Meta-Ethics Theme Analysis

How do we determine what is right and wrong? In ethics, this question, which defines the field known as meta-ethics, is as important as practical questions of which moral stances, courses of action, and social structures are actually the right and wrong ones. Like any philosopher building an ethical theory from the ground up, John Stuart Mill must offer some explanation of this: what makes happiness the best thing for humans, and therefore proves the utilitarian theory true? In Utilitarianism, he offers an unconventional answer to this question, which allows him to circumvent and undercut all these meta-ethical debates entirely: he says that happiness is desirable simply because “people do actually desire it,” and that this fact is impossible to deny or refute.

By looking at previous philosophers’ work and reflecting on the role of ethics in human life, Mill identifies meta-ethical questions as fundamental and analytically prior to moral ones: before presenting his theory of what is good and bad, Mill first needs to make a convincing case for how good and bad should be decided. While most fields of thought begin with data and then derive principles from them, philosophy—like mathematics—begins with principles, creates a “general theory” out of them, and then applies this theory to “particular truths.” The first principles of mathematics are straightforward. But those of philosophy are far more difficult, since unlike the basic rules of numbers, they are not obvious to everyone. According to Mill, these first principles of philosophy specifically must come from reason, rather than instinct (although he leaves open the question about whether they come from purely abstract reason, or reasoning about experience). At the very beginning of his introduction, Mill recognizes this set of difficulties and attributes 2,000 years of disagreement among philosophers to it. He believes that they are looking too hard, and in the wrong places, for the foundation of ethical philosophy. The principles they come up with, which they believe to be first principles, are actually derivative second principles. In many cases, this is because they derive these principles from their moral instincts—which Mill thinks almost always agree with moral truths but are ultimately only second-order ways of getting there. For Mill, this problem—the confusion of first and second principles—applies not only to arcane academic philosophy, but also to “morals [and] legislation” (including government), which also require deriving rules from abstract, theoretical truths. If philosophers’ disagreements are largely about their meta-ethical failures, then politicians’ failures probably stem from the same issue. In other words, Mill thinks he can kill two birds with one stone, revolutionizing both ethics and politics simply by investigating where good and evil originate.

From a purely philosophical perspective, utilitarianism’s key innovation is its meta-ethics: Mill believes that he proves its moral principles in a different way than other theories prove theirs, and that this method reveals those other theories’ weaknesses. Utilitarianism presents the principle of maximizing happiness as its one and only first principle and sees all other ethical principles as second-degree corollaries or consequences of this. One argument for this conception is that any other imaginable moral principles will eventually, at some point, conflict—and the only way to decide between them is to choose the principle that, in that case, upholds the greater good. As a result, Mill shows that utilitarianism’s first principle is more fundamental than what other philosophies consider first principles. In the fourth chapter, when it comes to proving his central principle, Mill returns to the idea that there are two basic sources of knowledge that can be used to establish first principles: “our senses and our internal consciousness.” (While he believes ethics should come from the latter, reason, he thinks it is also possible to prove utilitarianism’s validity by reference to the former, instinct.) Mill determines that showing that happiness is the most important end, or desired goal, of action simply means proving that everyone does desire happiness (and nothing but it). He compares it to how “the only proof that a sound is audible is that people hear it”—he believes there is no other way of proving such claims, which are not based on any other more basic claims. It simply is the case that people want to be happy, and it is impossible to make sense of human behavior if one chooses to deny this fact. Mill notes in this chapter that he also has to prove that nothing else is inherently desirable like happiness. He makes a case for this claim by suggesting that happiness is a composite, which can be made of different parts in different contexts—but whenever anyone wants something, they want it either as a means to happiness, or because it is a part of happiness itself. Mill continues that, becuase “each person […] desires [their] own happiness,” therefore “the general happiness” is the prime value for ethics because it is “a good to the aggregate of all persons.” If ethics is supposed to direct people to behave in ways that are objectively or absolutely good, this means people should do what is good from the most objective or impartial perspective—which, for Mill, is that of “the aggregate of all persons.” Good and evil depend on the situation, not the doer.

Although Mill’s supposed proof of utilitarianism seems almost too simple to warrant serious consideration, its simplicity actually makes an important statement about the kind of claims that need to ground ethical thought. While most philosophers worry that it would look stupid or uncreative to make such a straightforward argument and therefore go to great lengths to invent moral principles and elaborate justifications for them, Mill thinks that it is far more honest and important for them to name their principal assumption—that happiness is good, the assumption on which all ethics must rest, and the principle at the center of utilitarianism—and then consciously base the rest of their doctrines on it.