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Was Mill a Utilitarian?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 January 2009

Christopher Miles Coope
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Abstract

Mill was receptive to all sorts of ideas, both plausible and implausible, which did not fit well with utilitarianism. He was, for example, inclined to think of equality, not just pleasure, as ‘good in itself’. He was able to think of himself as a utilitarian only by grossly expanding that notion to cover any doctrine which did not entirely rely, without the possibility of further explanation, on ‘intuition’ or God's commands. It is even doubtful whether he was a consequentialist in any sense. Mill's account of moral obligation is not a maximizing, nor even a satisficing, one. And the account emphasizes the place of supererogation. There is no suggestion in Mill that one is obliged to do something merely because a teaching to that effect would be felicific. Far from there being an obligation to maximize, it would sometimes be wrong merely to make Pareto-improvements. Sympathetically understood, the account of obligation in Mill is more or less the same as one finds in Hobbes, with his theorems ‘for the preservation of men in multitudes’.

Type
Research Article
Information
Utilitas , Volume 10 , Issue 1 , March 1998 , pp. 33 - 67
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1998

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References

1 The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy ed. Audi, R., Cambridge, 1995Google Scholar, s.v. The publishers consider this ‘the most…authoritative one volume dictionary of philosophy available in English.’

2 A Dictionary of Philosophy, Oxford, 1996Google Scholar, s.v. According to its publishers ‘the most authoritative…dictionary of philosophy available today.’

3 The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, s.n.

4 A Dictionary of Philosophy, s.n.

5 Anyone who is inclined to think that of course Mill was a utilitarian should reflect that Fred Berger, in his comprehensive work on Mill's moral philosophy, Happiness, Justice and Freedom, Berkeley, 1984, found it necessary to take definitional precautions. He writes in his preface, ‘I prefer not to limit the term [utilitarianism] in a way that might rule out Mill as a utilitarian’ (p. 5).Google Scholar

6 I would prefer to avoid talk of Mill's ‘incoherence’. Is it not time for us to abandon this expression? It vacillates in meaning between ‘inconsistency’, ‘untidiness’ and ‘unintelligibility’.

7 Mill's own word. Utilitarianism, in Essays on Ethics, Religion and Society, ed. Robson, John M., Toronto, 1969Google Scholar, Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, (henceforth CW), x. 210. All subsequent references to Utilitarianism are from this volume.

8 If it were necessary to say what utilitarianism is, I would simply point the reader to Sidgwick's, Henry Methods of Ethics, 7th edn., London, 1907, bk. 4, ch. 1Google Scholar, ‘The Meaning of Utilitarianism’, or to one of many other standard works, including the ‘authoritative’ dictionaries quoted earlier. For a contrasting description however, see Mack, Mary P., Jeremy Bentham: An Odyssey of Ideas, 1748–1792, London, 1962Google Scholar: ‘The principle of utility was a general name for an open minded, methodical, scientific approach to any problem. Utilitarianism is not a formula but an attitude’ (p. 254). It is ‘a practical way to make the dark heavy lives of men a little brighter and lighter’ (p. 277). It would not be profitable to discuss whether Mill was a utilitarian in this sense. But the passage is instructive, for it shows how very indefinite the notion can be.

9 For ‘indirect’ see Gray, John, Mill on Liberty, London, 1983, p. 12CrossRefGoogle Scholar; for ‘complex’ see Wollheim, Richard in On Liberty in Focus, ed. Gray, John and Smith, G. W., London, 1991, p. 272Google Scholar; for ‘iterated’ see Copp's, David article in New Essays on John Stuart Mill and Utilitarianism, ed. Cooper, W E. et al. , Canadian Journal of Philosophy, Supplementary Volume, v (1979)Google Scholar.

10 Autobiography and Literary Essays, ed. Robson, John M. and Stillinger, Jack, Toronto, 1980, CW, i. 117Google Scholar; see also p. 83.

11 CW, i. 185.

12 E.g. Utilitarianism, CW, x. 233.

13 Journals and Debating Speeches, ed. Robson, John M., 2 vols., Toronto, 1988, CW, xxvii. 663Google Scholar. Of course ‘the greatest happiness’ is not a rule at all.

14 ‘Sedgwick's Discourse’, Essays on Ethics, etc., CW, x. 53.

15 The Earlier Letters of John Stuart Mill, 1812–1848, ed. Mineka, Francis E., 2 vols., Toronto, 1963, CW, xii. 207Google Scholar.

16 ‘Sedgwick's Discourse’, Essays on Ethics, CW, x. 52.

17 Utilitarianism, CW, x.. 205.

18 Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, repr., Cambridge, 1967, p. 227.

19 Additional Letters of John Stuart Mill, ed. Filipiuk, Marion, Laine, Michael and Robson, John M., Toronto, 1991, CW, xxxii. 206Google Scholar.

20 See esp. Liberty, p. 185.

21 Letter to SirArthur, Helps, estimated date 1847, in The Later Letters of John Stuart Mill, 1849–1873, ed. Mineka, Francis E. and Lindley, Dwight N., 4 vols., Toronto, 1972, CW, xvii. 2002Google Scholar, Mill's italics. This does not seem to have been a transitory conviction. A special case of it was the very foundation of Mill's The Subjection of Women. ‘The legal subordination of one sex to the other’, he says in its opening paragraph, is ‘wrong in itself’ – this being one of his most long-standing convictions ‘constantly growing stronger by the progress of reflection and the experience of life’. Essays on Equality, Law, and Education, ed. Robson, John M., Toronto, 1984, CW, xxi. 261Google Scholar.

22 That this is thought characteristic comes out well in Skorupski's, John article ‘Ethics’ in The Blackwell Companion to Philosophy, ed. Bunnin, N. and Tsui-James, E. P., Oxford, 1996Google Scholar. He writes: Utilitarianism is the thesis that the well-being of each and every individual has intrinsic ethical value, that the greater the well-being the greater its value, and that nothing else has intrinsic value’ And later: ‘For the utilitarian, the only thing that has intrinsic ethical value is a property of individuals … that of being or faring well’, p. 205. This echoes Mill: ‘The utilitarian doctrine is, that happiness is desirable, and the only thing desirable, as an end’. Utilitarianism, in Essays on Ethics, CW, x. 234. Note that in neither case is there any mention of maximizing anything.

23 Reprinted in his Four Essays on Liberty, London, 1969. Also in Gray and Smith. There is also a hint of this view in Leavis's, F. R. earlier ‘Introduction’ to Mill on Bentham and Coleridge, London, 1950, p. 10Google Scholar.

24 Utilitarianism and Beyond, ed.Sen, Amartya and Williams, Bernard, Cambridge, 1982, p. 160nCrossRefGoogle Scholar.

26 Mill on Liberty, Oxford, 1980, p. 9Google Scholar.

26 Utilitarian Morality, 2nd edn., London, 1989, p. 39Google Scholar.

27 Harmondsworth, , 1985, ‘Introduction’, pp. 30–1Google Scholar.

28 This principle is sometimes, misleadingly, called ‘the harm principle’, because of the way in which Mill states it; I say ‘misleadingly’ for every liberal will accept that the government may prevent an individual action which is perfectly harmless – such as, to adapt Ronald Dworkin's well-known example, carefully riding one's pollution-free bike into town along Lexington Avenue; it is often in the public interest to introduce one-way regulations, and Mill could not possibly have expected us to object.

29 Mill might indeed have argued here that I have a duty to others to be reasonably provident about may health. See ‘Auguste Comte and Positivism’, Essays on Ethics, CW, x. 340.

30 For example, the anonymous contributor of the article on Mill to Urmson's, J. O. Encyclopaedia of Philosophy, London, 1960Google Scholar. Mill would not himself have recognized ‘ideal’ utilitarianism as utilitarianism at all: ‘That the morality of actions depends upon the consequences which they tend to produce, is the doctrine of rational persons of all schools; that the good or evil of these consequences is measured solely by pleasure or pain, is all of the doctrine of the school of utility, which is peculiar to it’. ‘Bentham’, Essays on Ethics, CW, x. 111.

31 That is to say, to produce a ‘satisfactory’amount.

32 John Skorupski's account, which does not mention maximizing, or even satisficing, should however be noted (n. 22 above).

33 Essays in Ethical Theory, Oxford, 1989, p. 189Google Scholar.

34 Utilitarianism, CW, x. 213.

35 Mill on Liberty, p. 25.

38 Ibid., p. 12.

37 Utilitarianism, CW, x. 214, italics added.

38 Utilitarianism, CW, x. 220. This is not of course a low standard, for one might have to give one's life, and endure the death of one's family and friends, rather than wrong someone. A tyrant might put one in just such afix.This shows that the familiar criticism that ‘maximizing’ demands too much of us is ill-focused. It would be better to say that it is comically demanding, and to talk, with Mill, of moral intoxication (see n. 102 below).

39 Nor does Mill's standard take ‘impartiality’ seriously. ‘As between his own happiness and that of others, utilitarianism requires [the agent] to be as strictly impartial as a disinterested and benevolent spectator’ says Mill (Utilitarianism, CW, x. 218). But it is clear from Mill's remark about abstaining from what is manifestly pernicious that people are not, in Mill's view, required to live by this ‘requirement’. See also Mill's sensible remarks about partiality in ch. 5, para. 9: ‘Favour and preference are not always censurable, and indeed the cases where they are condemned are rather the exception than the rule’, etc. Mill, as we shall see (sect. X below), is not always so level-headed on this topic.

40 ‘Brodie's History of the British Empire’, in Essays on England, Ireland, and the Empire, ed. Robson, John M., Toronto, 1982, CW, vi. 4Google Scholar.

41 ‘Bentham’, Assays on Ethics, CW, x. 110.

42 ‘Comment on Bentham in Bulwer’ England and the English', Essays on Ethics, Appendix C, CW, x. 502. Bulwer cut up and incorporated some of Mill's sentences, somewhat to Mill's displeasure. Earlier Letters, CW, xii. 172; see also CW, i. 107.

43 On the pleasures of witch-burning: Mill was not one of those who thought that the enjoyment of acting cruelly would render the action not quite so bad or even, if the balance were right, positively virtuous. His view, expressed in his posthumously published essay ‘Nature’, seems to be that the vile enjoyment would make matters worse (Essays on Ethics, CW, x. 398). Mill had chided Bentham for not including among the consequences of actions the effects it has upon the character of the agent (‘Remarks on Bentham's Philosophy’, CW, x. 8; ‘Bentham’, CW, x. 112). Yet this need not be at issue in the present example for, as Mill would surely have noted, the cruel man might already be as corrupt as he could be, or again he might be on his death bed. Mill might have complained that the cruel man received undeserved enjoyment. (That Mill was not a preference utilitarian is well stressed by Berger, Fred, Happiness, p. 183Google Scholar.)

44 When Mill does, briefly, consider the difficulties of calculating what ‘the greatest happiness’ would amount to, he interestingly likens the question to the similar issue in regard to prudence, where there is no question who is to be counted in – unless indeed one has doubts about personal identity – and no problem about interpersonal comparisons of utility. For more on this, see sect. VII below. (Prudence is itself problematic when we are thinking of maximization. Is an action which manifestly fails to produce maximum benefit for the agent an imprudent action?)

45 A System of Logic, ed. Robson, John M., 2 vols., Toronto, 1974, CW. viii. 951–2Google Scholar.

46 Utilitarianism, CW, x. 227.

47 Utilitarianism, CW, x. 230.

48 Utilitarianism, CW, x. 223.

49 Utilitarianism, CW, x. 219.

50 Alan Ryan's talk ‘John Stuart Mill's Art of Living’ (The Listener, 1965, reprinted in Gray and Smith, p. 163) explains that Mill's morality is a matter of not-harming, and that morals should be backed by law except when this would do more harm than good. Morality and law both ‘aim at promoting such goods as peace, justice and honesty’. Jonathan Riley describes Mill's ‘principle of right and wrong’ as follows: ‘Any person should acquire a feeling of moral obligation to make other-regarding choices whose consequences promote his permanent interest in social harmony or unity, conceived to be part of his own happiness … A person should feel obligated not to make other-regarding choices whose consequences undermine social harmony….‘ (Liberal Utilitarianism, Cambridge, 1988 p. 198Google Scholar). Does Mill's view on either of these interpretations even look like some kind of utilitarianism?

51 Essays on Politics and Society, ed. Robson, John M., 2 vols., Toronto, 1977, CW, xviii. 279Google Scholar.

52 Utilitarianism, CW, x. 224. Compare what Mill calls: ‘the alpha and omega of my utilitarianism’ – that ‘the good of the species (or rather of its several units) [is] the ultimate end’. Earlier Letters, CW, xii. 207.

53 Instructively, there is an important exception, by the name of John Stuart Mill. In On Liberty he talks of‘the judicious utilitarianism of Aristotle’, CW, xviii. 235. Socrates is counted in too, on the apparent ground that he taught, in conversation with Protagoras, that a virtuous person was one who intelligently pursued pleasure – his own (see the opening paragraph of Utilitarianism). And if this were not enough, Mill has a go at recruiting Christian ethics too, possibly as a corrective (Utilitarianism, CW, x. 218–9. See also his remark in a letter: ‘the great work now to be done, to build up a system of morals capable of inspiring enthusiasm and satisfying the intellect. My own belief is that this will be a development of Xtianity, properly understood’. Additional Letters, CW, xxxii. 235–6). The enrolment of Christianity seems to have been a utilitarian commonplace. According to a writer in the Westminster Review, xxii (10 1829)Google Scholar, ‘Nobody ever thought of denying, that the author of Christianity was the first of Utilitarians’.

54 Summa Theologiae, la 2ae, Q2 art. 7; Q3 art. 1; Q90 art. 2.

55 Aquinas follows him, quoting De Trinitate, xii, 3: ‘All men agree in desiring the ultimate end which is happiness’.

56 ‘It is manifest that nothing can be of consequence to mankind or any creature, but happiness’, Sermon 12, sect. 20.

57 Here some remarks of David Lyons are instructive. He says for example: ‘Mill assumes that conduct must be evaluated by reference to ends, and that utilitarianism is to be distinguished from other theories by its endorsement of a certain end – happiness’ (Lyons, David, Rights, Welfare, and Mill's Moral Theory, New York, 1994, p. 51Google Scholar, my italics). Perhaps this is right – but what has happened to our concept of utilitarianism? Consider again how Professor Lyons himself characterizes utilitarianism as the doctrine which ‘holds that human conduct should promote the interests and welfare of those affected’ (‘Utilitarianism’ in Encyclopaedia of Ethics, ed. L., and Becker, C., New York, 1992Google Scholar). This seems to include either no one or everyone. It will include no one if it is taken, absurdly, to mean that we should never act against anyone's interests. More charitably interpreted it will include more or less anyone – any Jew, any Christian, anyone whose religious belief or secular convictions vaguely encourage benevolence. Professor Lyons admits that ‘utilitarian elements are evident in various ethical traditions’. If we go on to ask what is meant here by a ‘utilitarian element’ we will hardly, I believe, find this informative.

58 Thomas Scanlon has coined the phrase ‘philosophical utilitarianism’ for the view that ‘the only fundamental moral facts are facts about individual well-being’ (‘Contractualism and Utilitarianism’, in Sen and Williams, p. 108). It is not very evident what a fundamental moral fact would be, but this position sounds like the view I discussed above: that moral injunctions must have a point – the welfare of the community or the agent must in some way be at issue. Mill would then, one presumes, count as a‘ philosophicalutilitarian’ alongside Aristotle, Aquinas, Hobbes, etc. However, if one took seriously Mill's remark that ‘inequality’ is in itself always an evil, quoted in sect. II above, then perhaps Mill would not count even as a ‘philosophical utilitarian’. Further-more Scanlon contrasts utilitarianism with ‘contractarianism’. It is hard to deny that there is something of a contractarian spirit about Mill's account of moral obligation, as there is in the case of Hobbes (despite Mill's brief remarks about contract and obligation in the Logic, Book VI, ch. viii, sect. 2, where Mill simply and sensibly follows Hume, though without acknowledgement). At stake is something vital for everyone. Not everyone needs to live in a benevolent society, Mill would have said, but we all need a society which shows a respect for justice (Utilitarianism, CW, x. 255–6).

59 'Austin on Jurisprudence, Essays on Equality, CW, xxi. 177.

60 Austin himself wished to recruit Cicero, Seneca and DrJohnson. Though these writers ‘appear to reject utility,’ he wrote, they ‘do, in fact, embrace it’. MS fragment appearing as a footnote in The Province of Jurisprudence Determined, London, 1954, p. 113Google Scholar.

61 Mill on Liberty, p. 47.

62 Essays on Politics and Society, CW, xviii. 224.

63 Essays on Ethics, CW, x. 73.

64 To see how accommodating broad-brush utilitarianism turns out to be in Mill's account, consider the ‘definitions’ that he finds in Whewell and which he calls ‘in principle utilitarian’. One of these utilitarian definitions is of the virtue of justice: ‘the desire that each should have his own’. Another explains the point of truthfulness, which is a duty because ‘lying and deceit tend to separate and disunite men, and to make all actions implying mutual dependence, that is, all social action and social life, impossible’. ‘Whewell on Moral Philosophy’, Essays on Ethics, CW, x. 193.

65 See e.g. ‘Whewell on Moral Philosophy’, Essays on Ethics, CW, x. 192; ‘Thornton on Labour and its Claims’, Essays on Economics and Society, ed. Robson, John M., 2 vols., Toronto, 1967, CW, v. 654, 655Google Scholar.

66 E.g Ryan, in Gray and Smith, p. 163.

67 We should also give up similar phrases using the word ‘consequentialist’.

68 One might make similar remarks about the bare use of the word ‘utility’, or the phrases ‘promoting utility’ and ‘appeal to utility’. Would we mean maximal benefit or merely net benefit? It is often difficult to tell. Utility sometimes simply means benefit – as in: ‘as soon as a child has the idea of voluntarily producing pleasure or pain to any one person, he has an accurate notion of utility’ (‘Sedgwick's Discourse’, Essays on Ethics, CW, x. 59). It is interesting to see that in 1822 Bentham himself had already drawn our attention to the way in which the word utility might mislead us, saying among other things that the maximizing element might not come across. See ‘Note added by the Author’ at the beginning of An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, ed. Bums, J. H. and Hart, H. L. A, London, 1970Google Scholar (The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham), p. 11. Also added to the Fragment on Government, ed. Burns, J. H. and Hart, H. L. A., London, 1977Google Scholar, (Collected Works), ch. 1, sect. 48. p. 446. Imagine various proposed laws which imposed duties. What would it be for these laws to be ‘justified according to the utilitarian test’? The answer that is so easy to give is this: these laws are justified whenever ‘the rules and the duties they impose are useful’. I take this from Lyons, David, Rights, p. 28Google Scholar. But what has happened to maximizing? What genuine utilitarian ever allowed you to appeal to what is ‘useful’, when there was clearly some-thing better?.

69 Utilitarianism, CW, x. 207.

70 It is still being claimed that the moralist faces this choice that is no choice. The alternative to being a utilitarian is to be a ‘deontologist’, or so we are told – and a deontologist appears, heartlessly (indeed inexplicably), to prefer ‘abstract conformity to a rule’ to ‘the prevention of avoidable human suffering’. Professor Smart seems to suspect that people's dispositions to accept ‘non-utilitarian principles’ rests on ‘conceptual confusions’, perhaps caused by indoctrination in youth, and one can see what he means. (Smart, J. J. C. and Williams, B., Utilitarianism For and Against, Cambridge, 1973, p. 6CrossRefGoogle Scholar.)

71 ‘Sedgwick's Discourse’, Essays on Ethics, CW, x. 51.

72 ‘Whewell on Moral Philosophy’, Essays in Ethics, CW, x. 193.

73 Utilitarianism, CW, x. 223; see also 230.

74 This idea is of course still very much with us. Thus, talking about utilitarianism as recently revived, Anthony Quinton writes (Utilitarian Ethics, p. ix): Utilitarianism's ‘chief competitor being an atheoretical intuitionism which could give no better account of the counter-utilitarian principles it endorsed than their rootedness in common moral sentiment.’

75 From the discussion of freedom of the will in An Examination of Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy, ed. Robson, John M., Toronto, 1979, CW, ix. 454Google Scholar.

76 Utilitarianism, CW, x. 251.

77 ‘Whewell on Moral Philosophy’, Essays on Ethics, CW, x. 179.

78 Additional Letters, CW, xxxii. 181.

79 Utilitarianism, CW, x. 206.

80 If this seems too great a concession to ‘intuition’, a follower of Mill might prefer to talk at this point of ‘the whole unanalysed experience of the human race’. See Mill's use of this phrase in the essay ‘Bentham’, Essays on Ethics, CW, x. 90. Mill is clearly prepared to recognize that knowledge of one's obligations can come first and under-standing the rationale second if at all, as emerges in this essay on Bentham. In certain parts of morality, he says, ‘when [Bentham] happened to be in the right, it was always, and necessarily, on wrong or insufficient grounds’. CW, x. 98.

81 We need an account, too, why murder is so bad. ‘Killing [is] the most criminal act recognized by human laws …’, Mill says (‘Nature’, Essays on Ethics, CW, x. 385). See also the speech on capital punishment (Public and Parliamentary Speeches, ed. Robson, John M. and Kinzer, Bruce L., Toronto, 1988, CW, xxviii. 267Google Scholar). Though Mill thought that murder is the worst of crimes this is not because death is the worst thing that can happen to one. He argued in favour of capital punishment on the ground that it was worse to be sent to prison for life than to be executed. So Mill's account of the way in which murder is bad cannot have been simply in terms of the consequences for the victim.

82 As indeed it proved to Kant, at least according to Mill: see the remarks in Utilitarianism, CW, x. 207, 249. J. J. C. Smart too thinks that Kantian ethics, if plausible, amounts to a kind of ‘rule-utilitarianism’. Smart, and Williams, , Utilitarianism For and Against, Cambridge, 1973, p. 9CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

83 ‘Cette dispute practique se vuidera avec la dispute theoretique, entre la meta-physique de I'intuition et celle de I'experience’, Mill wrote to Georg Brandes in 1872. The Later Letters, CW, xvii. 1875. In Elliot's, H. S. K. The Letters of John Stuart Mill (London, 1910Google Scholar) ‘se vuidera avec’ is ‘se decidera avec’.

84 Plamanatz, John, in The English Utilitarians, Oxford, 1958, p. 122Google Scholar, counts Hume as a utilitarian – indeed ‘the greatest of the utilitarians’, with the younger Mill next in line – though Hume hardly fits the careful definition given by Plamanatz in his ch. 1. Hume simply said that the teachings of social morality must be justified by appeal to the public good, or what was socially necessary. See Treatise, III, iii, 1. J X. Mackie says of a certain view that it is ‘utilitarian in the very broad sense that it took human well-being as in some way the foundation of morality’. But he immediately adds: ‘However it is not very illuminating to use the term “utilitarianism” as broadly as this’ (Ethics, Harmonds-worth, 1977, p. 125Google Scholar). Surely he is right here? If one had to find someone defiantly outside the big tent it would have to be Wittgenstein. He wanted to say that the ‘the good is good because it is what God wants’ just because ‘it cut off any explanation “why” it is good.’ See Waismann, F., Ludwig Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle, Oxford, 1979, p. 115Google Scholar.

85 In An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation it appears as if it is the greater happiness principle that Bentham has in mind; see ch. 1, paras. 6 and 10, ed.J. H. Burns and H. L. A. Hart, pp. 12–13. An action is morally permissible if and only if its tendency ‘to augment the happiness of the community is greater than any it has to diminish it’. (See also the passage in The Rationale of Judicial Evidence, ed. Edinburgh, Bowring, 1843, vol. VI, p. 238Google Scholar, quoted in Dinwiddy, John, Bentham, Oxford, 1989, p. 21Google Scholar.) But in the ‘note by the author,’added at the beginning of ch. 1 in 1822 (see n. 68 above), the greatest happiness principle is ‘substituted’ (Bentham oddly says ‘added or substituted’ as if he were not sure what he had previously meant): the ‘only right and proper … end of human action … in every situation’ is ‘the greatest happiness of all those whose interest is in question’. Here he seems to be every bit as maximizing as Godwin, William: ‘I am bound to employ my talents, my strength and my time for the production of the greatest quantity of the general good’ (Political Justice, London, 1793, bk. 2, ch. 2, para. 14)Google Scholar. On other occasions Bentham gives yet another account of moral obligation, saying that there cannot be obligations without sanctions (see Hart, H. L. A., Essays on Bentham, Oxford, 1982, p.87Google Scholar).

86 I shall leave out of account Mill's psychologizing – for example, the curious explanation of the meaning of ‘I ought to X’ as ‘If I do not X, I shall be punished by a certain uncomfortable feeling’. Letter to W. G. Ward, Nov. 1859, Later Letters, CW, xv. 649. This is clearly related to the account of obligation-feelings in Utilitarianism, ch. 3.

87 CW, x. xlv.

88 See Robson's, J. M. ‘Textual Introduction’, Essays on Ethics, CW, x. cxxiii–cxxivGoogle Scholar.

89 30th June, 1854.The Later Letters, CW, xiv. 222.

90 Compare: ‘Mr. Bentham does not appear to have entered very deeply into the meta-physical grounds of these doctrines …’. ‘Remarks on Bentham's Philosophy’, Essays on Ethics, CW, x. 5.

91 In John Stuart Mill: A Criticism with Personal Recollections, London: 1882, p. 115Google Scholar.

92 ‘Grote's Plato’, Essays on Philosophy and the Classics ed. Robson, John. M., Toronto, 1978, CW, xi. 432Google Scholar.

93 The Subjection of Women, Essays on Equality, CW, xxi. 294.

94 Here it is significant that Mill does not pose ‘the utilitarian problem of justice’in the way one might expect. Nowadays people will say: ‘If our obligation were to maximize, wouldn't a judge be obliged to send the innocent Smith to prison if that appeared to afford a maximal advantage to the public?’ or ‘If our sole obligation were to maximize, how could anyone complain about inequality?’. If Mill were a utilitarian it would have been natural for him to introduce his discussion of justice with familiar examples of this kind.

95 That justice is in essence something needed comes out vividly in the story of Zeus and his gift to the city in Plato, , Protagoras, 322bGoogle Scholar. This is a dialogue which Mill himself translated. For the passage in Mill's translation, see Essays in Philosophy and the Classics, CW, xi. 49.

96 ‘Sedgwick's Discourse’, Essays on Ethics, CW, x. 63; ‘Whewell on Moral Philosophy’, ibid., CW, x. 180.

97 For a nice example of this minimal social prudence at work see the passage from the Examination of Hamilton quoted in the last section.

98 Utilitarianism, CW, x. 226.

99 Utilitarianism, CW, x. 219.

100 Significantly, H. L. A Hart, in making heavy weather of Mill on justice, seems to think that Mill offers us a ‘double criterion’ of moral obligation (Essays on Bentham, Oxford, 1982, p. 104Google Scholar). The rule setting up the right is needed (a) on grounds of utility, and (b) because of the vital interests, security etc., at stake. Criterion (a), Hart suggests, is a ‘maximizing’ one. It is a ‘specific utilitarian reason’ (p. 91). If ‘men have a moral right to worship as they please’ this entails ‘that it will maximize general utility to secure this freedom by law’ (p. 94) – a perfectly mad consequent of course. The thought must be that since Mill is a utilitarian, maximizing must come in somewhere.

101 ‘James Mill's Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind’, Miscellaneous Writings, ed. Robson, John M., Toronto, 1989, CW, xxxi. 242Google Scholar.

102 See also ‘Auguste Comte and Positivism’, Essays on Ethics, CW, x. 336–40, where Mill discusses the ‘morally intoxicated’ Comte's ‘prodigiously exaggerated’ view of moral restraints.

103 ‘James Mill's Analysis’, CW, xxxi. 242.

104 ‘Auguste Comte and Positivism’, Essays on Ethics, CW, x. 339.

105 Mill believed that ‘supererogation’ was a peculiarly Roman Catholic idea. See his essay on Comte, CW, x. 337–8, where he refers to ‘the sagacious and far-sighted men who constructed the Catholic ethics’ (Were they utilitarians too? one wants to ask). See also Mill's letter to Grote, Later Letters, CW, xv. 762–3, where he talks about ‘a lower standard for the world and a higher one for “the perfect” (the saints)’. But the idea is hardly exclusively Catholic. We find the distinction between counsel and command in Hobbes, for whom the Catholic Church was 'the Kingdom of Darkness' (see Leviathan, ch. 25, where ‘kill not’ and ‘steal not’ are commands, but ‘sell all thou hast; give it to the poor’ is a matter of counsel only). The division even crops up in the Pietist Kant (Groundwork, ch. 2).

106 Mill on Liberty, p. 25 (where he follows J. P. Dryer) and p. 28.

107 Anthony Quinton too can describe Mill's opinion with the aid of this alarming ought: ‘In every situation of choice the agent ought to choose that of the options available to him which will make the largest contribution to the general happiness’ (Utilitarian Ethics, p. 46).

108 An example from 1861, the year Utilitarianism appeared in Fraser's Magazine. See OED under ‘shall’, 14 d.

109 I have discussed the curious idea that morality is perpetually directive in ‘Does teaching by cases mislead us about morality?’, Journal of Medical Ethics, xxii (1996Google Scholar).

110 The fact that the security account of justice (and how curious, incidentally, to find no reference to Hobbes!), which is surely in some way on the right lines, has a problem with the rights of those far away makes Mill's account look even less utilitarian. Perhaps Mill simply failed to notice this aspect.

111 Utilitarianism, CW, x. 210.

112 For more on this famous remark, see n. 151 below. That Mill's account of‘the moral must’ makes it difficult to regard Mill as a utilitarian has of course not gone unnoticed. In particular I would like to mention the two articles, ‘Justice, Liberty and the Principle of Utility in Mill’, by D. P. Dryer, and ‘The Good and the Right’ by L. W. Sumner, both in Cooper et al. Dryer notices that Mill seems not to appeal to a maximizing principle of utility, leaving this principle aside idling as a fifth wheel’ when he comes to discuss justice and liberty; this rather confirms Maurice Cowling's remark: ‘The principle of utility is used by Mill… as a sort of pious slogan with which to convince himself that he was not departing too radically from the tradition in which he had grown up’ (Mill and Liberalism, Cambridge, 1963, p. 27Google Scholar). Both Sumner and Dryer want to say that Mill is neither an act-utilitarian nor a rule-utilitarian (Dryer, p. 63; Sumner, p. Ill), though Dryer says elsewhere (‘Mill's Utilitarianism’, Essays on Ethics, etc., CW, x. briv) that in Mill's opinion ‘something should not be done if and only if it would fail to cause as much happiness as would some alternative’, which sounds pretty like act-utilitarianism to me. Sumner still wants to regard Mill as a utilitarian of some kind, perhaps because Mill held, in Sumner's words, that ‘the good is prior to the right’ (p. 114). But this abstract mantra surely boils down to the homely view that a moral prohibition must have a point – that there must be an answer to the question Vhat is the good of it’, or ‘what is the necessity?’ – and as we have argued this view is not distinctive of utilitarianism.

113 Jonathan Dancy attributes this latter doctrine, erroneously, to Philippa Foot. In her view, he tells us, ‘we should do everything permissible to optimise consequences’. Maximizing must come in somewhere we perhaps tend to think – even in the account of obligation given by those who repudiate utilitarianism. (See Dancy's, J. ‘Nonconsequentialist reasons’, Philosophical Papers, xx (1991), 109Google Scholar.)

114 Mill on Liberty, p. 28.

115 Anarchy, State and Utopia, Oxford, 1974, pp. 28–30Google Scholar.

116 Ted Honderich and Myles Burnyeat, in their sensible and unsurprising account of utilitarianism, include the following variant – they call it a ‘successor to utilitarianism’: S ‘what one must do in life is to act in such a way as to produce those consequences which best realize both utility and justice’. (See their notes to their volume Philosophy As It Is, Harmondsworth, 1979, p. 32Google Scholar.) Mill is surely not a utilitarian, or utilitan-successor, of this type – even if one added the rider that the obligation not to act unjustly was lexically prior.

117 Some people like to define the word so that a consequentialist must be a maximizer. This would give a sense different again from the two we discuss.

118 In the essay ‘Bentham’ Mill says ‘The morality of an action depends on its foreseeable consequences’ (Essays on Ethics, CW, x. 112). But as Mill is here outlining a distinction between the morality, beauty and lovableness of actions, in an attempt to add, as it were, new dimensions to what Bentham had taught, it would be unreasonable to regard it as a definitive account of his view of obligation.

119 'Modern Moral Philosophy, Philosophy, xxxiii (1958)Google Scholar, reprinted in Collected Philosophical Papers, 3 vols., Oxford, 1981, iii; see esp. pp. 33–6.

120 Elizabeth Anscombe herself claimed that consequentialism, as she understood the word, came in with Sidgwick (‘Modern Moral Philosophy’, p. 34).

121 Essays on Politics and Society, ed. Robson, John M., 2 vols., Toronto, 1977, CW, xix. 637–41Google Scholar.

122 Essays on Ethics, CW, x. 72.

123 CW, x. 225.

124 Of course there is a difficulty in counting rules. One might say: if there is just one rule of this kind, there will be plenty! If it is always wrong to kill a baby, we have an infinite number of rules of a similar kind, of the form ‘it is always wrong to kill a baby in circumstances C’.

125 ‘Romilly's Public Responsibility and the Ballot’, Newspaper Writings, ed. Robson, Ann P. and Robson, John M., 4 vols., Toronto, 1986, CW, xxv. 1216. Mill, writing in 1865, is defending the idea that we should morally distinguish between equivocation and outright lying: ‘the difference for all human purposes is immense between him who respects that final barrier and those who overleap it’. See also the objection to Paley's lax morality … on the subject of lies’ (‘Sedgwick's Discourse’;, Essays on Ethics, CW, x. 55). In Utilitarianism, however, Mill seems prepared to countenance medical lies, at least when the doctor was in a tight corner (CW, x. 223). One might here side with one of Austin's ‘utilitarians’, the peremptory Dr Johnson: ‘I deny the lawfulness of telling a lie to a sick man for fear of alarming him. You have no business in consequences; you are to ten the truth’ (13 June 1784). Trust in such a context is at once so vital and so fragile.Google Scholar

126 Later Letters, CW, xv. 854.

127 Anscombe, ,‘Modern Moral Philosophy’, p. 34Google Scholar, italics omitted. This is not just the familiar thought that agents would be biased in their own favour. Temptation is at its most subtle when altruistic.

128 Essays on Politics, CW, xviii. 266.

129 ‘Whewell on Moral Philosophy’, Essays on Ethics, CW, x. 172.

130 ‘One of the great turning-points in the religious development of the world’, Some Dogmas of Religion, London, 1930, p. 214Google Scholar.

131 An Examination of Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy, CW, ix. 103. This point was of critical importance in the long ‘Examination of Hamilton’ as we can tell from Mill's Autobiography (CW, i. 270).

132 Mill would perhaps say that his sacrifice was ‘wasted’ if no good came of it (Utilitarianism, CW, x. 218). But that would I suppose simply count as a shame.

133 Letter to Young, E. W., Later Letters, CW, xvi. 1327Google Scholar.

134 There is an important passage which bears on this topic in the 1852 article on Whewell(Essays on Ethics, CW, x. 183). Mill lays down what is ‘essential’ when exceptions are made to moral rules. ‘The essential is, that the exception should be a general rule; so that being of definite extent, and not leaving the expediencies to the partial judgement of the agent in the individual case, it may not shake the stability of the wider rule in the cases to which the reason of the exception does not extend.' There is for example the general maxim of justice against homicide (Mill's example here). But the maxim we need to live by would clearly not be simple: it would contain built-in exceptions ‘of definite extent’ to handle the permissibility of warfare. All this is anticonsequentialist in intent. However, it would not be so in effect. For ‘partial judgement in the particular case’ would lead to the invention of general rules to suit what was wanted. Mill seems to have overlooked this possibility.

135 April 14,1872, Later Letters, CW, xvii. 1881.

136 Especially in the light of the letter to Brandreth, Henry, 1867, Later Letters, CW, xvi. 1234Google Scholar.

137 Accounts of ‘rule utilitarianism’ seem to me often rather unsatisfactory. E.g.: ‘The rule utilitarian does not consider the consequences of each particular action but considers the consequences of adopting some general rule, such as “Keep promises.” He adopts the rule if the consequences of its general adoption are better than the adoption of some alternative rule’ – from the article ‘Utilitarianism’ in Encyclopaedia of Philosophy, ed. Edwards, Paul, New York, 1967Google Scholar. I cannot believe that this is what the writer intended. For on this criterion one might cheerfully adopt the rule ‘Kill your aunt if she has made her will in your favour’, seeing that it is clearly consequence-better than all sorts of‘alternative’ rules, e.g. ‘Kill every aunt’, or ‘Kill every aunt and uncle, slowly and messily… ‘.

138 In the chapter on morals in The Emotions and The Will (London, 1859, p. 304Google Scholar), which Mill refers to as ‘admirable’ (Utilitarianism, CW, x. 246), Alexander Bain makes this point clearly, using different examples. There is no suggestion whatever in Bain's chapter that people ought to be maximizing or that morality is a maximizing aid. Bain showed the MS of his book to Mill before publication, who ‘revised it minutely, and jotted a great many suggestions’ (Bain, , John Stuart Mill, p. 102Google Scholar). The book would not have been published at all without Mill's support (Packe, Michael, The Life of John Stuart Mill, London, 1954, p. 410Google Scholar).

139 Mill might well have been a rule utilitarian on some accounts of that obscure notion – for example: ‘“Rule utilitarianism” holds … that right conduct [i.e. conduct that is morally all right] is the conduct that is permitted by useful rules, i.e. rules that are or would be useful when they are generally accepted or universally complied with’ (David Lyons, in ‘Utilitarianism’). But this criterion makes no mention of maximizing anything by obedience to a rule, or even of producing ‘enough’. (The criterion seems defective. There are plenty of bad actions which are permitted by useful rules – one could drive within the speed limit over someone lying in the road for example. We should perhaps say that what it is all right to do is what is not forbidden by any ‘necessary’ rule. But what would make us call this utilitarianism?)

140 See Lyons, David, Rights, p. 79Google Scholar, Gray, John, Mill on Liberty, p. 34Google Scholar, Berger, Fred, Happiness, p. 64Google Scholar, and Brink, David (‘Mill's Deliberative Utilitarianism’, Philosophy and Public Affairs, xxi (1992), 69Google Scholar), along with L. W. Sumner, and D. P. Dryer (see n. 112 above).

141 Was Mill ‘committed … to preferring more beneficent to less beneficent acts’, as Lyons, David claims? (Rights, p. 50Google Scholar.) It would be hard to square this with Mill's views of desert and his emphasis upon justice. In a just world, each person's ‘share’ of suffering and happiness would be ‘exactly proportioned to that person's good or evil deeds’ and ‘every human life would be the playing out of a drama constructed like a perfect moral tale’ (‘Nature’, Essays on Ethics, CW, x. 389).

142 Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Smith, Kemp, London, 1933, p. 641Google Scholar.

143 1st January, 1855, Later Letters, CW, xiv. 273.

144 Mill could have adopted a weaker principle, saying that, although it was not actually wrong to help the undeserving, it was wrong to have an undiscriminating concern for people. Among the traits which the gruff Stephen considered to be immoral was ‘gratuitous indiscriminate affection for all sorts of people, whether they deserve it or not, and in particular a weak, ill regulated, sympathy for those whose sufferings are their own fault.’ He added ‘there are sufferings which I, for one, would not wish either to relieve or to avert’ (p. 258).

145 Mill's doctrine on desert appears as part of his account of justice, but it is in fact ruled out by it. To commit injustice says Mill is to wrong a particular individual. But how does one wrong an undeserving person by doing him a good turn? Mill might say that in such a case one harms ‘his competitors’ (para. 15). But there might not be any ‘competitors’. Or if there are, they might all be even more undeserving!

146 CW, x. 231.

147 Later Letters, CW, xvii. 1875.

148 I take this phrase, and my use of it, from Utilitarianism, ch. 2, para. 19, CW, x. 219.

149 Utilitarianism, ch. 5, para. 32, CW, x. 255. One might of course need to consider consequences to know whether a proposed action would also be the doing of something forbidden. If one had promised not to let the cat out, one would need to know whether opening the window would have such a consequence.

150 Mill appears to give another account of moral obligation at the beginning of chapter two. In a very well-known passage, he describes the ‘creed’ of utilitarianism as maintaining ‘that actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness’ (ch. 2, para. 2, CW, x. 210). But is this really – in view of what he says later, and with some care – Mill's own view of obligation? An alternative suggestion would be to regard this earlier passage simply as a rough account of what utilitarians want to say – but which Mill is later going to replace by something better considered. After all, it hardly makes sense to talk, as the remark seems to suggest, that one action could be ‘righter’ than another. ‘Right’ is logically like ‘legal’, and we have no use for ‘legaler’. In this earlier chapter, Mill is not so much interested in the idea of obligation but in what counts as a fortunate outcome. Even from the account in this chapter, it could hardly be a matter of obligation to produce or attempt to produce ‘the greatest happiness’, for Mill says quite clearly that we are not under any general obligation to investigate what this is! Most of the time at any rate, even the ‘most virtuous’ man will not need to bother his head about it (ch. 2, para. 19).This is significant. If we have obligations at all, one of them will be the second order obligation to find out what one is obliged to do. One could not be quite careless of the matter.

151 I mention this pace both Ryan, Alan (‘Art of Living’, p. 620Google Scholar) and Brown, D. G. (‘Mill on Liberty and Morality’, Philosophical Review, lxxxi (1972), p. 150Google Scholar). Mill can hardly have thought such a thing. He is very insistent for example that Virtuous and rational citizens’ – supposing there are such – have an obligation to vote (Later Letters, CW, xvi. 1340). If one of these paragons stayed at home, who would suffer harm?

162 Gray, , Mill on Liberty, p. 31Google Scholar.

153 We should not think of universal benevolence, even within the bounds of justice, as quite uncontroversially a virtue. Aristotle seems not to have listed it. And Stephen said rather strikingly: ‘It is not love that one wants from the great mass of mankind but respect and justice’ (p. 221). We are misled by utilitarianism to suppose that anyone who recognizes both justice and benevolence as virtues must think that one is obliged to maximize welfare within the bounds set by a respect for rights; see n. 113 above. Maximizing maxims always have to be heavily interpreted if they are to avoid absurdity. Think of the saying ‘a doctor must do his best for his patients’, or even ‘the customer comes first’.

154 Plamanatz, John seems to have had the measure of things: ‘There is not much left of Benthamite utilitarianism, when John Stuart Mill has completed his defense of it. What is left is, strictly speaking, not utilitarianism at all …’ (Plamanatz, p. 144Google Scholar).

155 There are no interesting references to Hobbes in vol. x of CW (the volume which deals with ethics). But Mill can write, in Utilitarianism, about the obligations of justice (in his broad sense of that word): ‘It is their observance which alone preserves peace among human beings: if obedience to them were not the rule, and disobedience the exception, every one would see in every one else a probable enemy, against whom he must be perpetually guarding himself (ch. 5, para. 33). By now we will not be surprised to find that Hobbes is sometimes described as a utilitarian. E.g. Cross, R. C., ‘Utilitarianism’, Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 2nd edn., Oxford, 1974Google Scholar. For Hart, see The Concept of Law, Oxford, 1961, p. 169Google Scholar. For the view that the utilitarians were all natural-law philosophers, see Schumpeter, Joseph, A History of Economic Analysis, London, 1954, p. 132Google Scholar.

156 Essays on Equality, etc., CW, xxi. 185–8.

157 Utilitarianism, CW, x. 206 and 222.

158 ‘Nature’, Essays on Ethics, etc., CW, x. 394.

159 Mill's description of his own moral theory. Letter to Sidgwick, Nov. 26, 1867, Additional Letters, CW, xxxii. 185.

160 I have unfortunately not been able to comment on Crisp's, Roger comprehensive book, Mill and Utilitarianism, London: Routledge, 1997Google Scholar, which appeared as this article was in the hands of the journal. Dr Crisp (p. 127) quotes the familiar passage from Utilitarianism, ch. 5, para. 14: ‘We do not call anything wrong, unless we mean to imply that a person ought to be punished in some way for doing it; if not by law, by the opinion of his fellow creatures: if not by opinion, by the reproaches of his own conscience.’ He comments: ‘In recent years, several writers have used this paragraph to argue that Mill was not a utilitarian.’ I would like to stress here that I am not one of these writers. Standing on its own, at least, the passage would seem to be somewhat inconclusive. On this evidence alone, Mill might simply have thought that anyone who had carelessly failed to maximize the world's pleasures ought to feel ashamed of himself. (Dr Crisp mentions D. P. Dryer, David Lyons, David Copp, and John Gray in this connection, but, as we have seen, all these commentators insist that Mill was a utilitarian, though no doubt of a more complex kind than we are used to!)