Discussion Starter: Mill's Utilitarianism and Its Flaws

John Stuart Mill's moral philosophy of utilitarianism comes as a sudden shock in the Western canon. His On Utilitarianism is a text that profoundly questions the notions of intent and agency that are were so crucial to the building of Kant's deontological ethics (which focused heavily on the idea that you must will that your actions could be worthy of universal application, signifying a heavy deemphasis on consequence); instead, it suggests that human beings should operate under only one fundamental metric of good versus bad, which usually manifests itself in Mill’s text as pleasure versus pain. The distinction between these two poles is something that is usually determined by a rational mind of some sort, which illuminates Mill’s ties to the rational philosophical tradition.

However, I find it a sort of a contradiction that Mill pursues this rational project, because the criteria he so systematically integrates into his writing ignores the fundamental element of pleasure and pain: that they are feelings that are subject to variation across the people who experience them, depending on their standpoints and even their own personal tendencies. While Mill does address this concern a bit in his text—for example, he writes that different degrees and forms of pleasure can apply to different people—he does not formulate any concrete evaluative frameworks with which to apply his theory to real-life situations. It boils down to complexity and inability to solve even the most quotidian situations: if you had to buy a big bag of snacks for everyone, what would you choose if every person had a different idea of what they wanted?

Yet it might be this empty space Mill leaves in his text that blends On Utilitarianism nicely into the rest of the philosophical tradition: for example, even Plato found it difficult to identify particularities in his criteria for what was considered virtuous when asked about each virtue that he considered: to answer this question, he devised the idea of the mean as something relative, as something not necessarily always in the exact middle between two opposites but floating somewhere within the confines of those extremes. The exact determination of where the mean is might depend on the quality of the virtue itself, or the situation that the virtue is placed in. For this reason, I think that Mill might have been wise in leaving some open space in his definitions of pleasure and pain, because it allows him to join a continuous discourse without necessarily impinging on previous works; it allows him to form his own resonant ties to concepts and conceits in the preexisting works without necessarily imposing too many specificities that do not allow for his theory to be interpreted many years into the future, like it is today.

Returning to Kant, then, if a man brought happiness by accident, would it be moral? Ignoring the faultiness of what determines “happiness” aside, since I just discussed that, now we can illuminate the stark contrast between Kant’s and Mill’s viewpoints. Mill would write that any action that brings happiness would be moral, because it would function to bring more pleasure to the people in analysis. However, Kant might be a bit more critical of doing so, not because he feels that the person is being disingenuous, but because perhaps it is the idea that if a person felt a true compulsion or duty to execute a universal good, then the happiness derived from that would be much more significant. Thus, it is interesting to see how Mill’s revisions to the philosophical canon have palpable effects on how we look at real-life situations, allowing us to enter into different perspectives that provide lenses for calculating the moral value of our actions in the past, present, and future.