How can we preserve individual liberty while at the same time protect public health and safety? In my previous post, we saw a new type of solution to the paradox of politics: replace liberty with utility. On this view, which can be traced back to Jeremy Bentham, instead of trying to maximize freedom or some other natural right (e.g. private property), the role of the state is to maximize overall utility. This move, however, is a dangerous one. If we take the principle of utility to its logical conclusion — if utility is the be-all and end-all of politics — then individual liberty must not only take a back seat to utility; freedom may also be reduced or taken away when doing so would promote our overall utility.

John Stuart Mill (1806-1873), a second-generation utilitarian, tries to tame or neutralize this slippery-slope danger in two mutually-reinforcing ways. First off, Mill draws a qualitative distinction between higher-order and lower-level utilities or pleasures (“qualitative hedonism”; see generally Moore 2019, §2), and secondly, he replaces utility with progress as his master political principle (“the progress criterion”; see generally Strauss & Cropsey 1987, pp. 790-792):

1. Qualitative hedonism. Mill modifies Bentham’s crude form of consequentialism by distinguishing between two general categories of utilitarian pleasure: mental pleasures, which come from our intellect, imagination, and moral sentiments, and bodily pleasures, which come from physical sensations and appetites. According to Mill, a truly free person would choose the higher-level mental pleasures over the lower ones, “even at the cost of pain and sacrifice of the inferior pleasures.” (Ibid., p. 789; see also Davies 2022.)
2. The progress criterion. Where Bentham would swap out liberty for utility, Mill would replace utility with progress. For Mill, the purpose of politics — the end goal of the state — is to promote progress. (See Strauss & Cropsey 1987, p. 791.) But how do we measure “progress”? Here is where Mill’s qualitative hedonism comes into play: the promotion of the pursuit of higher pleasures is at the same time the promotion of progress. Why? Because, for Mill, “[a] society in which people pursue the superior pleasures is more advanced in civilization than one in which they do not.” (Ibid., p. 789.)

Pause. What’s wrong with this Millian picture? For me, the most devastating drawback of Mill’s modification of Bentham is that it contradicts the core egalitarian feature of utilitarianism: the idea that all persons in the utility calculus are supposed to count for one and only one! Or in the immortal words of Jeremy Bentham: “Everybody to count for one, nobody for more than one.”

How can we say, for example, that my love of college football is qualitatively inferior (and thus less deserving of legal protection) to your love of Italian opera or Norse poetry or whatever? Doesn’t it matter that many more people would prefer to watch LSU play against Alabama in college football than a night at the opera or a book of poems? [1] Alas, Mill’s combined qualitative hedonism and progress criterion are effete and elitist sand castles that crumble before the waves of real-world democratic politics, where everybody is supposed to count for one and nobody for more than one.

But in fairness to John Stuart Mill, I have yet to mention his most influential work, On Liberty. In that enduring essay, Mill presents a libertarian solution to the paradox of politics, a solution that also promises to neutralize the danger of Bentham’s appeal to utility without falling into the effete and elitist trap described above. In brief, Mill introduces an outer bound or upper limit to state action: the harm principle. (To be continued …)

[1] And even if we are prepared to say that opera and poetry are superior to college football, is poetry superior to opera or vice versa? (See, e.g., Schwartz 1998.)

Works cited

Ben Davies, “Rethinking ‘Higher’ and ‘Lower’ Pleasures“, Practical Ethics (20 April 2022), https://archive.ph/Fsl3h.

Abram L. Harris, “John Stuart Mill’s Theory of Progress”, Ethics, Vol. 66, No. 3 (Apr., 1956), pp. 157-175.

Andrew Moore, “Hedonism“, in Edward N. Zalta (editor), Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2019 Edition), https://archive.ph/kfWcf.

David T. Schwartz, “John Stuart Mill and the Ends of Sport“, Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy (10-15 August 1998), https://archive.ph/U7G8V.

Leo Strauss and Joseph Cropsey (editors), History of Political Philosophy, 3rd edition. University of Chicago Press (1987).