This content explores two major objections to Jeremy Bentham's utilitarianism: the failure to respect individual rights and the difficulty of commensurating all values into a single measure. It then introduces John Stuart Mill's attempts to address these objections by distinguishing between higher and lower pleasures and prioritizing justice based on social utility.
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[Applause] last
last
time last time we began to consider some
objections to Jeremy bentham's version of
utilitarianism people raised two
had the
first was the objection the claim that you
you
utilitarianism by concerning itself with
the greatest good for the greatest
number fails adequately to respect individual
individual
rights today we have
terrorism
suppose a suspected terrorist was
apprehended on September
10th and you had reason to believe
that the
suspect had crucial information about an
impending terrorist attack that would
kill over 3,000 people and you couldn't
extract the
information would it be just to
torture the suspect to get the information
information
or do you say
no there is a categorical moral duty of
respect for individual rights
in a way we're back to the questions we
started with about trolley cars and
issue and you remember we considered
some examples of cost benefit analysis
but a lot of people were unhappy with
cost benefit
analysis when it came to placing a
life and so that led us to the second objection
objection
it questioned whether it's possible to
translate all values into a single
uniform measure of
value it asks in other words whether all
values are
commensurable let me give you one other
example of an experience this actually
is a true story it comes from personal
experience that raises a question at
least about whether all values can be
terms some years
ago when I was a graduate student I was
at Oxford in England and the men they
had men's and women's colleges they
weren't yet mixed and the women's
colleges had rules against overnight male
guests by the 1970s these rules were
rarely enforced and easily violated
told by the late 1970s when I was there
pressure grew to relax these rules and
it became the subject of debate Among
The Faculty at St an's College which was
one of these all women's colleges the
older women on the faculty were
traditionalists they were opposed to
change on conventional moral grounds but
times had changed and they were
embarrassed to give the true grounds for
their objection and so they translated
their arguments into utilitarian
terms if men stay overnight they argued
the costs to the college will
increase how you might wonder well
they'll want to take baths and that'll
use up hot water they
said furthermore they argued we'll have
often the reformers met these arguments
by adopting the following compromise
each woman could have a maximum of three
week they didn't say whether it had to
be the same one or three
different provided and this was the
Compromise provided the guest paid 50 P
to defray the cost to the
college the next day the national
headline in the National newspaper read
night another illustration of the
difficulty of translating all values in
this case a certain idea of virtue into utilitarian
utilitarian
terms so so that's all to
illustrate the second objection to
utilitarianism at least the part of that
objection that questions whether
utilitarianism is right to assume that
we can assume the uniformity of value
the commensurability of all values and
translate all moral
considerations into dollars or
money but there is a second aspect to
this worry about aggregating values and
preferences why should
we weigh all
preferences that people have without
assessing whether they're good
preferences or bad
preferences shouldn't we
distinguish between higher pleasures and
lower Pleasures now part of the appeal
appeal of not making any qualitative
distinctions about the worth of people's
preferences part of the
appeal is that it is non-judgmental and
egalitarian the benthamite utilitarian
says everybody's preferences count and
they count regardless of what people
want regardless of what makes different
people happy for benam all that matters
you'll remember
are the intensity and the duration of a
pleasure or pain the so-called higher
Pleasures or nobler virtues are simply
those according to Bentham that produce
stronger longer
pleasure he had a famous phrase to
express this idea the quantity of
pleasure being equal push pin is as good as
as
poetry what was
pushpin it was some kind of a child's
game like Tiddly Wings push pin is as
good as poetry benam says and lying
behind this idea I think is the claim
the intuition that it's a presumption to
judge whose Pleasures are intrinsically
higher or worthier or
better and there is something attractive
in this refusal to judge after all some
people like Mozart others Madonna some
people like ballet others bowling who's
to say a benthamite might argue who's to
say which of these Pleasures whose
Pleasures are higher worthier nobler than
than
right this refusal to make qualitative
distinctions can we altogether dispense
with the
idea that certain things we take
pleasure in
are better or worthier than
others think back to the case of the
Romans in the Coliseum one thing that
troubled people about that practice is
that it seemed to violate the rights of the
the
Christian another way of objecting to
what's going on there is that the
pleasure that the Romans take in this
bloody spectacle
should that pleasure which is a base
kind of
corrupt degrading pleasure should that
even be valorized or weighed in deciding
is so here are the objections to bentham's
bentham's
utilitarianism and now we turn to
someone who tried to respond to those
objections a later day utilitarian John Stewart
Stewart
Mill so what we need
to examine now is whether John Stewart
Mill had a convincing reply to these
utilitarianism John Stewart Mill was
born in 1806 his father James
Mill was a disciple of
benams and James Mill said about giving
his son John Stewart Mill a model
education he was a child prodigy John
Stewart Mill he knew Latin at the age of
sorry Greek at the age of three Latin at
law at age 20 he had a nervous
breakdown this left him in a depression
for five years
but at age 25 what helped lift him out
of this depression is that he met Harriet
Harriet
Taylor she and Mill got married they
lived happily ever after and it was
under her
influence that John Stewart Mill tried to
to humanize
humanize
utilitarianism what Mill tried to do was
to see whether the utilitarian calculus
could be enlarged and
modified to accommodate
humanitarian concerns
like the concern to respect individual
rights and also to address the
distinction between higher and lower
Pleasures in 1859 Mill wrote a famous
book on Liberty the main point of which
was the importance of Defending
individual rights and minority rights
and in
1861 toward the end of his life he wrote
the book we read as part of this course
utilitarianism he makes it clear that
utility is the only standard of Morality
In His view so he's not challenging
bentham's premise he's affirming it he
says very explicitly the sole evidence
it is possible to produce that anything
is desirable is that people actually do
desire it so he stays with the idea that
our de facto actual empirical desires
are the only basis
for moral
judgment but
then page8 also in Chapter 2 he argues
that it is possible for a utilitarian to
distinguish higher from lower
Pleasures now those of you who have read
Mill already how according to him is it
possible to draw that distinction how
can a
utilitarian distinguish qualitatively
higher pleasure
from lesser ones base ones unworthy
ones yes if you've tried both of them
and you'll prefer the Higher One naturally
naturally
always that's that's great that's right
what's your name John so as John points
out Mill says here's the
test since we can't step
outside actual desires actual
preferences that would violate
utilitarian premises the only
test of whether a pleasure is higher or
lower is whether someone who has experienced
experienced
both would prefer it and here in Chapter
2 we see the passage where Mill makes
the point that John just
described of two Pleasures if there be
one to which all or almost all who have experience
