Led by John Stuart Mill
About this course
The third module of the Ethics paper takes up utilitarianism — the most influential modern rival to Aristotle's ethics — with John Stuart Mill, its classic defender.
Where Aristotle gave a wise person's trained perception and denied there could be any moral formula, Mill offers exactly a formula: an action is right insofar as it tends to promote happiness, wrong insofar as it tends to the reverse, counting everyone's happiness equally. Raised on Bentham's hard arithmetic of pleasure and pain, Mill enriched it after his own youthful crisis — insisting that pleasures differ in quality, not just quantity, so that it is better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied, with the verdict belonging to those who have known both. The module follows his contested "proof" of the principle, his replies to the objections that it cannot be calculated and that it demands too much, and his most ambitious move — the claim that justice, far from being a constraint that utility must respect, is itself the most vital part of utility, the body of rules protecting the security on which every other good depends.
The student leaves able to state and assess utilitarianism whole, and poised at the central question of modern ethics — whether the good is prior to the right (Mill) or the right prior to the good (Kant). They read Mill's Utilitarianism directly.
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Led by John Stuart Mill
The question
Is the right action simply the one that produces the most happiness for all affected? Utilitarianism says yes: morality has a single principle, and it is the general happiness. Mill defends this against the charge that it is a doctrine fit for swine by arguing that pleasures differ in quality and that the higher pleasures of mind and feeling are worth more — then offers a proof of the principle, answers the objections that it cannot be calculated and asks too much of us, and confronts the hardest challenge of all: that maximising happiness could license grave injustice. His reply — that justice is not a rival to utility but its most protected part, the rules that guard our security — sets up the deepest division in ethics, between grounding the right in the good and grounding the good in the right.