Mill, hedonism and higher pleasures: VCE Philosophy

What this dot point is asking

The previous study design asked you to explain hedonism as a theory of well-being and the good life, distinguish Bentham's quantitative version from Mill's qualitative version, set out the higher and lower pleasures distinction and the competent judges test, and evaluate whether Mill's move rescues hedonism or quietly abandons it. The top response reconstructs the competent judges argument, names the consistency objection precisely, and reaches a defensible verdict.

Hedonism and quantitative utilitarianism

Hedonism about well-being holds that the only thing good for a person in itself is pleasure and the only thing bad in itself is pain. The good life is the one with the greatest net balance of pleasure over pain. Jeremy Bentham gives the classic quantitative version: pleasures are assessed only by measurable quantities such as intensity, duration, certainty and extent. On Bentham's view no kind of pleasure is intrinsically better than another; the pleasure of a simple game counts equally with that of poetry if the quantities are equal.

Mill's qualitative turn

John Stuart Mill, in Utilitarianism, accepts that happiness is the only thing desirable as an end but rejects Bentham's purely quantitative measure. He argues that pleasures differ in quality as well as quantity, and that pleasures of the higher faculties (intellect, imagination, aesthetic appreciation, moral sentiment) are intrinsically more valuable than the bodily or sensual pleasures we share with animals.

Mill's test for quality is the verdict of competent judges:

1. If, of two pleasures, all or almost all who have experienced both place a decided preference on one, irrespective of any feeling of moral obligation, then that pleasure is the more valuable.
2. Competent judges, those acquainted with both higher and lower pleasures, decidedly prefer the higher pleasures even at the cost of greater discontent.
3. Therefore the higher pleasures are more valuable, and a life rich in them is better than one of greater quantities of lower pleasure.

This grounds his famous claim that it is better to be a dissatisfied human than a satisfied pig, and a dissatisfied Socrates than a satisfied fool, because the human and Socrates know both sides of the question while the pig and the fool know only their own side.

Why Mill makes the move

Mill is responding to the objection that utilitarianism is a doctrine fit only for swine, reducing the good life to animal contentment. By ranking pleasures qualitatively he can say that a life of pushpin is not as good as a life of poetry even if the felt quantities of pleasure are equal, which fits the strong intuition that a life of mindless gratification is not the best life for a human being.

Evaluation

Mill's distinction has real appeal. It accommodates the intuition that some pursuits make for a richer life, and it lets hedonism resist the charge that it cannot tell the difference between a contented fool and a fulfilled person. The competent judges test is also an attractively naturalistic way of fixing value, appealing to informed preference rather than to a mysterious objective standard.

But the central objection is the consistency charge. If pleasures are ranked purely by how much pleasure they contain, then the only thing that can make one more valuable is its greater quantity, and quality reduces to quantity. But if higher pleasures are more valuable even when they yield less pleasure (as the dissatisfied Socrates case requires), then their value comes from something other than pleasure, perhaps from exercising distinctively human capacities. In that case Mill has abandoned hedonism: he is now valuing the exercise of higher faculties for its own sake, not merely as a source of pleasure. Either the quality distinction collapses into quantity, or it ceases to be hedonism.

A second objection is the experience-machine worry (Robert Nozick): if only felt pleasure mattered, we should plug into a machine that guarantees maximal pleasant experience, yet most of us would refuse, suggesting that things beyond pleasure (real achievement, genuine contact with reality) matter to a good life. This tells against hedonism generally, including Mill's version.

Judgement: Mill's qualitative distinction is psychologically perceptive and improves on Bentham by honouring the intuition that some lives are richer than others. But it sits in tension with the hedonist core of his theory: the competent judges seem to be tracking the value of certain activities and capacities, not just quantities of pleasure. The honest reading is that Mill points beyond hedonism toward an Aristotelian or objective-list view of the good life, even as he tries to remain a hedonist. The distinction is true to our values but costs Mill his hedonism.