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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 May 2013
Recent attempts to defend Mill's account of higher and lower pleasures have overlooked a critical flaw in Mill's argument. Mill considers the question of pleasure and preference as an empirical one, but the evidence he appeals to is inconclusive. Yet, this distinction plays an essential role in Mill's utilitarianism because Mill uses this evidence to support his argument that most people actually prefer pleasures resulting from higher faculties over pleasures resulting from lower faculties. If this proves to be insufficient, then Mill's claim that these pleasures are clearly of a higher quality than others is left unsubstantiated. This article highlights the problematic nature of Mill's evidence, thereby exposing a significant problem for his, and for any utilitarian system which assumes Mill's distinction without providing additional argumentation for it.
1 Mill, J. S., Utilitarianism, ed. Sher, George (Indianapolis, 1979)Google Scholar, §II.6. All references to Mill are cited by chapter and paragraph number.
2 Three examples of this can be seen in Riley, Jonathan, ‘Interpreting Mill's Qualitative Hedonism’, The Philosophical Quarterly 53 (2003), pp. 410–18CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Brink, David, ‘Mill's Deliberative Utilitarianism’, Philosophy and Public Affairs 21 (1992), pp. 67–103Google Scholar; and Long, Roderick, ‘Mill's Higher Pleasures and the Choice of Character’, Utilitas 4 (1992), pp. 279–97CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
3 For argumentation proposing a rejection of the assumed discontinuity between quality and quantity, see Ryberg, Jesper, ‘Higher and Lower Pleasures – Doubts on Justification’, Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 5 (2002), pp. 415–29CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
4 For two conflicting interpretations of Mill's account of higher and lower pleasures, see Riley, ‘Interpreting Mill's Qualitative Hedonism’, and Schmidt-Petri, Christoph, ‘Mill on Quality and Quantity’, The Philosophical Quarterly 53 (2003), pp. 102–4CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
5 Mill, Utilitarianism, §II.5.
6 Mill, Utilitarianism, §II.5.
7 Mill, Utilitarianism, §II.5.
8 Mill, Utilitarianism, §II.6.
9 Mill, Utilitarianism, §II.5.
10 Anderson, Elizabeth, ‘Mill and Experiments in Living’, Ethics 102 (1991), pp. 4–26CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 9.
11 Anderson, ‘Mill and Experiments in Living’, p. 9.
12 Anderson, ‘Mill and Experiments in Living’, p. 9.
13 Anderson, ‘Mill and Experiments in Living’, p. 9.
14 Anderson, ‘Mill and Experiments in Living’, p. 10.
15 Anderson suggests that this judgement rests on a ‘nonhedonic value judgment’ in which ‘people experienced with both rank the pleasures of certain faculties higher than the pleasures of others because they judge the former to be more dignified’ (‘Mill and Experiments in Living’, p. 11). Anderson follows this with a well-argued defence of the use of ‘nonhedonic value judgments’.
16 Mill, Utilitarianism, §II.5.
17 Mill, Utilitarianism, §II.6.
18 Schmidt-Petri, ‘Mill on Quality and Quantity’, p. 102.
19 Mill, Utilitarianism, §II.6.
20 As Anderson points out, it also seems likely that most of us would be unwilling to give up a life of reading books and eating chocolate for a completely pleasurable life of just reading. While this fact should give us pause, it is certainly possible that Mill himself believed that people would be willing to do so.
21 There is a movement among the deaf community to define deafness and sign-language as a part of stand-alone culture that could be seen as preferable. Mill would reject this claim on the basis that the movement fails to fulfil the first requirement of his ‘test’ – that only people who ‘have experience of both’ are capable of determining which is preferable.
22 Schmidt-Petri, ‘Mill on Quality and Quantity’, p. 103.
23 Mill, Utilitarianism, §II.8.
24 See Schmidt-Petri, ‘Mill on Quality and Quantity’, pp. 102–4, for the example involving two bottles of wine and Schmidt-Petri, , ‘On an Interpretation of Mill's Qualitative Utilitarianism’, Prolegomena 5 (2006), pp. 165–71Google Scholar, for the example involving Toyotas and Hyundais.
25 Riley, ‘Interpreting Mill's Qualitative Hedonism’, pp. 410–11.
26 For more on this subject, see the dispute between Jonathan Riley and Christoph Schmidt-Petri as laid out in Riley, ‘Interpreting Mill's Qualitative Hedonism’, and Schmidt-Petri, ‘Mill on Quality and Quantity’. The differences between each position are further explored in Schmidt-Petri's, response, ‘On an Interpretation of Mill's Qualitative Utilitarianism’, Prolegomena 5 (2006), pp. 165–71Google Scholar, and Riley, , ‘What are Millian Qualitative Superiorities?’, Prolegomena 7 (2008), pp. 61–79Google Scholar. A more extensive account of Riley's interpretation of Mill and his evidence for it can be found in ‘Millian Qualitative Superiorities and Utilitarianism, Part I’, Utilitas 20 (2008), pp. 257–78, and ‘Millian Qualitative Superiorities and Utilitarianism, Part II’, Utilitas 21 (2009), pp. 127–43.
27 See Riley, ‘Millian Qualitative Superiorities and Utilitarianism, Part I’.
28 Riley coins the term ‘infinite superiority’ to express this difference. For Riley's complete account, see both ‘Millian Qualitative Superiorities and Utilitarianism, Part I’ and ‘Millian Qualitative Superiorities and Utilitarianism, Part II’.
29 For an interesting study suggesting an inverse relationship between perceptions of social inequality and a person's own sense of well-being, see Napier, Jennifer L. and Jost, John T., ‘Why Are Conservatives Happier than Liberals?’, Psychological Science 19 (2008), pp. 565–72CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.
30 Mill, Utilitarianism, §II.6.
31 Mill, Utilitarianism, §II.5.
32 Mill, Utilitarianism, §II.5.
33 Thanks to Geoff Gorham, Mark Newman and Brad Hooker for providing useful comments on this article.
