Utilitarianism: Chapter 2 Summary & Analysis

In this chapter, Mill has two central goals: he wants to briefly explain his simple ethical theory, and he wants to address the endless stream of criticism it has received from the British public. Due to this structure, this chapter might seem disjointed: in its opening lines, Mill has already laid out his deceptively straightforward philosophy. While the word “utilitarian” is still associated with function-over-form thinking and ruthless pragmatism, Mill explains here that this is not at all what utilitarianism is about. The fact that utilitarianism was already a topic of popular discourse in 19th-century England reflects Mill’s place in a longer utilitarian tradition: although his is the name most associated with the doctrine now, the philosophy goes back further, at least to his teacher Jeremy Bentham and arguably to ancient Greece (specifically Epicurus).

Mill recognizes that the most controversial part of his philosophy is his argument that happiness is merely about maximizing pleasure: others might agree that happiness is the supreme goal but reject the idea that happiness just consists of having more pleasure than pain. However, Mill emphasizes that his conception of pleasure is expansive: unlike some similar thinkers (such as Bentham and Epicurus), Mill does not think all pleasures are alike. Most importantly, he is not talking about hedonism, or the pursuit of purely physical pleasures. Rather, he thinks that just pursuing physical pleasure would mean forgetting what is special about human beings: our capacity for complex intellectual, emotional, and spiritual experiences means that true happiness is about much more than just physical sensations.

Here, Mill specifically breaks with his teacher Jeremy Bentham, who thought that pleasures and pains could literally be measured and ranked through a “felicific calculus” that considered things like their “permanency, safety, [and] uncostliness,” as well as more basic elements like how intense they were and how long they lasted. This distinction between Bentham’s ideas and his own allows Mill to further refute the conflation of utilitarianism with hedonism, and also introduce a more straightforward method to rank pleasures. If intellectual pleasures are categorically better than physical ones, then utilitarians are not hedonists, but rather enlightened, liberated intellectuals. Yet, from a contemporary perspective, Mill’s claim that people prefer refined pleasures is deeply biased: he is specifically referring to educated European people, mostly from the upper classes, who think they have better taste and that they are capable of greater enjoyment than their counterparts of different social classes or cultural roots. His language betrays a risk in his kind of thinking: by assuming that people who prioritize different pleasures are somehow deficient or do not know better, he makes it seem like the mission of educated Europeans to teach the rest of the world their “refined” way of life, perhaps even at any cost. Notably, this is exactly what Mill thought he was doing when he spent decades working for and defending the murderous British colonial government in India.

Mill’s argument is fragile because, if someone can show that there are some people versed in the intellectual “refined” pleasures who have chosen to give them up and pursue just physical pleasures, then his hierarchy of “highly endowed being[s]” over “fools” falls apart. Recognizing this, he suggests that such people either recognize they are erring or else are forced by an unjust society to abandon “refined” pleasures. And he suggests that this criticism should not dissuade its holders from being utilitarians—they should still believe in maximizing happiness, but can decide to define this happiness differently.

The objection that it is impossible to always be happy again confuses Mill’s picture of the good life with the common-sense assumption that pleasure simply means physical sensations that feel good. It is impossible—and would be very impractical—to live in a constant state of physical ecstasy. Besides, this is not what happiness really means. Mill explains that tranquility can lead to happiness because, without much pain to suffer, people can become more sensitive to the pleasures they do experience. For the opposite reason, people can also become more sensitive to excitement: although one might suffer, one can become hardened to pain and experience a great deal of pleasure. So Mill is not advocating for an ascetic life, nor for one of adventurous risk-taking. He recognizes both of these as options for finding happiness, but believes that everyone has to find their own balance. Regardless of where one lands on the spectrum, however, he thinks of generosity and “mental cultivation” as essential traits. The first means one is likely to take pleasure in others’ successes and pass happiness on, and the second is what makes people capable of higher (“refined”) pleasures.

Education and cultivation are not necessarily the same thing, but the first is a means to the latter, because it teaches people how to actively pursue knowledge and follow their curiosity. Mill makes the social implications of utilitarianism clear here: a society should guarantee all its members political and personal freedoms, physical safety, economic security, and access to the best possible medical care. In fact, this idea lies at the foundation of most modern liberal democracies, which achieve Mill’s goals with varying levels of success. Mill, like these societies, believes that government’s role is to ensure these conditions for people, so that they can pursue their own happiness in the ways they see fit. This belief also motivated Mill’s own political activism in Britain during his lifetime.

When referring to renunciation, Mill is talking roughly about two lifestyles. The first is withdrawing from material goods and physical pleasures, as a monk or ascetic would do. The second is sacrificing oneself in order to help or save others—which is similar to the first kind of renunciation because it involves denying oneself physical pleasures, but different because its goal is helping others, not achieving enlightenment. It is important for him to address these ideas because many people instinctively associate morality with these kinds of lives. But Mill notes that it is always better to help others and achieve enlightenment while also being fully satisfied oneself. While it is generally true that living a life of asceticism or service to others will improve the common good, these lifestyles are only good insofar as they serve the common good. Again, Mill suggests, his critics are misinterpreting their moral instincts (selfless service to others is usually good, which is true because service to others usually increases overall happiness) with absolute moral laws (selfless service to others is inherently good, which is false).

Mill notes that societies and their governments largely determine how much their citizens prioritize the collective: his argument for teaching utilitarian thinking through “education and [public] opinion” is, to a significant extent, the reason contemporary students take civics classes and contemporary political institutions emphasize transparency, responsibility, and ethical conduct. Notably, utilitarianism basically assumes that everyone is equal—not that everyone is equally happy, but rather that everyone is equally capable and deserving of happiness (and the means to access it).

Mill sees that it is easy to misconstrue his philosophy as holding that everyone must always be thinking about the collective. Again, he sees this interpretation as a needless exaggeration: he does not want to turn everyone into a philosopher. He makes a useful distinction between doing what is good and doing what is good because it is what is good. In short, he does not care about people’s motives, but only about their actions (after all, only actions contribute to happiness). In “the great majority of” situations, then, it is fine to behave for the sake of oneself and one’s immediate circle, and to follow commonsense notions of morality—except, that is, in the few exceptional cases when one’s own interests are opposed to the interests of others. In those cases, Mill thinks, people must stop and think about the common good, reflecting on whether their actions are beneficial or detrimental to net happiness.

Mill’s answer to this objection allows him to introduce three important ideas. First, morality depends on deeds, not their doers. But secondly, despite this fact, it is still important for people to be virtuous because this will lead them to instinctively take good actions and usually increase the world’s net happiness. And thirdly, the fact that “beauties of character” are valuable as a means to good actions (but not in and of themselves) is another good reason for utilitarians to prioritize the building of common institutions and collective moral values.

Mill’s answer to his Christian critics is characteristically clever: prioritizing human happiness does not mean ignoring God’s will, but rather fulfilling it. Therefore, the implication goes, not only is it perfectly possible to be a good Christian and a good utilitarian, but in fact utilitarians are the best Christians, and the moral rules outlined in scripture should be taken as useful guides to prioritizing the general good (but not infallible rules for human conduct).

Like the objection that “utility is opposed to pleasure” from the beginning of the chapter, this criticism is based on a simple misinterpretation of terms. If the previous objection relied on a misunderstanding of what “utility” was, this objection relies on a misinterpretation of “expediency” (a word that is no longer commonly used in English). In contemporary terms, some people think that utilitarianism allows people to make exceptions for themselves by referring to the “greater good.” It is okay to tell a lie just this once, one might think—but in this case, one forgets the long-term consequences of lying, both because one has to keep up the lie and because one loses others’ trust and goodwill. When such lies come from public figures, they erode the general moral fabric of society as a whole. In short, then, people who make moral exceptions for themselves on the basis of the “common good” are simply wrong about their behavior being good, and Mill argues that considering the concept of utility would help people avoid such mistakes.

In responding to this penultimate objection, Mill continues to clarify what, precisely, he thinks is valuable about moral instincts: they give people rules of thumb to follow in most situations, shortcuts that can generally lead them to make good decisions. Situations of moral conflict, when people have to seriously think about what course of action is right and wrong, tend to also be situations in which they have either no strong moral instincts or conflicting ones. Accordingly, the problem is not moral instincts in and of themselves, but rather the conflation of moral instincts and moral laws. At the same time, here Mill also responds to his critics’ general concern that he is throwing tradition to the wayside. Just as he preserves the role of moral instincts in his argument by putting them in their proper place, he saves history and “law and opinion” by showing that they serve an important function for the promotion of the common good. Mill is essentially saying that utilitarianism is revolutionary as a moral theory from a philosophical point of view, but it does not require people to revolutionize their common sense about what is right and wrong.

This criticism is essentially the same as the argument that utilitarianism promotes “expediency.” While those who make this objection worry that utilitarianism facilitates bad behavior by making morality about specific situations and not absolute rules, Mill insists that he does not do away with moral rules—he merely explains the true reasons behind them and, in fact, gives people an even better reason to follow and promote them. Indeed, people will always treat themselves as exceptions to the rules. And contrary to this example of people excusing bad behavior by compulsively citing utilitarianism, in reality, according to utilitarians, breaking the rules is only acceptable after extensive moral reflection and analysis.