John Stuart Mill

(1806-1873)
Brief Biography
• Born in London.
• Eldest son of the nine children of
James Mill. Bentham’s godson.
• His father began teaching John Greek
and arithmetic at age 3.
• At age 6 ½, he wrote a history of
Rome, complete with footnotes.
• Although he never attended a university,
it is said that when he was 13 years old
he was better educated than any
university graduate of the time.
• British philosopher, political economist,
and civil servant.
• Mill died in 1873 of erysipelas
in Avignon, France, where his body was
buried alongside his wife's.
 Principle of Utility:
Actions are right in proportion as they
tend to promote happiness, wrong as
they tend to produce the reverse of
happiness. By happiness is intended
pleasure, and the absence of pain; by
unhappiness, pain, and the privation of
pleasure.
Utilitarianism, Chapter II
 Tried to reform utilitarianism
so that quality, not just
quantity, matters, when
evaluating utility.
 One of the classic criticisms of
utilitarianism is that it is the
ethics of swine.
“It is better to be a human being
dissatisfied than a pig satisfied;
better to be Socrates dissatisfied than
a fool satisfied”.
 Higher and lower pleasures
 This is the principle that after basic
human requirements were fulfilled a
person’s primary moral concern
should be to seek the highest
pleasures in life.
 John Stuart Mill believed the
highest pleasures that we should
all seek were things that benefited
you morally such as going to the
opera and music and lower
pleasures are things like drinking
and sex.
 Human beings have faculties
much more elevated than
swine, and require different
types of gratification of the
higher faculties in order to be
happy.
 Mill believed that the problem with
society was that people weren't
educated in the higher
pleasures of life and in order to
improve society we should
educate the lower classes in how
to seek the higher pleasures.
 Synthesis of utility and human
rights
Why rights? He believed the effort to
achieve utility was unjustified if it
coerced people into doing things they
did not want to do. Likewise, the
appeal to science as the arbiter of
truth would prove just as futile, he
believed, if it did not temper facts with
compassion.
 “Human nature is not a machine to
be built after a model, and set to do
exactly the work prescribed for it,
but a tree, which requires to grow
and develop itself on all sides,
according to the tendency of the
inward forces which make it a living
thing”.
 Mill was interested in
humanizing Bentham’s system
by ensuring that everyone’s
rights were protected,
particularly the minority’s, not
because rights were God given
but because that was the most
direct path to truth.
 Justice and Moral Rights
Mill understands justice as a respect
for rights directed toward society’s
pursuit for the greatest happiness of
the greatest number.
A right is justifiable on utilitarian
principles inasmuch as they produce
an overall happiness that is greater
than the unhappiness resulting from
their implementation.
 Harm Principle
“The only purpose for which power
can be rightfully exercised over any
member of a civilized community,
against his will, is to prevent harm
to others. His own good, either
physical or moral, is not a sufficient
warrant.”
 If you believe in the harm
principle you as the majority
would only get involved in
ethical decision if the well
being of many was at risk.
Limitations

1. There has never been a

satisfactory definition of “harm,”
and what one person finds
harmful another may find
beneficial.
 For Mill, harm was defined as the
set back of one’s interests. Thus,
harm was defined relative to an
individual’s interests.
 What role, if any, should society
play in defining what is harmful or in
determining who is harmed by
someone’s actions?
 For instance, is society culpable for
not intervening in cases of suicide,
euthanasia, and other self-
destructive activities such as drug
addiction?
2. It makes no provision for
emotional or cognitive harm.
 If the harm is not measurable in
physical terms, then it lacks
significance.
For example, if a reckless driver today
irresponsibly exceeds the speed limit,
crashes into a concrete abutment, and kills
himself while totaling his vehicle (which he
owns), utilitarianism would hold that in the
absence of physical harm to others, no one
suffers except the driver. We may not arrive
at the same conclusion. Instead, we might
hold that the driver’s survivors and friends,
along with society as a whole, have suffered
a loss. Arguably, all of us are diminished by
the recklessness of his act.
Evaluation of Utilitarianism

Advantages:
1. Utilitarianism is good as it
takes in to account the
consequences of an action. While
motives may be good or bad,
only consequences have a real
effect on human well-being.
2. It is reasonable to link morality
with the pursuit of happiness and the
avoidance of pain and misery.
3. It is an application which does not
rely on any conventional or unverifiable
theological or metaphysical claims or
principles. It asks us to consider no
more than the greatest good for the
greatest number.
4. Utilitarianism is “a strong
weapon” for calling into question
the concentration of resources and
power.
(Kymlicka, 2002, P. 12)
The principle encourages a democratic
approach to decision making. The
majority’s interest is always considered
so a dangerous minority can not
dominate.
5. Utilitarianism does offer a
systematic way to make an
ethical decision which is simple
to understand and apply. In its
historical context it did serve a
purpose which was to put the
majority first.
6. Everyone’s utility is treated
equally. The objective is to
maximize utility in general and not
only or primarily the utility of those
preferred by an agent or a social
group.
(Beauchamp and Childress,
1994).
7. Classical utilitarianism has
often claimed that we should
acknowledge the pain and
suffering of animals and not
restrict the calculus just to
human beings.
Disadvantages:
1. Even when we think we know the
consequences they can often have a
knock on effect and people can suffer
second or third hand. It is difficult to
measure pleasure.
2. It is a practical application that
requires the ability to predict the long
term consequences, and to predict with
unfailing accuracy. Of this there is no
guarantee.
3. The theory gives no credit
to motivation. Not every action
done out of good will is going
to result in a good
consequence, but the attitude
behind it should be worthy of
some credit.
4. The theory is too simplistic –
it relies on one principle only by
which we make moral decisions.
Every ethical dilemma is unique
in some way and so we can not
make a decision on just one
ethical theory.
5. In the past the principle of
utilitarianism has been used
to justify the most horrifically
immoral acts – the Holocaust
for one.
6. Utilitarianism is too demanding.
For utilitarians, there is no more
justification, at least a priori, for
pursuing our own goals or for
helping our friends, our children,
our patients or our community
than for pursuing the goals of
others or for helping strangers.
7. “Utilitarianism does not take
seriously the distinction between
persons” (Rawls, 1971, p. 27).
The principle of choice for an
association of men is interpreted as
an extension of the principle of
choice for one man” (Rawls, 1971,
p. 24).
8. The end cannot justify all
means. The end can justify the
use of means that may seem
morally dubious.
 PUBLIC HEALTH SHOULD ADOPT
UTILITARIANISM
1. As with utilitarianism, one of the
aims of public health is to maximize
the presence of a good, namely the
health of the population. Public health
actions are thus evaluated, at least in
part, on the basis of the gains and
losses they entail for the health of the
population (Cribb, 2010; Holland, 2007
and 2010).
Effectiveness and efficiency
are thus important factors in
evaluating actions, programs,
and interventions as objectively
as possible, both in public health
and for utilitarians.
2. As with utilitarianism, public
health seeks to achieve an effect at
the population level and not,
initially, at the individual level. It
follows that public health sometimes
calls for interventions that negatively
affect some individuals, but improve
the collective health of the population
(Cribb, 2010; Nixon and Forman,
2008).
3. The justification for government-led
public health actions, programs and
interventions is usually based on an
impartial point of view. Public health
authorities and practitioners usually
justify their actions on the basis of their
populational effects and not, for
example, on the basis of their effects on
people with whom they have personal
relationships or on groups that they
might favour.
 PUBLIC HEALTH SHOULD NOT
ADOPT UTILITARIANISM
1. Health and utility are two
concepts with multiple meanings which
may overlap to varying degrees, but
which are not usually treated as
synonyms. Thus, if health is only one
aspect of utility or if utility is only one
aspect of health, then maximizing
health will not produce the same result
as maximizing utility (Holland, 2007).
In fact, public health advocates are
accused of “healthism” when they
forget that health is not the only
good that can have moral value
and, moreover, that it is not a good
that necessarily always takes
precedence over others.
(Cribb, 2010, p. 25)
2. While the (or one) purpose of public
health is to maximize the health of
the population, it is acknowledged by
many that another of its purposes is
to reduce health inequalities.
(Agence de la santé et des services
sociaux de Montréal, 2012; Butler-
Jones, 2008; Powers & Faden, 2006).
As soon as one claims the ability
to justify interventions or policies
that are somewhat less effective
at improving the general level of
population health, but that reduce
health inequalities, one must
concede that public health is not
guided solely by a principle of
maximization (of health).
Public health ethics cannot be based on a
single principle, as is utilitarianism. If one
considers that public health has two
independent purposes, namely,
maximizing population health and
reducing health inequalities (Powers
& Faden, 2006), then public health ethics
should include, at the minimum, a
principle of equity or justice in
addition to a principle of health
maximization.
3. Public health practice cannot be
considered purely
consequentialist. Public health
ethics include certain values,
respect for which is intended to
guide the choice of means used to
achieve objectives.
Often included, for example, are respect
for the autonomy of individuals and
communities, or the fair and
equitable treatment of individuals
and groups. If one views such values as
important to public health, then one
does not believe that public health
should focus solely on the consequences
of its practices for population health
(and for health inequalities).
Thus, one does not believe it
should be purely
consequentialist, and by
extension, utilitarian.
Public health should adopt the
utility principle, but not
utilitarianism.
The maximization of
utility alone is no longer
advocated.
(Honderich, 1995)
Concluding Assessment
Utilitarianism is most appropriate
for policy decisions, as long as a
strong notion of fundamental
human rights guarantees that it
will not violate rights of small
minorities.
Thank
you!