BOOKS.
MR. J. S. MILL ON UTILITARIANISM.*
WHEN the substance of this thoughtful essay was first published a year ago in Fraser's Magazine, we had occasion to make some comments on the philosophical controversy which is discussed in it before the whole of Mr. Mill's argument was before us. It is not, perhaps, very surprising that a careful study of that argument, even though it has been elaborated by the most deservedly eminent of living philosophers,e has not altered our persuasion that the utilitarian principle is not, in fact. the basis of human ethics ; indeed, the principles once deli- berately formed on these ultimate questions of mental philo- sophy, are even seldomer changed in mature life than the princi- ples of faith itself. But the perusal of this essay will do much to clear up for modem students the critical points of the problem, since Mr. Mill does all for the utilitarian doctrine which a com- prehensive view of moral phenomena, a subtle analysis, and a thoroughly practical wisdom can effect.
The first great break-down, as we conceive it, of the utilitarian explanation of the actual phenomena of the human conscience, is that it either seeks by a violent logic to reduce our sense of obligation within the false and narrow circle of selfish pleasure, or, if set free from that transparently false position by the more comprehensive definition of such a writer as Mr. J. S. Mill, sacrifices it at the cost of interpolating an imperfect conscience to mobilize the hopelessly lame and stiff movements of the funda- mental principle. The apparent advantage of saying that the rule of duty is the promotion of happiness consists in this, that, as Mr. Mill says in one place, "there is in reality nothing desired except happiness." "Whatever is desired otherwise than as a means to some end beyond itself, and ultimately to happiness, is desired as itself a part of happiness, and is not desired for itself until it has become so." Now this, if it were true, would, no doubt, be philosophically very convenient, as it identifies the principal ground of moral obligation with the principle of all human action, and only leaves the philosopher the task of clearing up by intellectual processes the considera- tions which tend to show how the greatest amount of this universal desideratum may, in fact, be best attained. In other words, ethics would then introduce no new ground of action at all, but only new trains of thought tending to disperse delusions concerning imaginary mines of happiness, and to discover new mines. The utilitarian moralist would then say to a man pondering a theft, for example, whether you thieve this loaf or not, you will equally act from a desire for happiness, —but, if you do not steal it, you will show a wider knowledge of the consequences of your act than if you do.' l'his is coherent, though we believe it to involve a false explanation of moral facts. But it is obviously too narrow and false for a thinker so wide as Mr. Mill, and he bursts through it with a much higher and more disinterested principle, which we find, however, very vari- ously stated in different pages of his essay. In one place it stands thus :—" As between a man's own happiness and that of others, utilitarianism requires him to be as strictly impartial as a disinterested and benevolent spectator." Requires But why ? Surely all the advantage of merging the principle of ethics in the universal principle of all human action is here lost sight of. It is now no longer even plausible to say that a man may be made to do right by merely opening his eyes. If he can be made to see that a grain more happiness will accrue to the world by his sacrificing say a pound sterling, than would accrue to himself by keeping it, utilitarianism " requires " him, says Mr. Mill, to sacrifice his pound. But though "requiring" him, it no more furnishes him with the assumed universal motive for so doing, —the conviction that his own happiness demands it,—than a distinct moral faculty would do. If A asks why he is to value B's happiness as much as his own, when, in fact, he does not do so ; Mr. Mill can only answer with the empty "categorical im- perative" which he deprecates, "you ought." That is, he demands a dictate of unresolved conscience after all to bridge over the chasm from self-interest to human interest, — from " mine " to "yours,"—from Paley to Bentharn. It is true that in another place he evades the verbal difficulty by putting the principle thus : " that equal amounts of happiness are equally desirable, whether felt by the same, or by different per- sons." But this is only an impersonal way of putting it. Does he mean that the intending thief would think it equally desirable that his hunger should be satisfied, as that somebody else's should be?
• Uttlitarioninn. By John Stuart Mill. Parker, Son, and Bourn, 1808. Or only that the impartial spectator would think so ? If the former, the intending thief would probably solve the difficulty in a very summary fashion by a solemn deposition that he considered his own stomach's needs by far more important than any one else's. If the latter, Mr. Mill may be quite right ; but then, why is a man to estimate his own happiness just as the impartial spectator would estimate it for him ? If you can persuade him that the risht action is the one most desirable for him, you effect something ; but if only that it is the most desirable for an impartial philanthropist who feels no more for him than for any one else, you have yet to span the whole enormous gulf between interested and disinterested motives,—aud to supplement your happiness principle by at least thus much of arbitrary con- science, which the natural man rejects,—viz., "I ought to be ready to surrender the only happiness which is important to me for happiness which is not important to me, but is important to some other man." Hence, we maintain that Mr. Mill's fully con- scious, and Bentham's half-conscious, disinterested utilitarianism is not a mere intellectual modification of what some believe to be the actual and only motive of human action, the pursuit of our own happiues.s, but superinduces upon it an entirely new prin- ciple of disinterested obligation, which as much implies a special moral faculty as any other system of ethical teaching.
Mr. Mill appears partly aware of this difficulty, and proposes to avoid it by saying that happiness is of various kinds, and that though A's regard for his own happiness is not of the same kind as A's regard for B's, yet that the latter is of so much higher and purer a kind that he may be taught to prefer it. The intending thief can scarcely be told that it is as desirable to him that he should remain hungry as that any one else should ; but he may be taught that there is a higher kind of pleasure which will be given by his self-denial, and denied him if be steals his loaf; and that the latter will prove, if once lie makes experience of it, the more important desire of the two, even to him. If asked how he is to tell a higher from a lower pleasure, Mr. Mill merely answers that nothing but the experience of the majority of those who have tested both can really decide. It is like, he seems to say, the verdict of musical ears on the question of sounds. Certain com- binations are pronounced by all experienced ears a discord, certain others a harmony. So, also, certain comparisons between different pleasures result in a consensus of preference on the part of those who have tested them all, which must be the rule for those who have not. Well, but is not this principle, if admitted, a new and very remarkable break-down of the utilitarian principle ? It establishes a scale of pleasurable emotions, and asserts that a very little of one, will, in fact, be more than equivalent to much of another, to those who have tested them all. But it gives you no reason why you should or ought to test them all. If a non- musician declineseven to learn music so as to test this pleasure, you may possibly think him narrow-minded, but no one would think him wicked. Heis denying himself a possible pleasure; and that is all. But if Mr. Mill wishes to evade the awkward fragment of conscience we have detected in his doctrine, by appealing to the ex- perience of the quality of pleasures,—he must either substitute the still more anomalous maxim that everybody is bound to do his best to test the asserted pleasures of other people, or admit that there is no more neglect of duty in sticking to the safe selfish sort of pleasures, than in declining to study the flute or the delicate delights of poetical insight, or any other of the higher esthetic pleasures. If we are to have the virtue of disinterested- ness founded on its high aesthetic character, it must rank with the other artistic excellences ;—there will be no difference in kind between a man who neglects to look into it and a man who neglects to study Mozart, or Raphael, or Shakes- peare. Now, whether Mr. Mill asserts that A is bound to desire B's happiness as much as his own, — or that A is bound to make experiment of B's asserted pleasures till he can make a complete scale for himself, — we have in either case an arbitrary equivalent for a conscience which has all its theoretical disadvantages and none of its advantages. And if Mr. Mill denies both propositions, and merely states that in mat- ter of fact every one who has experienced the higher pleasures will prefer them ; he gets no moral leverage at all which is not equally at the command of a mere esthetic artist as such.
It is of course much easier to criticize a false theory than to substitute a true one. But such a task can scarcely be expected from a mere reviewer. However, we may say in conclusion, that the fundamental error of the utilitarian theory appears to us to consist in trying to set up an aristocracy of human motives and desires, not by and for themselves, but by virtue of the purely accidental phenomenon which attends their satisfaction, —pleasure. They exist and impel the mind before they can be satisfied at all, and therefore before any pleasure arises by which they can be measured. The utilitarian theory asserts that every desire is, to use the old phraseology, a mere sense of uneasiness combined with "the idea of a pleasure" to be derived from its gratification,—and hence that all action proceeds from antici- pation of some pleasure, or some loss of pain from that action. This theory seems to us wholly incorrect. That there is such a thing, of course, as acting for the sake of the pleasure derived from action, every one admits. But Bishop Butler long ago pointed out that this covers but a small class of self-conscious actions, that a much larger number do not anticipate any pleasurable or otherwise self-conscious result at all, but are acts springing from motives or impulses that are in no sense prospective. Sincerity, for instance, of the highest kind, is merely the result of a self-dis- covering movement of the whole nature without anticipation of results. But if this be so, the active principles of human nature, the appetites, sentiments, and the rest, may be ranged one above the other, in a rank which depends not on the mere pleasure incidental to their satisfaction,—but on their intrinsic worth at their root, so to say, in human character; and the test of this intrinsic worth may be the relative degree in which each of such principles is capable of re- flecting the Divine perfection itself. If there be a perfect character in close spiritual contact with our own, it is surely rather more natural to make that the standard by which the relative worth of our motives is determined, than to resort to the artificial expedient of classifying them by the kinds of pleasure in which they blossom ; whereas many of them are mere seeds, the rudest possible germs of life that have never come near to blossoming in pleasures at all. And even for philosophers who would deny this spiritual fact, but yet insist on a classifica- tion of qualitative pleasures, it would be not only quite as valid, but, as it seems to us, a much more valid process, to classify the original springs of desire and motive at once, than the pleasures in which they issue. If all pleasures be not alike, and there be a hierarchy of pleasures, there is clearly no advantage, but even a misleading idea, in the common term "pleasure." And it is always more philosophical, when it is possible at all, to classify in the root, so to speak, than to lose sight of your classifying charac- teristics in the confusion and complexity of the branches and leaves.
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