Utilitarianism Summary

The stated purpose of John Stuart Mill’s Utilitarianism is deceptively simple: the author wants to clearly explain his utilitarian ethical philosophy and respond to the most common criticisms of it. In many instances, however, the book is much more layered and complex: Mill often references other important ethical systems (like Kant’s deontological ethics and Aristotle’s concept of virtue), whose major concepts he thinks utilitarianism explains even better. This is most apparent in the introduction, in which Mill notes that ethics has long been considered an important subject and yet has produced little agreement among philosophers. He thinks this is because they have failed to clearly specify the first principles of their ethical philosophies—they articulate various second principles about how to act, but never explain the theory of moral value that underlies these principles. Mill thinks this theory of value is actually quite simple: everyone, including laypeople and philosophers alike, values happiness and nothing else. Although all ethical theories ultimately have to rely on this principle, only utilitarianism is based on it from the beginning.

In the next chapter, Mill gives an overview of the utilitarian doctrine. Fundamentally, utilitarians want to maximize utility, which means the total of human happiness. Happiness has two parts: “pleasure and the absence of pain.” And happiness is the only intrinsically good thing. This means that actions are morally good if they “promote happiness,” and morally wrong if they “produce the reverse of happiness.” This does not mean people should spend their lives pursuing bodily pleasures: Mill thinks the refined pleasures of the intellect and the emotions are inherently better, as indicated by the fact that “all or almost all [people] who have experience of both [types of pleasure] give a decided preference” to the refined ones. So critics are wrong to accuse utilitarianism of undermining human dignity or encouraging people to become indulgent pleasure-seekers: because humans’ intellectual and emotional capabilities give them access to unique experiences and pleasures, “it is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied.” Indeed, few humans are fully satisfied: many lack the opportunities to fully cultivate their intellects or pursue their interests, and of course it will always be impossible to eliminate all of life’s pains. But utilitarians care about happiness, not satisfaction, and producing the happiest possible world does not require fixing all the world’s problems. Contrary to the assumptions of utilitarianism’s critics, Mill does not see the happy life as “a continuity of highly pleasurable excitement,” but rather as a life “of few and transitory pains, many and various pleasures,” and correct expectations about and knowledge of the world. People can be happy by living peaceful and uneventful lives (reducing pain), pursuing interesting and exciting experiences (maximizing pleasure), or embracing a balance of both. And people who are selfish and/or mentally uncultivated will never be happy, even with all the advantages in the world. Indeed, according to Mill, wealth and status are far less important as contributors to happiness than education and individual rights, which all societies should try to guarantee for their citizens. Teaching people to care about the collective happiness has a snowball effect, turning a sense of equality and care for others into an institutional principle of “law and [public] opinion.”

Throughout this chapter, Mill also dismisses a number of common misinterpretations and criticisms of utilitarianism. For instance, some people say that self-sacrifice is better than pursuing one’s own happiness, and Mill agrees—but only in the cases where self-sacrifice improves net happiness, because in a world where everyone could freely pursue their own happiness, sacrifice would be unnecessary. Other critics worry that people cannot possibly think in every moment about how their actions will affect everyone else in the world, and Mill agrees—most good actions, he notes, are only done for the good of a few people, and do not affect the vast majority of society (about whom only politicians and public servants should be constantly thinking). To those who call utilitarianism “godless,” Mill replies that God certainly wants everyone to be happy. Those who believe people cannot predict the effects of their actions, he suggests, should study history and get a general idea of the best course of action.

In the next two chapters, Mill takes up two important side considerations about utilitarian philosophy. In Chapter Three, “Of the Ultimate Sanction of the Principle of Utility,” Mill asks what sanctions (or gives “binding force” to) utilitarian sentiments. In other words, having established that promoting the general happiness is good, he considers what makes people actually act in ways that do so. Mill decides that “external” sanctions, like shame from others or retaliation from God, are ultimately far less important than the “internal” sanction of the individual moral conscience, which he believes societies should support and cultivate as a way to encourage a general interest in justice and the common good.

In Chapter Four, Mill asks how it is possible to prove a moral theory like utilitarianism as true. This essentially requires proving utilitarianism’s primary claim, which is that happiness is the most desirable thing, and the only desirable thing. Just like “the only proof that a sound is audible is that people hear it,” Mill insists, the only way to show that something is desirable is to show “that people do actually desire it.” There is no question that everyone desires themselves to be happy, which implies that humanity as a whole—“the aggregate of all persons”—desires its own collective happiness. To show that happiness is the only truly desirable thing, Mill looks at examples of other things that people seem to desire, like virtue and money. These things are desirable precisely because they form “part[s] of happiness.” He emphasizes that it is wrong to think of happiness as an “abstract idea,” when in reality it is a “concrete whole” comprised of various things in a human life. Therefore, he concludes that everything people naturally desire is “either a part of happiness or a means to happiness,” which proves that happiness is the most desirable thing and the only thing that is desirable in and of itself—meaning utilitarianism’s fundamental claim is true.

In the fifth and final chapter, Mill asks about the relationship between utility and justice. This is important, he notes, because people often use their sense of justice as an argument against utilitarianism: how can people simply calculate consequences when, in many situations, they feel they have to act to do what is right and just? Aren’t some things (say, punishing the innocent or taking away people’s rights) plainly wrong, even if they ultimately produce good consequences? And don’t people’s moral instincts about what is just and unjust point them to what is inherently good or bad, making utilitarianism unnecessary?

In fact, Mill fully agrees that feelings of justice almost always point to what is morally right—which, importantly, does not always mean the same thing as what the law allows or prohibits. However, he insists that this is the case not because the moral feeling itself serves as proof of what is good and evil, but rather because these feelings are based on even deeper, utilitarian instincts: people’s sense of justice reminds them what is conducive and counterproductive to collective happiness. So people are right to feel that it is morally wrong to violate others’ rights—by taking away their property or liberty without due cause, for example, even when it produces some good in the short term. Despite the good they may do, such violations denigrate the public’s trust in the law, feeling of safety, and sense of equality—outcomes which are always bad for collective happiness in the long term. This does not mean there are no exceptions to violating others’ rights: it is perfectly moral to steal medicine if that is the only way to save a loved one’s life, for instance, but few people would say the injustice of stealing the medicine is more egregious than the injustice of not being able to get it in the first place.

Mill argues that, when we say that a thing is morally “wrong,” we mean “that a person ought to be punished […] for doing it.” This means not only that someone has failed to act in the best way, but also that they have broken a moral duty, whether a general duty that is owed in the abstract (an “imperfect duty”) or a specific duty owed to “some assignable person.” Injustice is specifically the latter: it is unjust to break a promise made to someone else, while it is morally wrong, but not necessarily unjust, for a rich person to be stingy in general. In response to injustice, people feel a moral sense of justice that comes from “the impulse of self-defense and the feeling of sympathy.” Essentially, people want to defend others when their rights are violated, just as they would defend themselves in the same situation. So justice combines “vengeance” with a moral interest in others, that is, a commitment to “the general good” based on a sense of equality. This is how Mill connects justice back to utility: it is people’s way of responding to the violation of people’s rights, with rights being an important foundation for and contributor to the happiness of everyone in a society. Hinting at his political philosophy, Mill argues that such rights are in fact the most important moral rules of all: they are “the essentials of human well-being,” because they stop people from hurting each other. And yet it is impossible to explain these rules’ importance—or the necessity of protecting them through people’s feelings of justice and societies’ elaborate legal systems—without ultimately showing that they are valuable because they promote the general happiness. So according to Mill, while justice is an important feeling that should be celebrated and cultivated, it is not separate from or superior to utility: instead, it actually becomes a further justification for utilitarianism.