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The Rise of Liberal Utilitarianism:
Bentham and Mill
Piers Norris Turner, Ohio State University
[DRAFT: final version forthcoming in The Blackwell Companion to 19th
Century Philosophy , ed. J.A. Shand]
I. Introduction
By the turn of the nineteenth century, Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) was a well-known moral and legal reformer. A child of the Enlightenment, writing at the time of the American and French revolutions, Bentham had offered wide-ranging critiques of customary institutions and ways of thinking. He was particularly critical of appeals to natural law and intuition that, consciously or not, provided mere cover stories for people’s preferences. Such appeals, he argued, fail to provide real reasons:
The various systems that have been formed concerning the standard of right and wrong… consist all of them in so many contrivances for avoiding the obligation of appealing to any external standard, and for prevailing upon the reader to accept of the author’s sentiment or opinion as a reason in itself. ( An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation [IPML], II.14; B i.8)^1
Because these cover stories are guided by people’s preferences, Bentham also argued that they are incapable of grounding a principled and well-organized set of public institutions. They instead protect established powers, whose likes and dislikes carry the most weight. His earliest writings, for instance, detail how the vagaries of the common law served entrenched interests rather than the public at large. What Bentham needed was a public principle that could guide a scientific program of legal codification and political reform. In A Fragment on Government (1776), he therefore introduced the principle of utility , according to which “it is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong” (B i.227). Over the following half century, he demonstrated that this principle required comprehensive political and legal reforms, including an overthrow of the traditional aristocracy in favor of democracy, social equality, and personal and economic
(^1) Bentham citations marked “B volume#.page #” refer to the Bowring edition of his Collected
Works. IPML passages are also cited by chapter and paragraph number.
liberty. Earlier philosophers had declared that utility or happiness was central to morality and public life, but it was Bentham who finally laid out a systematic utilitarian moral and political theory, as well as a set of institutional reforms based on those ideas. Bentham’s historical significance is underappreciated today, but the civil, constitutional, and penal codes he developed to promote the general happiness had wide influence in Great Britain and beyond. He became an inspiration for the radical politics of the early nineteenth century, arguing in particular that democratic accountability is needed to ensure that government works for the universal interest, and not for the sinister (or partial) interest of a person or group. The principle of utility requires that each person’s happiness count equally in the justification of policy, regardless of social rank, race, or gender. In Britain, Bentham’s arguments motivated an impressive collection of thinkers and political reformers loosely referred to as the Philosophical Radicals.^2 Most influential among them at the time were James Mill (1773-1836) and, later, his son John Stuart Mill (1806-1873). If Bentham was the intellectual godfather of this group, James Mill was initially its strongest personality and practical leader, whose “Essay on Government” (1820) served as a guiding text. Like Bentham, he argued especially that good government required democratic accountability to maintain an “identity of interest” between the rulers and the ruled (Mill 1992, 22). Despite his own philosophical achievements, however, perhaps his greatest contribution was training his son into the utilitarian fold. Like Bentham, John Stuart Mill was a child prodigy. By his teens he became a significant contributor to the radical program and, owing to later works such as Principles of Political Economy , On Liberty , Utilitarianism , and The Subjection of Women , he is now widely regarded as the greatest theorist and expositor of liberal utilitarian political philosophy. Interestingly, John Stuart Mill’s reputation as a moral and political philosopher derives in part from his coming to reject Benthamite utilitarianism in favor of a theory that is more deeply liberal and humanistic. On the now familiar story, Mill thought Bentham’s utilitarianism focused too much on the material and external determinants of happiness, such as institutional arrangements and incentive structures, and ignored the development of individuals’ own faculties, sentiments, and character as a way to promote happiness. Insofar as Bentham did focus on character, Mill also thought he had a woefully deficient understanding of people’s capacity to develop a sense of moral obligation and fellow-feeling. Raised to be a Benthamite rational thinking machine, Mill was forced to confront these defects both personally and philosophically during a “mental crisis” at the age of twenty (CW I.137ff). Personally, he realized that his own emotional deficits had left his capacities for happiness and fellow-feeling severely limited. Philosophically, he applied this realization to utilitarianism itself, arguing that Bentham’s view ignored what Mill now took to be a significant part of the moral life: the inner development of the individual.^3 To
(^2) John Stuart Mill himself used the term “philosophic radicals” (“Autobiography” (1873), CW
I.203), but the label was not accepted by all those identified with it. Mill citations marked by “CW volume#.page #” refer to his Collected Works. (^3) See Donner 1991 for a detailed discussion of this theme in Mill.
The principle of utility
At the bottom of everything for Bentham is the principle of utility, which he introduces as “that principle which approves or disapproves of every action whatsoever, according to the tendency which it appears to have to augment or diminish the happiness of the party whose interest is in question” (IPML, I.2; B i.4). He emphasizes that the party whose interest is in question, at least in the case of government action or policy, is the entire community. Later he would state the principle differently, commonly referring to it as “the greatest-happiness principle” and sometimes specifying the “universal interest” as the end of all action and policy. Strictly, these are meant to be just notational variants. He explains that “[b]y utility is meant that property in any object, whereby it tends to produce benefit, advantage, pleasure, good, or happiness” (IPML, I.3; B i.1- 2), and that to promote someone’s “interest” just is “to add to the sum total of his pleasures” (IPML, I.5; B i.2). It is worth distinguishing five elements of Bentham’s view of the principle of utility, three of which concern his utilitarian theory of value, while the final two concern his theory of right action. First, on Bentham’s view, happiness is the ultimate value for persons. Whether we are evaluating actions or policies or practices or institutions, what is fundamentally important is how much happiness is produced and how much suffering is avoided or alleviated. The key implication of this claim is that the value of everything else is to be explained in the end by its contribution to one or more individuals’ happiness. Second, happiness (or interest or benefit or good) is to be cashed out in terms of the balance of pleasure and pain. In perhaps the most famous passage from all of Bentham’s works, he writes: “Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do” (IPML, I.1; B i.1). Pleasure and pain are concrete bits of experience that are uniquely able to give meaning to, and ground, otherwise vague and unclear moral claims. Other moral systems, he contends, “deal in sounds instead of senses, in caprice instead of reason, in darkness instead of light” (IPML, I.1; B i.1). Third, Bentham is famous for arguing that pleasures and pains can be quantified according to their intensity, duration, probability, proximity, the number of people affected by them, and their causal relationship to further pleasure and pain (IPML, IV.2-5; B i.16). His quantification of happiness in the service of utilitarian decision-making has come to be called the “felicific calculus,” though he seems not to have used that term himself. Crucially, Bentham makes no further distinction among pleasurable experiences in terms of quality : “the game of push-pin is of equal value with the arts and sciences of music and poetry. If the game of push-pin furnish more pleasure, it is more valuable than either” ( Rationale of Reward , B ii.253). Fourth, the principle of utility holds that the proper end of human conduct, including government policy and law, is the maximization of the universal interest or “the greatest happiness
of all,” 5 and not the interest or happiness of some subgroup or class of individuals. In a characteristic statement, he writes: “The right and proper end of government in every political community is the greatest happiness of all the individuals of which it is composed” ( First Principles Preparatory to a Constitutional Code [FP], 232). Fifth, and finally, in calculating the general happiness or universal interest, each person’s happiness must be considered impartially or equally: “every individual in the country tells for one; no individual for more than one” ( Rationale of Judicial Evidence , B vii.334). Mill would later emphasize this aspect of Bentham’s account of the principle of utility:
That principle is a mere form of words without rational signification, unless one person's happiness, supposed equal in degree (with the proper allowance made for kind), is counted for exactly as much as another's. Those conditions being supplied, Bentham's dictum, “everybody to count for one, nobody for more than one,” might be written under the principle of utility as an explanatory commentary. ( Utilitarianism , CW X.257)
Uniting these elements, and setting aside some disagreements about how best to interpret Bentham’s understanding of the principle of utility, the basic idea is that what makes any action or policy right is its tendency to promote the greatest overall balance of pleasure over pain, given an impartial consideration of the interests of all those involved. This relatively straightforward moral principle became a powerful weapon in the cause for social and political reform, and remains influential to this day.^6 For many readers, however, this is where their understanding of Bentham’s moral and political philosophy ends. Familiar objections are raised against the elements just outlined. Is pleasure all that is ultimately valuable? Does it really not matter whether we get our pleasure from push-pin or poetry? Is the felicific calculus a practicable method for moral decision-making? Negative answers to these questions have led philosophers to turn away from Bentham. But, while I cannot do justice to the full range of Bentham’s thought, a fair treatment of his views must include some of the distinctive ways that he puts the principle of utility into practice. These are crucial to any understanding of his legacy as a moral and political philosopher. In the remainder of this section, I therefore propose to look at three important and distinctive features of his utilitarian thought: his introduction of four subordinate ends to guide public morality and law, his account of “official aptitude,” and his “assumption of infallibility” argument.
Four subordinate ends and the universal interest
(^5) He is more commonly associated with the phrase “the greatest happiness of the greatest number,”
but it is important to appreciate that, for Bentham, this formulation is required only by cases of competition in which the greatest happiness of all is not possible (FP 3; Constitutional Code , B ix.5-6). (^6) Perhaps most prominently in the works of Peter Singer.
significance of Bentham’s having introduced them at all, a few general remarks about how they relate to each other are in order. First, because security and subsistence are required for life itself, and so for the existence of any society at all, they have priority over abundance and equality. Bentham describes security as “the principal object of the laws” (B i.307) because it establishes the social conditions for the other three: it creates and maintains shared expectations that allow for the coordination on which other goods depend. This means, in practice, that any reforms must be consistent with maintaining security, and so—despite Bentham’s reformist zeal—there is an anti- revolutionary streak in his thought. Second, security encompasses a great deal: security against natural disasters, security against enemies, security against misrule by one’s own government, security of property, security of person, and more (“Leading Principles of a Constitutional Code,” B ii.269-270). Even our regard for liberty, on Bentham’s view, is contained within security: personal liberty is, roughly, security of the person, and political liberty is security against misrule. But constraints on liberty are also fundamentally justified by security, because we must have enforced social rules to maintain our social life and protect our rights. Security is thus a complicated end, even on its own. Third, Bentham argues that social, political, and economic equality are important to the greatest happiness, but within limits. He recognized that many of the evils of the traditional aristocracy in Britain stemmed from inequalities. He was, for instance, anti-slavery and pro- women’s suffrage.^10 On voting rights, he saw that “a share in the supreme constitutive power is a means of, or security for, happiness” and should therefore be extended to “the most helpless and most indigent” as well as the “the most powerful and the most opulent” ( Constitutional Code [CC], B ix.108). Bentham was also in favor of limiting property rights, largely for reasons of diminishing marginal utility. In fact, over time and through piecemeal reforms, he believed that security and equality could be made fully compatible. But it is worth reiterating the priority of security. In the near term, he argued, “When security and equality are in opposition, there should be no hesitation: equality should give way” (“Principles of the Civil Code,” B i.311). And thus, for example, when he called for giving women the franchise, he also noted that the “contest and confusion” caused by the proposal would be reason to put it off (CC, B ix.109). There is a great deal more one might say about the relationships among security, subsistence, abundance, and equality, but my main point is to highlight the fact that, in much of his writing, Bentham pursued the greatest happiness or universal interest through those subsidiary ends. We might now ask: why? As Gerald Postema (2018) has argued, the answer seems to be Bentham’s recognition that in order to promote happiness there is a need for a public standard, accessible to all, that each person has an interest in achieving and supporting. This public standard is required by security itself; it is necessary for setting the shared expectations that allow for all of the goods that depend on social coordination. It cannot, then, be constituted by the particular ends of an individual or small group. And it cannot be made up of private ends that others cannot appreciate or evaluate. Only generally recognized values can (1) provide a framework within
(^10) For Bentham’s view of slavery, see Rosen 2005.
which we can specify what we may reasonably expect of each other, and how we may hold each other accountable for our failures and (2) facilitate public deliberation about how to revise and develop that very framework going forward. Bentham’s increasing use of the term “universal interest” in his later work reflects his commitment to this public standard. In particular, it allows him to express two related thoughts about what is right and wrong in political arrangements and the actions of public officials. On the positive side, Bentham comes to identify the universal interest with those interests that each individual holds in common with others. He sometimes suggests that the universal interest is constituted by public interests in which we each have a share, and which benefit each of us without sacrificing any of us (CC, B ix.7, 127; The Book of Fallacies , B ii.475; FP 192). To maximize the universal interest on this picture looks rather different than before. On the negative side, he introduces the notion of “sinister interest” (CC, B.ix.128, 136ff; The Book of Fallacies , B ii.475) to refer to those interests that are partial to an individual or small group, and which conflict with the promotion of the universal interest:
Be the community what it may, to every member of it belongs two opposite and continually conflicting interests: 1. His share in the universal interest—that interest which is common to himself and every other member of the community: 2. That interest which is particular and peculiar to himself, with or without some comparatively small number of associates. (CC, B ix.127)
Bentham does not doubt that sinister interests are real interests or that their realization would contribute to an individual’s happiness. He also believes that the typical individual is, most of the time, more motivated to pursue his sinister interest than to secure his share of the universal interest. As we shall see in a moment, this is especially important when it comes to public officials, but it is also true of regular citizens who might benefit from freeloading or otherwise taking advantage of their fellow community members. The more Bentham’s own efforts at political and legal reform failed (notably his Panopticon prison design), the more he believed that sinister interest was the chief obstacle to promoting the general happiness.^11 The four subsidiary ends defining the universal interest provide Bentham with a public standard of utility: they express a set of shared expectations capable of grounding a process of public decision-making and accountability. Unlike the preferences that underlie appeals to intuition or natural law to justify self-serving aristocratic institutions, these subsidiary ends are recognizable by all, everyone has a share in them, and the default assumption is equality. This is a significant contribution to the public reason tradition in political philosophy that has become only more pronounced since Rawls. Bentham’s elaboration of the principle of utility is not nearly so flat-footed as it might have seemed.
(^11) See Schofield 2006, 109-136.
create a meritocratic system based on objective measures of talent for the work required. It is difficult to convey the extent of Bentham’s detailed expositions of how officials might be found lacking in moral, intellectual, or active aptitude, and his proposed remedies for each of them.^12 Such failures might be found in citizens themselves, in the executive branch at every level, in legislative bodies, or in the courts, and in each case different sorts of fixes might be needed. Because securing appropriate aptitude is the primary means by which the universal interest is served, these remedies take up a large portion of Bentham’s work on constitutional codes. Bentham also proposes to limit the opportunities for public officials to make mischief. This is done, for instance, by limiting the power of individual offices and officers, including the amount of public funds they control. He allows that government is necessary to promote the public interest, but he wants it to be as efficient as possible by avoiding “expense” in the form of unnecessary coercion, punishment, taxation, or any other harm or cost. The motto that guides his institutional designs is therefore: “Aptitude Maximized; Expense Minimized” (FP, 4; CC, B ix.150, 200). The details of his designs matter less to us than the fact that the principal means by which Bentham proposes to maximize the universal interest is not by prescribing particular laws (though he also does that), but by focusing on the promotion of official aptitude and the division of decision-making labor. Bentham argues that to promote happiness one needs to secure competent decision-making by groups or individuals, and then allow the competent parties to do their work. As David Lieberman puts it: “The so-called ‘maximization of official aptitude’ was a relatively late addition to Bentham’s political lexicon, but by the time of the Constitutional Code , it had become the designated goal of constitutional arrangements” (2008, 621). In designing institutions, then, the first practical matter is to maximize official aptitude in each domain in which decisions are made, and not to secure particular outcomes. We thereby see that certain substantive commitments—such as public accountability in the form of elections and free discussion—are justified primarily as ways to promote appropriate official aptitude. They provide security against misrule, and (some) hope that over time decisions and policies of public officials will promote the universal interest. In these three elements—the principle of utility, the four subordinate ends, and the notion of official aptitude—we now have the basic structure of Bentham’s political philosophy. As he summarizes his own view:
These same uncontrovertible ends of all good government, I once more acknowledge accordingly, and in these few words bring together and recapitulate:— Greatest happiness of greatest number maximized; national subsistence, abundance, security, and equality
(^12) The topic of securing appropriate official aptitude takes up much of his Constitutional Code ,
and is the organizing theme of at least two volumes of the new edition of Bentham’s Collected Works produced by the Bentham Project at UCL under the direction of Philip Schofield: First Principles Preparatory to a Constitutional Code and Official Aptitude Maximized, Expense Minimized. For a brief overview, see “Leading Principles of a Constitutional Code,” B ii.272-3.
maximized; official aptitude maximized; expense, in all shapes, minimized. (CC, B ix.200; see also CC, B ix.127).
These elements together also provide a more appropriate measure by which to evaluate Bentham’s legacy, especially his influence on Mill, and the unifying themes of nineteenth century utilitarianism.
The assumption of infallibility
Before moving forward, however, I want to add a further consideration that is not as commonly discussed in connection with Bentham, but which seems both important in itself and relevant to his relationship to Mill. Bentham emphasizes that, even when we have secured appropriate official aptitude, there is a limit to the decisions any official, including the sovereign authority, may legitimately make: current decision-makers, whether an individual or an entire parliament, should not be able to bind future decision-makers indefinitely, or even for an extended period. This caveat is especially important for a view like Bentham’s, in which securing and giving power to appropriate official aptitude is seen as the principal means for promoting the universal interest. Even the most competent party may not legitimately undermine the means necessary for public accountability and future improvement. As we shall see, Bentham called doing so an assumption of infallibility. This phrase does not mean that someone consciously adopts their own fallibility as a premise in a chain of reasoning but rather that one assumes a position of superiority with respect to the future that only infallibility could justify. As Melissa Schwartzberg (2007) has shown, this theme appears in many places in Bentham’s work, as in his skepticism of the Church and his criticism of political oaths that bind one indefinitely to already-established laws.^13 But it is clearest in his work on constitutional codes, when he argues that constitutions must not be made immune to revision. Rather, he argues, they must contain within themselves the means to their own improvement. The failure to do so amounts to an assumption of infallibility. In “Necessity of an Omnicompetent Legislature,” for example, he criticizes the decision of the French Constituent Assembly to make it very difficult to amend the constitution despite their acknowledgment that individual elements of it could be improved: “You are not persuaded of your own infallibility; and yet you act as if you were; you engage in a measure which nothing but infallibility could justify” (NOL, 273).^14 He objects that the “perpetuity of the constitution” will “tie the hands of authority for ever” (NOL, 274, 275). Similarly, he criticizes the Spanish constitution for including an “immutability-enacting, alias the infallibility- assuming clause” that restricts amendments: “I, who have been thinking of such matters for more than fifty years, would no more think of giving a twelvemonth’s immutability to any such work of
(^13) See Schwartzberg 2007, 569, 571. (^14) See also Schwartzberg 2007, 578, and Turner 2013, 96-99.
comments about Bentham by attending to the content and scope of the criticisms rather than focusing on how they are expressed. Above all, despite stinging criticisms of Bentham in particular respects, it seems clear to me that Mill’s overall assessment is enormously positive. It has been more common to linger on their disagreements than their shared projects. But even if Mill thought Bentham “one-sided” as a philosopher (CW X.112, 498; CW I.169), it would be a mistake to infer that Mill thought Bentham not worth reading for the part of the truth he supplies, or that Bentham’s part was insignificant. His essay “Bentham,” the source of many of Mill’s sharpest criticisms, is a good example. In that critical piece Mill nevertheless writes that Bentham, with Coleridge, is one of “the two great seminal minds of England in their age” (CW X.77) and “a source of light to a generation” (CW X.80). He says that “[a] place, therefore, must be assigned to Bentham among the masters of wisdom, the great teachers and permanent intellectual ornaments of the human race” (CW X.82). After criticizing Bentham at length, he concedes “[i]t is an ungracious task to call a great benefactor of mankind to account for not being a greater—to insist upon the errors of a man who has originated more new truths, has given to the world more sound practical lessons, than it ever received, except in a few glorious instances, from any other individual” (CW X.100). And he concludes the essay with these words: “there remains to Bentham an indisputable place among the great intellectual benefactors of mankind. His writings will long form an indispensable part of the education of the highest order of practical thinkers” (CW X.115). Mill expresses similar sentiments in private. In an angry 1851 letter to William E. Hickson, he describes Bentham as “a man who has done more for the world than any man of modern times” (CW XIV.78). Mill was upset that Hickson, his successor as editor of the Westminster Review , had published unfair criticisms of Bentham. And in an 1871 letter he writes, “On the whole I can think of no books so likely to be useful, both from their intrinsic merit and from their cosmopolitan character as some of Bentham's writings” (Letter to Furnivall, CW XVII.1812). If Bentham’s achievements have been overlooked, it is not because John Stuart Mill failed to appreciate him. So let us begin by noting four general points of clear agreement recognized by Mill. First, Mill greatly admired Bentham’s introduction of the scientific method into moral and political philosophy. He asserts more than once that by providing a systematic, publicly accessible, and empirically grounded method for the derivation of moral conclusions, Bentham did for moral and political philosophy what Bacon had done for physics.^16 This, Mill argued, has “a value beyond all price” (CW X.83) because it offers a necessary alternative to the a priori moral philosophy of Immanuel Kant and others.^17
(^16) “Remarks on Bentham’s Philosophy,” CW X.9; “Bentham,” CW X.83; “Whewell on Moral
Philosophy,” CW X.174. (^17) Mill’s main comment on Kant is found in Utilitarianism : “[T]o all those a priori moralists who
deem it necessary to argue at all, utilitarian arguments are indispensable. It is not my present purpose to criticize these thinkers; but I cannot help referring, for illustration, to a systematic treatise by one of the most illustrious of them, the Metaphysics of Ethics , by Kant. This remarkable
A second point of agreement is Mill’s wholehearted endorsement of Bentham’s criticisms of intuitionist, common sense, and natural law moral philosophers who—unintentionally—set up their own feelings of approval and disapproval as the standard of right and wrong. Mill’s “Whewell on Moral Philosophy” repeats the main lines of Bentham’s criticisms, including a lengthy quotation from An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation. Morality, they both argue, requires an external standard:
Whether happiness be or be not the end to which morality should be referred—that it be referred to an end of some sort, and not left in the dominion of vague feeling or inexplicable internal conviction, that it be made a matter of reason and calculation, and not merely of sentiment, is essential to the very idea of moral philosophy; is, in fact, what renders argument or discussion on moral questions possible. That the morality of actions depends on the consequences which they tend to produce, is the doctrine of rational persons of all schools; that the good or evil of those consequences is measured solely by pleasure or pain, is all of the doctrine of the school of utility, which is peculiar to it. In so far as Bentham's adoption of the principle of utility induced him to fix his attention upon the consequences of actions as the consideration determining their morality, so far he was indisputably in the right path… (CW X.111; emphasis added)
This passage seems to leave room for disagreement between them about whether happiness is the correct consequentialist standard. But, despite thinking Bentham’s account of happiness was limited in ways that mattered a great deal, Mill always accepted the principle of utility. A third general point of agreement, then, is their common acceptance of the greatest happiness principle as the external standard needed for moral evaluation. In his Autobiography , Mill describes his youthful conversion to utilitarianism upon finishing Dumont’s edited French editions of Bentham’s writings:
When I laid down the last volume of the Traité I had become a different being. The “principle of utility,” understood as Bentham understood it, and applied in the manner in which he applied it through these three volumes, fell exactly into its place as the keystone which held together the detached and fragmentary component parts of my knowledge and
man, whose system of thought will long remain one of the landmarks in the history of philosophical speculation, does, in the treatise in question, lay down an universal first principle as the origin and ground of moral obligation; it is this:–‘So act, that the rule on which thou attest would admit of being adopted as a law by all rational beings.’ But when he begins to deduce from this precept any of the actual duties of morality, he fails, almost grotesquely, to show that there would be any contradiction, any logical (not to say physical) impossibility, in the adoption by all rational beings of the most outrageously immoral rules of conduct. All he shows is that the consequences of their universal adoption would be such as no one would choose to incur” (CW X.207).
on Labour and Its Claims” CW V.651). As we shall see, all of this is consistent with Mill’s criticism of the limited Benthamite conception of human happiness. In accounting for Mill’s commitment to individual liberty, we must appreciate—as he did—that its significance and scope is ultimately determined by the greatest happiness principle. As he writes in On Liberty itself: “It is proper to state that I forego any advantage which could be derived to my argument from the idea of abstract right , as a thing independent of utility. I regard utility as the ultimate appeal on all ethi c al questions: but it must be utility in the largest sense, grounded on the permanent interests of man as a progressive being” (CW XVIII.224). Mill thought Bentham was “one-sided,” but this was primarily because the latter lacked a sufficiently rich notion of the factors affecting human happiness and motivation, a failing which does not undermine the basic mechanics of the utilitarian view. Fourth, Mill took over from his father and Bentham core political views that formed the basis of philosophical radicalism. Chief among these, Mill writes, were “representative government, and complete freedom of discussion” (CW I.108). Below we will consider his own reasons for supporting these positions. I simply want to register that by the time Mill was writing, it was already understood that the greatest happiness principle, as a reforming political doctrine, required representative democracy in place of hereditary aristocracy, and freedom of discussion to provide a public check on power. Crucial to both of these commitments is the idea of securing the moral aptitude of those in power. Mill thus echoes his teachers when he writes: “[f]rom the principle of the necessity of identifying the interest of the government with that of the people, most of the practical maxims of a representative government are corollaries” (“Appendix to Dissertations and Discussions , Vol. I,” CW XIX.648). Given these points of agreement between Bentham and Mill, it is now for us to consider the main ways Mill found Bentham’s views lacking. There are at least five substantive points of disagreement mentioned by Mill. The first two of these concern Bentham’s failure to appreciate the role of character within a utilitarian moral theory. The next two speak directly to Bentham’s conception of the felicific calculus. And the last concerns Bentham’s single-minded focus on public accountability in his democratic theory. In all of these, Mill can be seen to be pushing utilitarianism in a more liberal direction.
The importance of character in the evaluation of consequences
Perhaps the most important criticism Mill laid at Bentham’s feet was his failure to recognize that, because people’s actions affect their own character, they have ramifications well beyond the particular consequences associated directly with the initial action. Mill thought Bentham’s consequentialism was “indisputably in the right path,” but he continued: “…though to go far in it without wandering, there was needed a greater knowledge of the formation of character, and of the consequences of actions upon the agent's own frame of mind, than Bentham possessed” (“Bentham,” CW X.111-112). To make a proper assessment of consequences—to be a good utilitarian—one must account for more than just the “specific consequences” of that action:
[T]he great fault I have to find with Mr. Bentham as a moral philosopher… is this: that he has practically, to a very great extent, confounded the principle of Utility with the principle of specific consequences, and has habitually made up his estimate of the approbation or blame due to a particular kind of action, from a calculation solely of the consequences to which that very action, if practiced, would itself lead. (“Remarks on Bentham’s Philosophy” [RBP], CW X.7-8)
Mill thought the study of the formation of character—a science he called “ethology”—was a necessary development in the utilitarian tradition if there was to be any hope of taking proper stock of people’s actions: “All acts suppose certain dispositions, and habits of mind and heart, which may be in themselves states of enjoyment or of wretchedness, and which must be fruitful in other consequences, besides those particular acts” (RBP, CW X.7). Our actions affect how we think and feel, and these changes can then manifest themselves in many different ways that need to be taken into account. This seems a fair criticism of Bentham, but it does not strike at the fundamentals of the principle of utility so much as point to causes and effects that previously had been overlooked.
The importance of developing character to promote happiness
Mill also argues that, to the extent that Bentham did consider character, he incorrectly assumed a relatively selfish, narrow, and static conception of human feeling and motivation. Bentham failed to appreciate fully the possibility of developing “feelings of moral obligation” (RBP, CW X.13) and the more altruistic aspects of human nature: “Bentham's idea of the world is that of a collection of persons pursuing each his separate interest or pleasure, and the prevention of whom from jostling one another more than is unavoidable, may be attempted by hopes and fears derived from three sources—the law, religion, and public opinion” (“Bentham,” CW X.97). Mill thought Bentham’s acceptance of this predominantly selfish view of human motivation was “doing very serious evil” because its perpetuation dims “all rational hope of good for the human species” (RBP, CW X.15). By contrast, Mill thought it was possible to educate people to develop a greater “fellow- feeling with the collective interests of mankind” ( Utilitarianism, CW X.215) and that doing so was an important driver of overall happiness: “Utilitarianism… could only attain its end by the general cultivation of nobleness of character” ( Utilitarianism , CW X.213-214; see also CW X.95, 215, 233, 394, 421). Generally speaking, Mill thought that because Bentham took “next to no account of national character and the causes which form and maintain it, he was precluded from considering, except to a very limited extent, the laws of a country as an instrument of national culture” (“Bentham,” CW X.105). For the author of On Liberty more specifically, the problem with this is two-fold. First, Bentham did not attend enough to the value of allowing human thought and feeling to develop freely so that there might be “as many possible independent centres of improvement as
misrepresentation of the view. Utilitarianism, fairly represented, recommends the pursuit of pleasures associated with the exercise of our higher-order cognitive and emotional faculties despite their involving greater amounts of frustration, stress, or discontent. To make this case, he argues that pleasures that involve the higher-order faculties are more valuable in virtue of their quality , separate from quantity. Mill believes the case can also be made on purely quantitative grounds (CW X.211), but his own view is a revision of Bentham’s account. This has been a vexed issue in Mill scholarship, in part because his discussion of it is limited to a few pages of Utilitarianism. The core concern is that, if Mill is a hedonist (for whom pleasure is the only thing ultimately desirable as an end), then by introducing quality he cannot mean that something over and above the pleasure (or pain) itself makes a moral difference. But then, for quality to contribute to the value of a pleasure, it seems it must reduce to—or be some aspect of—quantity. Isn’t what makes an experience more valuable for a hedonist just that there is more pleasure in it?^19 I cannot hope to settle this issue here, though a variety of proposals have been offered, including both defenses of the notion of quality of pleasures and claims that Mill gave up on hedonism.^20 But whether we accept qualitative hedonism, or keep to a strictly quantitative hedonism, two common points emerge from Mill’s discussion. The first point, which is the core of Mill’s reply to the claim that utilitarianism is a doctrine worthy only of swine, is that “[f]ew human creatures would consent to be changed into any of the lower animals, for a promise of the fullest allowance of the beast’s pleasures” (CW X.211). This fact marks out something important: that we must not confuse happiness with contentment or mere preference satisfaction. Rather, for most of us most of the time, there is great pleasure in the higher-order awareness involved in our activities—a sense of richness and wonder and complexity, as well as an appreciation of ourselves as capable of these thoughts and feelings—that more than compensates for the frustration, stress, and other discomforts that attend these capacities. This is why he concludes “[i]t is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates satisfied than a fool satisfied” (CW X.212; also “Diary,” CW XXVII.663). But it remains an open question whether the introduction of qualities to make this case represents an advance on Bentham. The second point that emerges is Mill’s belief that our evidence of which pleasures are better or worse, greater or lesser, or higher or lower can be found only in the “decided preference” of those who have experienced the relevant pleasures (CW X.211). The feel of a pleasure is not itself publicly accessible, let alone susceptible to quantification and direct comparison. All we have to rely on are the preferences of competent judges:
On a question which is the best worth having of two pleasures, or which of two modes of existence is the most grateful to the feelings, apart from its moral attributes and from its consequences, the judgment of those who are qualified by knowledge of both, or, if they
(^19) The classic statement of this criticism is in Sidgwick 1962, 94. (^20) For some leading positions taken on this issue, see: Saunders 2010; Schmidt-Petri 2006; West
2004, 48–73; Riley 1993.
differ, that of the majority among them, must be admitted as final. And there needs be the less hesitation to accept this judgment respecting the quality of pleasures, since there is no other tribunal to be referred to even on the question of quantity. What means are there of determining which is the acutest of two pains, or the intensest of two pleasurable sensations, except the general suffrage of those who are familiar with both? (CW X.213)
This point applies whether or not we accept the introduction of qualities of pleasures. Either way, the crucial upshot of Mill’s reliance on the decided preference of competent judges is that he thereby gives up on the felicific calculus.
Rejection of the felicific calculus
Whether or not Mill’s notion of quality of pleasure makes sense, it is clear he gives up on Bentham’s attempt (such as it was) to provide a felicific calculus to guide utilitarian decision- making. Mill does not make much of this difference with Bentham, but he also never uses the calculus himself or expresses the hope of developing a quantitative utilitarian measuring stick. In the passage about competent judges, Mill admits that utilitarian judgments can track real differences among pleasures, but he does not expect to be able to provide exact measures of the pleasures directly. Rather, he is comfortable relying on the judgment of those who have experienced the relevant pleasures, whose judgment can then be incorporated by those charged with determining how to maximize happiness in some domain.^21 It might seem, then, that one advance in Mill’s thinking over Bentham is a greater acceptance of uncertainty in utilitarian decision-making. Certainly, in one of his earlier essays, Mill worries about the “cold, mechanical” impression given by Bentham, when ethical decision- making properly understood is a multi-faceted and nuanced matter (“Bentham,” CW X.112). But in later writings Mill recognizes that Bentham is more cognizant of this fact than he had earlier understood. This shift can be seen in Mill’s comments about Bentham’s appreciation of the need for secondary maxims to apply the principle of utility. In the earlier essay, Mill accuses Bentham of a flat-footed utilitarianism according to which moral decision-making involves the calculation of the all the pleasure and pain that might result from an action: “while, under proper explanations, we entirely agree with Bentham in his principle, we do not hold with him that all right thinking on the details of morals depends on its express assertion. We think utility or happiness, much too complex and indefinite an end to be sought except through the medium of various secondary ends” (CW X.110). Mill suggests that Bentham failed to appreciate the significance of secondary maxims
(^21) That is to say: the preference of competent judges does not settle things practically. For instance,
Mill believes competent individuals are best placed to apply (or not) the general information about the quantity or quality of pleasures, provided by the competent judges, to their own specific circumstances. Individuals’ desires, commitments, and circumstances differ in many ways that are difficult, if not impossible, to express to others. See, e.g. On Liberty , CW XVIII.277.
