mill secondary Flashcards
3 main doubts of mill’s audience re. utilitarianism
o 3 main doubts about the opposition of secular Util to traditional Xianity
♣ too much emphasis on outcome
♣ utility undermines duty – how does pleasure obstruct duty?
Greatest happiness = at odds with morality/too indeterminate
alan ryan - mill criticism of religious ethics
o ‘Mill’s objections to theological and intuitive accounts of ethics…did not change during his entire intellectual life. The brand of Christian ethics which most outraged him was that which made the will of God the source of the rightness of an action as well as the motive for performing it’ (97) o moral values must be independent to God’s command since otherwise we would not obey God out of gratitude o viewed religious values as affected by class interest – he saw ‘what were commonly passed off as the precepts of the Christian faith...(as) the prejudices of the nineteenth-century Anglican church’ (98)
alan ryan - mill criticism of intuitionism
- highly critical of intuitionism due to viewing it as arising from a conservative doctrine
o this can be seen in Liberty where he ‘claims that the likely consequence of intuitionist ethics is the tyranny of the majority conscience’ (100)
alan ryan - utility as the first Principle
- facts ground imperatives – some imperatives are more valuable than others
- ‘the principle of utility is supposed to serve as the first principle not just of morality but also of the rest of the art of life’ (104)
- Util opens with critique of institutionalist’s neglecting of first principles – need a goal to an ethical theory. Cannot know if we are right or wrong if we have nothing to test our decisions against
- ‘so strong is Mill’s assumption that the appeal to one ultimate principle is the hallmark of rationality that he says that all intuitionists worthy of the name of thinkers agree with him, but simply cannot produce the ultimate rule they require. Either they do not try, or when, like Kant, they do, they cannot derive anything from it’ (107)
alan ryan - impartiality
- impartiality is key and it is in this context that Mill ‘makes his celebrated claim that the Christian ethic is a utilitarian one’ (113)
alan ryan - intention vs. motive
o intention – what a man ‘wills to do’
o motive – the feeling that makes him ‘will to do’
o ‘motives thus form an important aspect of our assessment of personal worth, though no part of our assessment of the morality of particular actions’ (113)
alan ryan - logical, moral, psychological
- ‘In Utilitarianism, psychology swallows up both the logical problem of what it means to say that a man has an obligation, the moral question of what constitutes the grounds of obligation, and the psychological question of what makes people do what they feel they ought to do’ (115)
alan ryan - conscience
- utility possesses the sanctions of ‘the external power of public opinion or the fear of God, and the internal power of the conscience’ (115)
- Mill offers an ‘associationist theory of conscience’ (115)
o Starts with society where we respect others happiness to a state where others’ pain = painful to contemplate
o ‘this picture of internalisation is a twentieth-century stand-by in several disciplines’ (115)
alan ryan - questions about principle of utility
o how are maximalising principles like utility related to distributive principles about shares of happiness etc.
o are there any moral non-util principles that are at odd with util e.g. Kantian no means to end
o e.g. should we punish an innocent man for general welfare?
♣ Distributive question
♣ Related to institution like punishment
alan ryan - questions about justice
o 2 main problems
♣ accounting for rules
♣ obligation to follow rules not impulse
o difference between what is right and having a right
o justice = rights and duties
alan ryan - advantages of christianity and Comte
- ‘Mill agreed that it was one of the advantages of Christianity and other forms of Theism that they presented a concrete object to whom we feel such an attachment’ (234)
o parallels Comte
o ‘Come has Mill’s complete sympathy when he claims that, since the existence of a supreme providence is unprovable one way or the other, the greatest service we can do to anything which might be called God is to do our duty by the human race’ (234)
o although did not go as far as Comte in viewing all ritual as not useful and argues against C’s emphasis on the motive of an action as determining its rightness
berger - problem of instrumental aspect to virtue
- problem: if virtue is a means of happiness then he falls short of being truly virtuous. Instrumental value
o pleasure is not only thing of value therefore
o pleasure is valuable insofar as it leads to happiness
o concept of higher/lower pleasures suggests that some pleasures are more valuable for happiness
berger - elaboration of conception of happiness
o look at higher being requiring more to make him happy
o happiness includes ‘whatever is necessary to maintain human dignity’ (40)
o links happiness to justice
o can be separated into 2 categories
♣ requirements for an individual’s sense of being
things which provide a sense of security
skorupski - religion in mill
- ‘religion is absent from his philosophy, in the sense that working out a metaphysics in which God and immortality have a fundamental place is simply not something he needs to do. But it is not absent as a meaning-giving human belief and…as a way of life’ (11)
skorupski - theism
- discusses theism from perspective of natural reason – see examination of God’s existence etc. in Theism
o dismisses omnipotent God
o but wants religious hope in this belief
o ‘this striking conclusion has made some people think that Mill had a wistful desire to believe after all. That is a misconception. He simply provides an assessment of the very best that can be said for religion, in the spirit of a fair-minded but detached philosopher’s review’ (13)
