasure of somewhat greater intensity and somewhat longer duration? A preliminary question concerns how to discriminate the higher from the lower pleasures in the …rst place. Mill offers a simple answer.
