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2015 | OriginalPaper | Chapter

An Extraordinary Maximizing Utilitarianism

Author : Jonathan Riley

Published in: Individual and Collective Choice and Social Welfare

Publisher: Springer Berlin Heidelberg

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Abstract

This chapter interprets John Stuart Mill’s liberal version of utilitarianism, which is extraordinary in at least three respects. First, Mill distinguishes among different kinds of utilities conceived as pleasant feelings (including relief from pain) of different intrinsic qualities irrespective of quantity. A feeling of security associated with the moral sentiment of justice is said to be higher in quality as pleasure than any competing kind of pleasure, where justice is conceived in terms of a social code that distributes and sanctions equal rights and duties for all who have a voice in constructing the rules. Second, the utilitarian aggregation procedure is restricted to this higher moral kind of utility and may be depicted as a social welfare functional which operates within a limited sphere of morality and law. The sole purpose of the aggregation procedure is to generate an optimal social code of justice so that individuals are then free from coercive interference to act and pursue non-moral kinds of pleasures in accordance with their optimal rights and duties recognized under the code. Finally, Mill never discusses a standard utilitarian aggregation mechanism and seems instead to have in mind a democratic voting procedure, which can be seen as a purely ordinalist utilitarian procedure, for aggregating over the higher moral kind of utilities expressed by moral individuals who are competently acquainted with the different kinds of utilities.

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previous chapter The Merits of Merit Wants

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For a compelling critique of utilitarianism as commonly understood from the standpoint of our considered beliefs in justice, see Will Kymlicka, Contemporary Political Philosophy: An Introduction, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 10–52, and the many references cited therein. See, also, Amartya Sen, On Ethics and Economics (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987); and Sen, The Idea of Justice (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009).

For further critical discussion of standard utilitarianism and its central assumptions, see Jonathan Riley, “The Interpretation of Maximizing Utilitarianism,” Social Philosophy and Policy 26 (2009): 286–325.

Perhaps the most frequent strategy is to read Mill as some type of rule utilitarian. See, for example, John Rawls, Lectures on the History of Political Philosophy, ed. Samuel Freeman (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), pp. 249–316; and Dale E. Miller, J.S. Mill (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010).

John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism [1861], in John M. Robson, gen. ed., Collected Works of J.S. Mill [CW], 33 vols. (London and Toronto: Routledge and University of Toronto Press, 1963–91), vol. X, chapter II, paragraph 4, p. 211. All references are to this edition. Henceforth, I shall provide references in abbreviated form, as follows: Mill, Util II. 4, p. 211.

Mill, Util V. 32, p. 255. The quoted sentence is one of many indications that Mill assigns absolute priority to considerations of justice over considerations of mere general expediency or policy. As he also says: “moral rules [of justice] which forbid mankind to hurt one another [are] …more vital to human wellbeing than any [policy] maxims, however important” (Util V.33, p. 255, emphasis added).

Mill, Util V.27, p. 252.

Util.V.26, p. 251.

Util II.10, p. 214.

Mill, Util II.5, p. 211. Mill goes on to draw an important distinction between happiness and contentment in the next paragraph.

For different interpretations of the higher pleasures doctrine which cannot be squared either with hedonism or with Mill’s texts, see, e.g., Rawls, Lectures on the History of Political Philosophy, pp. 258–65; L.Wayne Sumner, Welfare, Happiness, and Ethics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), pp. 87–112; and Miller, J.S. Mill, pp. 35–36, 54–70.

Of course, different mental pleasures, in which the physical sensation of pleasures is fused with ideas of different objects or activities, may conflict so that an agent must choose one rather than another. But that is not the issue here.

Util II.5–9, pp. 211–214.

Mill, Util V.25, p. 251. For Mill’s analysis of the ingredients of the moral sentiment of justice and the pleasant feeling of security which in his view is inseparably associated with it, see Util V.14–25, pp. 246–251. See also Jonathan Riley, “Happiness and the Moral Sentiment of Justice,” in Leonard Kahn, ed., Mill on Justice (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), pp. 158–183.

See Jonathan Riley, “Utilitarian Ethics and Democratic Government,” Ethics 100 (1990): 335–348.

For further discussion of the form of representative democracy which Mill recommends as best for any civil society, see Jonathan Riley, “Mill’s Neo-Athenian Model of Liberal Democracy”, in N. Urbinati and A. Zakaras, eds., J.S. Mill’s Political Thought: A Bicentennial Reassessment (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 221–249.

H.L.A. Hart, The Concept of Law, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), pp. 26–49, 80–81.

Mill, Util V 14–15, pp. 246–248.

Util V.24, p. 250, emphasis added.

Util V.25, p. 251.

Util V.25, p. 251, emphasis added.

Given the simplifying assumption, any suitably competent individual who accepts legal rules as reasons for action also by definition accepts them as moral reasons. This necessary connection between law and morality ceases to exist, however, when the simplifying assumption is relaxed, as it must be. So I do not mean to reject (or endorse) Hart’s influential version of inclusive legal positivism. See H.L.A. Hart, The Concept of Law; and Hart, Essays on Bentham. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982).

Util II.10, p. 214, emphasis added.

Various forms of social welfare functionals and the axioms or conditions that characterize them are brilliantly summarized by Amartya Sen, “Social choice theory,” in K. J. Arrow and M. D. Intriligator, eds., Handbook of Mathematical Economics, Vol III (Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1986), pp. 1073–1128.

For discussion of the scheme of checks and balances that Mill recommends in his proposed plan of representative democracy, see Riley, “Mill’s Neo-Athenian Model of Liberal Democracy.”

Mill, Util II.9, p. 214, and Util V.36, p. 257.