Mill

This week we had a symposium and discussed the pros and cons of Immanuel Kant’s and John Stewart Mill’s philosophical theories. Mills ethical theory was called Utilitarianism and focused on “utility”; utility is the measure by which we judge the moral goodness or badness of a situation. I spent majority of the time talking about the pros of Mill’s utilitarianism approach. One of the things I found while researching Mill’s utilitarianism is that it is intuitive in general. Mill’s theory links happiness with morality, instead of possibly linking happiness against morality (such as Kant’s view). Mill’s approach of consequentialism means he views the consequences before acting on a decision. For instance, in general, this theory backs up murder’s being wrong, lying, and rights. Utilitarianism is good for this because it gives us a system to our intuitions. Intuition is the ability to understand something immediately, without the need for conscious reasoning. This theory is great at looking into why something is morally wrong. It is often criticized that Utilitarianism is based on people’s self-interest and that people’s desire for happiness may not be morally just at all. The counter to this is that reason doesn’t motivate moral action as in Kant’s approach. Utilitarianism requires us to balance our interests with those of others and is impartial, fair, and promotes social harmony. Additionally, Mill would argue that there are “higher” and “lower” pleasures. Only humans can possess these higher pleasures and these pleasures are set up so that we can experience emotions, intellectual experiences etc. These pleasures are set out to increase happiness which satisfies the Greatest Happiness Principle which states that things are good insofar as they tend to promote happiness and bad insofar as they tent to diminish happiness. Mill is famous for his quote “I’d rather be Socrates dissatisfied than a pig satisfied”, this quote is supporting that even as humans that are dissatisfied was can have the benefit of having higher pleasures.