Economic Justice and Liberty

The Social Philosophy in John Stuart Mill’s Utilitarianism

Huei-chun Su

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9780415692755
• eBook ISBN:
  9781135009885
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

This new book reopens the debate on theories of justice between utilitarian theorists and scholars from other camps. John Rawls' 1971 publication of A Theory of Justice put forward a devastating challenge to the long-established dominance of utilitarianism within political and moral philosophy, and until now no satisfactory and comprehensive utilitarian reply has yet been put forward.

By expounding John Stuart Mill's system of knowledge and by reconstructing his utilitarianism, Huei-chun Su offers a fresh and comprehensive analysis of Mill's moral philosophy and sheds new light on the reconciliation of Mill's idea of justice with both his utilitarianism and his theory of liberty. More than a study of Mill, this book uses a systematic framework to draw a comparison between Mill's theory of justice and those of John Rawls, Amartya Sen, and Friedrich von Hayek. It hence establishes common ground between different schools of thought in the fields of economics and philosophy, and enables more effective dialogue.

This book will be indispensable both to those interested in Mill's moral philosophy and to those seeking a solid theoretical basis for analyzing the idea of justice, as well as to anyone with an interest with the history of economics, economic philosophy and the history of economic thought more generally.

Part I

Scientific foundation of Mill’s philosophy

1 Epistemological and psychological foundations of Mill’s utilitarian moral philosophy

Before Mill, David Hume (1711–1776) had attempted to ground his moral theory on the science of the human mind. Both his A Treatise of Human Nature and An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding essentially provide the scientific foundation for his moral theory. Like Hume, Mill also builds his system of moral philosophy on the basis of moral sciences. It follows that a thorough understanding and full evaluation of Mill’s utilitarian moral theory requires a careful examination of the relationship between his moral theory and his theory of human beings. This chapter will investigate the scientific foundation of Mill’s moral philosophy.

Epistemology and utilitarian morality

The most effective approach to understanding the epistemological foundation of Mill’s moral theory is to contextualize his work by recognizing the intellectual landscape against which he defends the utilitarian moral philosophy. This approach is particularly helpful, given that the main opponents of utilitarianism in philosophy have shifted from the intuitionism school in the nineteenth and early-twentieth century to contractarianism, of which John Rawls is a representative, in the mid-twentieth century. In Utilitarianism, Mill argues against intuitionism and the a priori school at the most abstract level regarding the final judgement on moral questions and the origin of moral sentiments, which for him are the essentially epistemological issues.

Ethical intuitionism developed as a reaction to the Enlightenment in the eighteenth century, and reached its apogee in Britain in the nineteenth century. In Mill’s view, as a consequence of the reaction of the nineteenth century against the eighteenth, the apotheosis of Reason had been replaced by Instinct: ‘we call everything instinct which we find in ourselves and for which we cannot trace any rational foundation’ (Mill CW, XXI: 263). With the endorsement of important philosophers, such as Adam Sedgwick (1785–1873), William Hamilton (1788–1856), and William Whewell (1794–1866), ethical intuitionism had become the most influential approach to ethical theories in Mill’s time. Meanwhile, on the other side of the Channel, Kant’s moral theory also became noticeably influential. In spite of some important differences, these two schools echoed each other’s a priori view of morality, namely, human beings have a priori moral knowledge about what is right and wrong.

Strictly speaking, British intuitionists and German transcendentalists had different views about the origins of moral judgement. The former believed that human beings perceive moral properties through peculiar faculties called moral senses;¹ for the later, it is pure reason that tells us what is right and wrong. Nevertheless, both schools share a similar view of the objectivity of morality: moral properties of actions or states of affairs are objective knowledge, knowable prior to rather than learnt from experience.

Despite Mill’s criticisms of the intuitionist and Kantian moral theory, it is important to note that what distinguishes Mill’s moral theory from the other two is not the content of moral rules. In fact, they would have many shared views on which moral rules should be obeyed in practice. For instance, they all agree that it is a general moral rule that human beings ought to promote others’ happiness, and that keeping promises, not lying, and not stealing are proper moral rules. It is the origin of moral obligation and the first principle of morality that are the main divergences between the moral philosophy of Mill and those of the intuitionists and Kant.

Mill considers the lack of a first principle a serious problem inherent in ethical intuitionism. This problem, to borrow the distinction within intuitionism made by Bernard Williams, is one of the characteristics of ‘methodological intuitionism’, in contrast to ‘epistemological intuitionism’.² Indeed, Mill stresses this problem of the a priori moral theory in both the System of Logic and Utilitarianism. Nevertheless, it seems that for Mill ‘epistemological intuitionism’ will cause a far more serious problem than methodological intuitionism. In Mill’s view, the chance of appealing directly to a first principle is in fact very low because there is often agreement on various secondary ends among people, despite their differing in ultimate standards (Mill, CW, X: 110–111). In contrast, he considers the a priori view of morality as ‘an instrument devised for consecrating all deep-seated prejudices’, which had hindered the improvement of English society in the eighteenth century (Mill, CW, I: 233). As Ryan comments, the intuitionist view seems to Mill to be ‘a doctrine designed to foster conservatism, for it assured people that anything they believed deeply enough must be true’ (Ryan, 1974, p. 60).

Far from being a purely philosophical debate, the argument between intuitionism and the empiricism conducted by utilitarian philosophy is ‘full of practical consequences’ (Mill, CW, I: 233, 269; CW, X: 73). The practical consequences which deeply concerned Mill are the threats to the progress of the human mind which may result from the a priori view of moral judgements and moral feelings. If it were true that ‘man has a sense given him to determine what is right and wrong’, Mill worries, ‘his moral judgments and feelings cannot be susceptible of any improvement’ (Mill, CW, X: 73–74).

The barriers to progress in nineteenth-century England have to be traced to the epistemological foundation of the a priori view of morality:

The notion that truths external to the mind may be known by intuition or consciousness, independently of observation and experience, is, I am persuaded, in these times, the great intellectual support of false doctrines and bad institutions. By the aid of this theory, every inveterate belief and every intense feeling, of which the origin is not remembered, is enabled to dispense with the obligation of justifying itself by reason, and is erected into its own all-sufficient voucher and justification.

(Mill, CW, I: 233)

Moreover, Mill believes that ‘the chief strength of this false philosophy in morals, politics, and religion, lies in the appeal which it is accustomed to make to the evidence of mathematics and of the cognate branches of physical science’ (Mill, CW, I: 233). It follows that if he intends to expel the a priori view of knowledge from morals, he has first to deal with the epistemological foundation of mathematics and physical science. This idea of demolishing the a priori view of morality led Mill to his writing of the System of Logic, where he encounters intuitive philosophers on the epistemological ground.³

For Mill, epistemology is the starting-point of every consistent scheme of philosophy, including moral philosophy. It deals with two fundamental questions: ‘the sources of human knowledge’ and ‘the objects which the mind is capable of knowing’ (Mill, CW, X: 125). On the first issue, Mill believes that experience is the only material of knowledge: ‘All knowledge consists of generalizations from experience […] There is no knowledge a priori; no truths cognizable by the mind’s inward light’ (Mill, CW, X: 125). On the second issue, he believes that nothing can be the object of our knowledge ‘except our experience and what can be inferred from our experience by the analogies of experience itself’ (Mill, CW, X: 128–129).

It is Mill’s view that the sources of our knowledge in moral science and in natural science are the same. Although the subject matter is very different – one refers to human phenomena, the other to natural phenomena – sensation and the mind’s consciousness of its own acts are the sole materials of human knowledge (Mill, CW, X: 125). In other words, experience is the source of moral knowledge: a priori moral knowledge is impossible.

The psychological foundation of utilitarianism

Laws of mind

In Mill’s time, it was still debatable whether psychology was a science. It was once widely accepted that states of mind were merely the products of bodily processes: it would follow therefore that there is no science of psychology, only one of physiology. Mill disputes this view. He believes that observation and experiment have made it incontestable that some states of mind, instead of being the direct results of the body, are the results of other states of mind, and that there exist uniformities of succession among states of mind (Mill, CW, VIII: 851). Therefore, psychology is ‘a distinct and separate science of mind’, that studies the laws between these states of mind (Mill, CW, VIII: 851).

Mill confines the subject of psychology to the ‘uniformities of succession’, that is, the laws ‘according to which one mental state succeeds another, is caused by, or at least, is caused to follow, another’ (Mill, CW, VIII: 852). Of these laws, there are two most general ones. The first is:

whenever any state of consciousness has once been excited in us, no matter by what cause […] a state of consciousness resembling the former, but inferior in intensity, is capable of being reproduced in us, without the presence of any such cause as excited it at first.

(Mill, CW, VIII: 852)

In short, ‘every mental impression has its idea’, as Mill writes, using the language of Hume (Mill, CW, VIII: 852).

The second general law, which is particularly significant for our present discussion, is that ‘these ideas, or secondary mental states, are excited by our impressions, or by other ideas, according to certain laws which are called Laws of Association’ (Mill, CW, VIII: 852). Among them, Mill summarizes the three most elementary laws of ideas: first, ‘similar ideas tend to excite one another’; second, ‘when two impressions have been frequently experienced (or even thought of) either simultaneously or in immediate succession, then whenever one of these impressions, or the idea of it, recurs, it tends to excite the idea of the other’; third, ‘greater intensity in either or both of the impressions, is equivalent, in rendering them excitable by one another, to a greater frequency of conjunction’ (Mill, CW, VIII: 852). Further, he maintains that complex laws of thought and feeling must be generated from these simple or elementary laws of mind (Mill, CW, VIII: 853).

Mill’s psychology adopts most of his father’s views. In the psychological analyses of James Mill, the laws of the phenomena of mind are analogous to mechanical laws. But Mill claims that they are sometimes analogous to chemical laws: ‘When many impressions or ideas are operating in the mind together, there sometimes takes place a process of a similar kind to chemical combination’ (Mill, CW, VIII: 853). He uses an example to demonstrate the case of ‘mental chemistry’:

When impressions have been so often experienced in conjunction, that each of them calls up readily and instantaneously the ideas of the whole group, those ideas sometimes melt and coalesce into one another, and appear not several ideas, but one; in the same manner as, when the seven prismatic colours are presented to the eye in rapid succession, the sensation produced is that of white. But as in this last case it is correct to say that the seven colours when they rapidly follow one another generate white, but not that they actually are white; so it appears to me that the Complex Idea, formed by the blending together of several simpler ones, should, when it really appears simple, (that is, when the separate elements are not consciously distinguishable in it), be said to result from, or be generated by, the simple ideas, not to consist of them.

(Mill, CW, VIII: 853–854; emphases original)

Such a view of the formulation of complex ideas distinguishes Mill’s psychology from that of Bentham and James Mill and, as Wilson comments, gives him a powerful tool to explain the nature of moral sentiments and to support utilitarian moral theory (Wilson, 1998, pp. 215–216). Mill uses it to analyse moral feelings, which are not the result of any peculiar law of our nature but can be explained by the same laws on which all our other complex ideas and feelings depend.

The origin of moral sentiments

The issue of the origin of moral sentiments is different from that of the standard of moral obligation. These two questions, though closely connected, are distinct. The standard or test of moral obligation is about ‘what rule we ought to obey and why’; the origin of our moral sentiments is about ‘how our feelings of approbation and disapprobation actually originate’ (Mill, CW, X: 26; emphases original).⁴ The former is a matter of art; the latter, a matter of science. It is important to remember that the focus of this chapter is not the criterion of morality, which is a matter of norm, but the origin of moral sentiments, which is a matter of fact.

Mill’s moral theory is in the British empiricist tradition in the sense that, for him, ‘moral’ is a property which cannot be found in objects or by reason. Nevertheless, Mill’s views of moral sentiments is clearly different from that of his predecessors in this tradition. A brief discussion of Hume, Bentham and James Mill’s views on moral sentiment can help us in appreciating the distinctive features of Mill’s theory.

Hume has a significant place in the history of moral theory. In Book III of A Treatise of Human Nature and An Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals, he argues that morality is not an objective property existing in the object, but a subjective property existing in the human mind. This view has become a distinguishing mark of British empiricism. Hume seems to believe that the perception of moral qualities takes place through distinct faculties, namely, moral senses (Hume, 1975, Appendix I). Nevertheless, there is still an important distinction between Hume and the intuitionists. Despite believing that moral sentiments are excited by the particular structure and fabric of the human mind, Hume does not claim that the faculties of sentiments inform us of an objective moral property existing in the object we observe. Rather, the sentiments generated by human faculties are subjective feelings of approbation or disapprobation and it is these feelings that determine what moral qualities are. That is to say, morals originate in natural feelings. It has to be remembered that this does not mean that rightness or wrongness is simply determined by these subjective feelings. Rather, it suggests that ‘moral feelings are feelings of a special kind (a distinctive kind of pleasure and pain) which we entertain about certain characters, actions and states of affairs’ (Scarre, 1996, p. 58). In other words, moral judgement does not express objective reality existing outside the human mind, nor does it ascribe objective moral qualities to things. How moral standards are formed in relation to these natural feelings is another question.⁵

According to Mill’s reading, Bentham, unlike Hume, does not appreciate the existence of the feeling of moral approbation or disapprobation (Mill, CW, X: 95). While criticizing the theory of moral sense, natural right and conscience as a mere cover for dogmatism, Bentham did not offer metaphysical grounds for his own moral doctrine. Mill complains that this neglect of the foundations of moral doctrine in fact leaves plenty of space for those who are acquainted with the moral doctrines either of the Reid and Stewart school, or of the German metaphysicians, to easily answer Bentham’s critiques of the intuitionist view of moral sense. Mill worries that if the metaphysical explanation which Bentham can provide for the utilitarian doctrine is attributing the love of pleasures and the aversion of pains to ‘nature’, the a priori school of morality can likewise claim that our moral sentiments are ‘as much part of the original constitution of man’s nature as the desire of happiness and the fear of suffering’ (Mill, CW, X, pp. 5–6).

In contrast to Bentham, James Mill elaborates on the origin of moral distinctions and the formation of moral sentiments in his psychological analysis. In the notes Mill made for the new edition of his father’s Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind, he summarizes James Mill’s theory of moral sentiments as follows:

the foundation of the moral feeling is the adoption of the pleasures and pains of others as our own […] The moral feeling rests upon this identification of the feelings of others with our own, but is not the same thing with it. To constitute the moral feeling, not only must the good of others have become in itself a pleasure to us, and their suffering a pain, but this pleasure or pain must be associated with our own acts as producing it, and must in this manner have become a motive, prompting us to the one sort of acts, and res...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• A note on texts and references
• Introduction
• PART I Scientific foundation of Mill’s philosophy utilitarian moral philosophy
• PART II Utilitarianism and theory of justice
• PART III Dialogues – justice and liberty in focus
• Conclusions: prospect – the continuing relevance of Mill’s utilitarianism today
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index