Utilitarianism: Chapter 5 Summary & Analysis

Mill dedicates this last chapter to “the idea of justice” not only because his more sophisticated critics use the idea of justice as evidence that merely calculating the consequences of an action cannot adequately capture its morality, but also because discussing justice allows him to outline a general procedure for dealing with objections to utilitarianism that come from moral instincts. Instead of trying to debate the importance of justice, Mill tries to affirm it through utilitarianism—in other words, he shows why the moral instincts people try to use against utilitarianism are actually reflections of utilitarian principles themselves.

Mill chooses a set of examples that he sees as clear and incontestable—at least among the British reading public of his time—which allows him to build a convincing analysis of the moral instinct of justice. The first two examples tie justice to “moral right[s],” and the next three suggest that such rights have to do with people receiving the sort of treatment they deserve. Mill’s implication, of course, is that the instinct about what people morally deserve is ultimately based in utilitarianism.

Mill notes that even moral instincts that at first appear to be unshakeable, consistent laws—like justice—actually have shades of meaning and contingency depending on the situation. When it is advantageous (good for utility), it is all right to break the norm of equality. Therefore, Mill is already suggesting that people who adhere to moral rules are actually utilitarians because they are willing to break those rules for the sake of utility. Readers should note that the word “expedient” takes on a new context here: before, Mill was talking about how people misunderstand “expediency,” contrasting this term with the idea of the common good, and here, he is talking about what is actually best or most “expedient,” which in Mill’s terms is identical to the idea of the common good.

Again, Mill clarifies the distinction between judicial and moral laws. They are linked in the sense that legal systems should seek to approximate morality as closely as possible in the proper domains of life. But precisely because the law fails to capture morality and should stay out of private life, it is crucial to separate the two. This is further evidence for Mill’s earlier claim that the internal sanction of morality (the individual conscience) is a more important driver of moral behavior than the external sanction (reward and punishment). Therefore, while people tend to instinctively associate justice with justice systems (the law), when asked to further reflect, they will realize that justice is about morality. Everything just is moral and everything unjust is immoral. But this does not make the concept of justice useless, or entirely reducible to that of morality: rather, justice tells people something meaningful about the kind of morality or immorality tied to an act.

It is important to remember that, when Mill talks about certain immoral behaviors deserving punishment, he is not only talking about legal punishment, but also things like social retaliation or personal torment. Neither is he saying that all immoral acts should be punishable by law. Imperfect and perfect duties are two categories within morality, and their relevance to Mill’s discussion of justice will soon become apparent. The fact that he distinguishes between them shows that Mill’s moral calculus is not as simple as it is often made out to be: while it is true that actions are good if and only if they contribute to the general happiness (and bad if and only if they detract from it), this is not the only relevant moral distinction that can be made. While some rule-based moral philosophers claim that utilitarians cannot distinguish between types or categories of moral good, Mill clearly does, although he thinks that these categories’ definitions rely in some fundamental on the principle of utility.

In short, Mill’s argument is that people use the term “justice” to talk about perfect moral duties. It is wrong and immoral, but not unjust, to be stingy—because generosity is an imperfect moral duty. (Similarly, it could be wrong but neither immoral nor unjust to cut one’s finger while cooking.) So each category is a subset of the next: only some bad acts are immoral (if they are wrong enough to merit punishment), and only some immoral acts are unjust (if they violate a perfect duty, meaning their actions harm someone specific).

Mill completes his definition of justice. But by defining it in terms of other, more basic human feelings (“vengeance” plus “[concern for] the general good”), he does not mean to challenge its importance. Rather, he sees these feelings as essential, valuable, and worth promoting, precisely because they are oriented toward the promotion of the general good. Again, Mill is using “expediency” to mean what is beneficial or best for utility, as opposed to its colloquial meaning of self-interest as opposed to collective interest. This allows him to distinguish between the feeling of justice (self-defense combined with sympathy) and the moral determination of whether justice should be enacted (meaning whether people should be punished for their unjust actions). This moral part of justice—which requires people to “consider whether an act is blamable” and think of the collective interest—is the part that aligns with utility.

In this chapter so far, Mill has distinguished justice from morality and mere good, and then explained that the moral component of justice has to do with appropriately responding to unjust acts. This means, as he shows here, that morality is inextricably tied to the social dimension of human life, and that ethics and social philosophy are extensions of one another. Rights are the expression of individual morality in a social context, and emotions, in turn, give force to rights by connecting people to one another (like “external sanctions”). This is a curious argument because much of Mill’s disagreement with his predecessors—Jeremy Bentham and his own father—came after he had a mental breakdown at the end of his adolescence and came to believe in the power of emotions (which Bentham and the elder Mill largely rejected).

Mill has completed his analysis of justice and explained what it has to do with utility: the feeling of injustice reflects an instinctual response to a certain kind of immoral, happiness-stifling behavior, and the enacting of justice involves directing these instincts toward the social good (the promotion of utility). Accordingly, he now turns to more concrete arguments against the idea that justice is an independent, absolute moral value “totally independent of utility” (rather than, as Mill thinks, an instinctive interpretation of the utilitarian principle). The argument he presents here is the most straightforward and undeniable one: different people think different things are just and unjust. If some of them were simply wrong about what justice really is, then the ones who are right would be able to produce some convincing explanation that their own concept of justice is the true one. But they cannot: everyone has reasons to prefer their concept of justice, but all these reasons are either meaningless or utilitarian. For instance, defenders of different models of punishment all say that their own model of justice is the right one because criminals deserve some particular kind of treatment, but none can coherently explain why their idea of what criminals deserve is truer than any other idea. If criminals deserve punishment because of the social contract, one must then ask what gives the social contract validity; if they deserve it because of “an eye for an eye,” one must ask why “an eye for an eye” is the best policy, and answers to these questions either get no closer to an absolute concept of justice or end up appealing to the consequences—the resulting utility—of each principle.

As with the previous case of punishing a criminal, Mill chooses these cases because his readers are likely to have competing instincts about what is just: it is fair for people to get rewarded for their results (a product of their ability), but also fair that people who work equally hard should get paid equally, and also unfair that some people have superior abilities in the first place. This and Mill’s other examples challenge the simplistic idea of justice as an absolute value “totally independent of utility” because they show that people’s instincts about justice are not always reliable or fixed; rather, they point the way to another, more fundamental way of determining morality: utilitarianism, which is the only way to decide among competing principles of justice. Therefore, Mill concludes that the instinct of justice is valuable because it helps enforce the most important rules that promote the common happiness in a society—but that it is wrong to mistake this instinct for morality in and of itself.

Mill sees justice as the connective tissue between personal morality and society as a whole, which is part of why he devoted so much energy to politics during his life. By extension, if justice reflects the moral rules that promote utility, then a society’s justice system reflects that society’s collective moral conscience.

Mill now returns to several of the instincts that make up the idea of justice, but which people often erroneously take as valuable in and of themselves (rather than as indirect expressions of the principle of utility). He interprets these instincts in terms of his picture of justice, showing that the instinctual desire for equality and reciprocity should be the basis of any justice system, except when these values come in conflict with one another or with utility. They should, in turn, be the basis of human society, and this is Mill’s philosophical justification for his unshakeable belief in providing equal rights and social services to all people. Yet it is worth asking whether Mill does leave too open a door for politicians and legislators to justify breaking with equality in so-called exceptional circumstances. Grotesquely enough, for instance, Mill promoted the British empire in India in part because he thought he was “civilizing” Indians and bringing them up to an equal level with Europeans. In other words, he justified the mistreatment of people he considered inferior “barbarians” by claiming he was trying to make them his equals. Contemporary readers can see the profound irony in Mill, an irredeemable racist against non-Europeans, defending equality and decrying racism and sexism.

In his conclusion, Mill emphasizes that he has reconciled with his critics rather than dismissing them: these critics’ instincts about justice correctly reflect what is moral and immoral. But justice is subservient to the principle of utility, not independent of it. In other words, the same people who question utilitarianism because they think justice is more important than utility are, at the end of the day, secretly utilitarians themselves. And their strong instincts are incredibly important for a well-functioning, equal society. Although he was personally involved in profound injustice, then, Mill’s philosophy clearly supports any progressive social justice movement that seeks equality for oppressed groups and/or the righting of historical wrongs.