Critics of Kant have held the level of abstraction of the categorical imperative prevents the derivation of any substantive moral principles therefrom, or else it allows the derivation of principles that should not be derivable. That is, either it is sterile or promiscuous. John Stuart Mill made the latter charge.
Suppose, for example, I decided to act on this principle: "Take whatever you want, from whomever has it, however you can manage to get it." This is the sort of principle that holds in a Hobbesian state of nature. According to Kant, willing this principle to be a universal law must imply a contradiction if it is to be inadmissible. But what is the contradiction? If everyone willed this egoistic principle, then, we may further suppose, the situation is one that Hobbes described, a war of all against all. But while this consequence is not a happy one, it is at least possible.
Mill thought that what really drives the use of the categorical imperative, despite all the talk about pure reason, is the desirability of the consequences of making a law universal. No one is secure in the state of nature, life is nasty, and it is in everyone's interests to renounce the egoistic principle. According to Mill, Kant should admit that happiness is relevant to moral evaluation, despite Kant's statement that consequences are irrelevant. Even in Kant's own examples, it is the potential undesirable consequences of universal adoption of certain rules ("Leave everyone else alone, even if you are in a position to help them," for example) that makes it "contradictory."
Mill's ethical theory was entirely consequentialist. The goodness or badness, rightness or wrongness, of an action is determined only by its fruits. Thus he professed a doctrine diametrically opposed to Kant's. As with the ancient Greeks, Mill held that the good for a human being his happiness, and like Epicurus, he located happiness in pleasure and the avoidance of pain. His advance on the Epicurean doctrine was to introduce the element of universality. It is not my particular pleasure or averted pain that makes an act good, but rather that of humanity as a whole. The principle of utility calls an act good when it contributes to the overall promotion of human happiness. The popular slogan for this principle is that a good act results in the greatest good for the greatest number of people.
It was Mill's contention that all moral systems have always had this principle in mind, though they have not properly understood it role. Thus he sought to clear up misunderstandings which he thought were the basis for objections to utilitarianism. We shall discuss a number of them.
The idea that pleasure and pain are determinants of moral goodness is shocking to some, who hold that the basest of human responses are elevated to the highest status. Is a life of wanton indulgence to be promoted, at the expense of more refined virtues? Certainly Aristotle was very cautious about the role of pleasure and pain in human excellence, recognizing that what is pleasurable often leads us away from excellence.
Mill responded by claiming that there is a hierarchy of pleasures, with the base pleasures at the bottom and the more refined pleasures (e.g., music appreciation) at the top. A basic principle for Mill is that what is desirable is a function of what is desired, so that the most desirable pleasures are those that are most desired. If few people in reality desire the refined pleasures, it is because they lack acquaintance with them or the capacity to appreciate them. Those with the proper acquaintance and capacity prefer a way of life that uses the higher faculties. Here we might compare Aristotle's view that the contemplative life is the highest as well as most pleasurable.
Of course, even the most highly educated person will at times forego the higher pleasures for the lower. This is not an indication of their relative value, but rather of the frailty of the human condition. "Capacity for the nobler feelings is in most natures a very tender plant, easily killed, not only by hostile influences, but by mere want of sustenance." Mill believed that education and the maintenance of culture were of the utmost importance. The promotion of the general happiness requires the general cultivation of noble character.
A further objection to the utilitarian identification of the good with happiness is the alleged unattainablity of happiness in this world of woes. For the most part, Mill believed, the impediments to happiness are of our own making, e.g. the result of bad education or unjust social structures. In particular, he opposed inequalities based on race, ethnicity and gender.
What counts as happiness is crucial to the response. The happy life is a matter of degree. It is not a continual state of highly pleasurable excitement, for this is indeed unsustainable. Excitement and tranquillity must follow each other. The pleasurable life for the human being consists of some moments of pleasurable excitement, few and short-lived pains, variety in pleasures, and an active life.
Yet another objection to utilitarianism is due to its quantitative character. The objection is that to conform to the principle of utility, human action should be based entirely on cold, hard calculation of consequences. But Mill rebutted the objection by pointing out that most of human action is not concerned with the promotion of pleasure and avoidance of pain for all of humanity. At any rate, the principle of utility is used to evaluate actions. It does not matter what the motive of the person may be, whether calculation is involved in carrying it out or not.
The quantitative nature of utilitarianism does give rise to a more serious objection that is not so easily swept aside. The greatest happiness for humanity as a whole might involve the sacrifice of a few for the pleasure of the many. If this is in fact what it requires, if human happiness really would be served by, say, the torture of twenty people out of five billion, it seems that the principle of utility endorses this action. Mill himself stated that everyone has a right to equality of treatment, "except when some recognized social expediency requires the reverse."
Perhaps there is a way around this problem by appealing to the vagueness of the notion of 'general' in the principle of utility. It might be said, for example, that the general happiness cannot be promoted by anything that makes any person miserable. But then the question is one of implementation: how can one then formulate the principle precisely in such a way that it is attainable. It seems practically impossible that general happiness in this sense is anywhere nearly attainable. At any rate, utilitarian theorists are always performing a delicate balancing act in trying to find the formula for general happiness.
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