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Millian Qualitative Superiorities and Utilitarianism, Part I*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 September 2008

JONATHAN RILEY
JONATHAN RILEY*
Affiliation:
Tulane University
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Abstract

Arrhenius and Rabinowicz (henceforth, AR) have argued that Millian qualitative superiorities are possible without assuming that any pleasure, or type of pleasure, is infinitely superior to another. But AR's analysis is fatally flawed in the context of ethical hedonism, where the assumption in question is necessary and sufficient for Millian qualitative superiorities. Marginalist analysis of the sort pressed by AR continues to have a valid role to play within any plausible version of hedonism, provided the fundamental incoherence that infects AR's use of such analysis is removed. But what AR call ‘Millian superiorities’ are never genuine qualitative superiorities in Mill's sense. Mill scholars need to appreciate this point and recognize that the interpretation of qualitative superiorities as infinite superiorities is the only interpretation which is compatible with the text of Mill's Utilitarianism. The continuing failure to appreciate the possibility of infinite superiorities has precluded any adequate understanding of the extraordinary structure of Mill's pluralistic hedonistic utilitarianism.

Type
Research Article
Information
Utilitas , Volume 20 , Issue 3 , September 2008 , pp. 257 - 278
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2008

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References

1 Arrhenius, Gustaf and Rabinowicz, Wlodek, ‘Millian Superiorities’, Utilitas 17 (2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 AR, ‘Millian Superiorities’, p. 129, Definition 1.

3 AR, ‘Millian Superiorities’, p. 127.

4 AR, ‘Millian Superiorities’, p. 131, n. 9.

5 Mill, John Stuart, Utilitarianism, in Collected Works of John Stuart Mill [henceforth CW], x, ed. Robson, John M. (Toronto and London, 1969), p. 210, my emphasisGoogle Scholar. Even those who reject ethical hedonism usually recognize that Mill endorsed it. See, e.g., Crisp, Roger, Mill on Utilitarianism (London, 1997), chs. 2–4Google Scholar. Mill also endorsed a sophisticated version of psychological hedonism.

6 Such confusion infects the discussions even of leading scholars of Mill. See, for example, Skorupski, John, ‘Quality of Well-Being: Quality of Being’, in Crisp, R. and Hooker, B. (eds.), Well-Being and Morality: Essays in Honour of James Griffin (Oxford, 2000)Google Scholar; and West, Henry R., An Introduction to Mill's Utilitarian Ethics (Cambridge, 2004), ch. 3Google Scholar. I briefly discuss these authors later in the text.

7 AR, ‘Millian Superiorities’, p. 133.

8 AR, ‘Millian Superiorities’, p. 133.

9 AR, ‘Millian Superiorities’, p. 133.

10 AR, ‘Millian Superiorities’, p. 133, Independence Axiom.

11 AR, ‘Millian Superiorities’, p. 134.

12 AR, ‘Millian Superiorities’, p. 134.

13 Ethical hedonism must not be conflated with any ethical theory that takes pleasure to be one among plural irreducible basic values. The alternative theories are versions of ethical pluralism with a hedonistic component. As G. E. Moore, who famously rejects hedonism, explains: ‘By [ethical] hedonism, I mean the doctrine that pleasure alone is good as an end . . . The doctrine that pleasure, among other things, is good as an end, is not hedonism; and I shall not dispute its truth’ (Principia Ethica (Cambridge, 1903), p. 62, emphasis original).

14 Utilitarianism, CW, x. 257–8, note.

15 Utilitarianism, CW, x. 257.

16 Utilitarianism, CW, x. 257.

17 Utilitarianism, CW, x. 257–8, note.

18 See, e.g., Riley, Jonathan, ‘Interpreting Mill's Qualitative Hedonism’, The Philosophical Quarterly 53 (2003), p. 412CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

19 Although ethical hedonism does not presuppose psychological hedonism, I shall generally ignore the point since Mill endorsed both. For further discussion of how hedonistic and modern economic usages of the term ‘utility’ can be consistently combined, see Riley, Jonathan, ‘Welfare (Philosophical Aspects)’, in Smelser, N. J. and Bates, P. B. (eds.), International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences, 25 vols. (Oxford, 2001), pp. 16420–6CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

20 Principia Ethica, pp. 38–9.

21 Principia Ethica, pp. 6–16, 41, 142–6, 183–4.

22 Principia Ethica, pp. 27–31, 92–6, 184–9.

23 Moore's description of his ‘method of absolute isolation’ for intuitively determining the intrinsic values of the parts of any organic unity makes no reference to varying the amounts of the different things that are the parts. See Principia Ethica, pp. 92–6, 187–225.

24 The confusion that infects AR's use of marginalist analysis in the context of hedonism does not arise in the context of every theory of good. AR's approach to radical superiorities may be free from contradiction in the context of non-hedonistic theories. But space limitations prevent me from further discussing the point.

25 Utilitarianism, CW, x. 211, my emphasis.

26 Utilitarianism, CW, x. 211.

27 Fred Feldman's ‘attitudinal hedonism’, for instance, is really a non-hedonistic axiology that relies on independent attitudes to determine the worth or value of any feeling of pleasure. See Feldman, Fred, Pleasure and the Good Life: Concerning the Nature, Varieties, and Plausibility of Hedonism (Oxford, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

28 Utilitarianism, CW, x. 211, emphasis added.

29 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, in The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation [henceforth CW], vols. i−ii, ed. Jonathan Barnes (Princeton, 1984), ii. 1858.

30 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, CW, ii. 1855.

31 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, CW, ii. 1860.

32 Aristotle appears to have been committed to a fundamental ontology and theology, which Lear aptly labels ‘objective idealism’, such that a rational human replicates the activity of a divine Mind and thereby becomes god-like when correctly perceiving and contemplating the forms of the various substances observed in nature. The underlying stuff or matter out of which the substances are composed is an unknowable substrate but our ideas of the substances can be made to correspond to their forms on the basis of observation and reasoning. See Lear, Jonathan, Aristotle: The Desire to Understand (Cambridge, 1988)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

33 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, CW, ii. 1861.

34 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, CW, ii. 1862.

35 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, CW, ii. 1863. Aristotle may well have preferred a constitutional aristocracy rather than democracy as an ideal form of government so that an educated minority could have the leisure needed to live as far as possible the quasi-divine life of contemplation, with the majority consigned to a second-best life of virtue in which, among other things, they supplied the bodily and emotional needs of the elite.

36 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, CW, ii. 1856.

37 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, CW, ii. 1858. By a pleasant feeling that is ‘proper’ to an activity, Aristotle means a pleasure that ‘intensifies’ the activity in the sense that it heightens our awareness and appreciation for that kind of activity. Proper pleasures thus complete their associated activities. In contrast, activities are injured by ‘alien pleasures’ that are proper to other types of activities. Aristotle says that alien pleasures are similar to ‘proper pains’ in the sense that they detract from the proper pleasures of an activity. The pleasures of sexual intercourse are alien to the activity of contemplation, for instance, just as the pleasures of contemplation are alien to sexual activity.

38 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, CW, ii. 1859.

39 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, CW, ii. 1856.

40 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, CW, ii. 1856.

41 Hutcheson, Francis, A System of Moral Philosophy, vols. i−ii, ed. Carey, Daniel (London and New York, 2005; reprint of the 1755 edn.), i. 117CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

42 Ibid. Hutcheson makes clear that duration is not of ‘such importance to some higher kinds, as it is to the lower’. In his view: ‘The exercise of virtue for a short period, provided it be not succeeded by something vicious, is of incomparably greater value than the most lasting sensual pleasures’ (System, i. 117–18).

43 Hutcheson, System, i. 117.

44 Hutcheson considers employing the term ‘intenseness’ to ‘denote . . . the degree in which any perceptions or enjoyments are beatifick’ so that higher kinds of pleasures might then be said to be always more intense than lower kinds. But he rejects this move as potentially confusing: ‘to retain always in view the grand differences of the kinds, and to prevent any imaginations, that the intenser sensations of the lower kinds with sufficient duration may complete our happiness; it may be more convenient to estimate enjoyments by their dignity and duration: dignity denoting the excellence of the kind, when those of different kinds are compared; and the intenseness of the sensations, when we compare those of the same kind’ (System, 118–19, my emphasis). Thus, the subsidiary role played by quantity of pleasant feeling within his ethical system is subsumed within his non-hedonistic idea of dignity or worth.

45 On the moral sense and its operation, see Hutcheson, System, i. 53–62, 209–10, 238–324. The fallibility of the human intellect accounts for mistakes in the application of the moral sense and for some degree of variation (which Hutcheson suggests is fairly minor) across even advanced societies in the actions and dispositions classified as virtuous (System, i. 89–98). Hutcheson also contends that Aristotle subscribed to a moral sense and refers to various passages in Nicomachean Ethics and Magna Moralia to support his contention (System, i. 237).

46 Hutcheson, System, i. 121.

47 Hutcheson, System, i. 212, emphasis in the original. Hutcheson may not have been accused of atheism as, say, Spinoza was for adopting such a pagan conception of the deity as a force immanent in nature. But his views provoked discontent, especially because he was also sharply critical of the ‘Popish religion’, including its elaborate rituals and acquisition of vast property in God's name. He eventually left Ireland for Scotland. His peculiar mix of Aristotelian theology and Christianity seems to have met with less opposition from the relatively enlightened and tolerant Scots.

48 For the suggestion that Hutcheson may have influenced Mill in this regard, see, among others, Edwards, Rem B., Pleasures and Pains: A Theory of Qualitative Hedonism (Ithaca, 1979), p. 70Google Scholar.