Transcript
Speaker: It's a common saying that the ends do not justify the means. In other words, even though some state of affairs might be very desirable, you have to get there in the right way. You can't get there through illegal means or immoral means, through harming others, right?
Speaker: But in the last lesson, the last thought that I left you with is maybe there are some things that are so awful that maybe we're allowed to do almost anything to bring about the downfall of those things. And the thing that I was hinting at was slavery.
Speaker: In this story, we are in the middle of the 1800s and that is exactly a topic that people were trying to figure out at the time. How do we end slavery?
Speaker: At least some people over in the United States were thinking that. And I sort of hinted that maybe a moral theory that focuses on consequences might be able to justify things like violence in order to end the institution of slavery.
Speaker: Now, this brings us to the topic of American abolitionism. And I want to be abundantly clear about this. The main lesson today is on a kind of moral theory that is based on consequentialism.
Speaker: that's known as utilitarianism. And i'm so I sort of, you know, I've been foreshadowing this view through talk of slavery.
Speaker: But I have to be very clear about this. The actual American abolitionist movement did not use utilitarianism to justify their views. I think from our perspective, it it sort of makes sense that they go together.
Speaker: But in point of fact, the the real abolitionists were most more so influenced by other kinds of philosophy. So even though the bulk of today's lesson is on utilitarianism, I want to begin with American abolitionism. Two reasons. A, I kind of already did, right? i i brought it in last time and now I should really talk about it and clarify it. But B,
Speaker: Now we get to talk about the United States and how European ideas were influencing American minds. And we will sort of stay in the United States for a chunk of Unit 3. We actually end in California. So you can see how geographically this course is mapped out to begins in Western Europe. And it does go to some other places and it comes back or it ends here where I am recording in California. So there you go. There is a trajectory of the course. So let's talk about American abolitionism.
Speaker: And I've already said that utilitarianism didn't directly influence American abolitionists. Here's another thing that didn't directly influence abolitionists. That would be Christianity. um So this is a complicated story and the point that I'm trying to make, I'll try to defend right now. But let me begin by saying this.
Speaker: Antebellum, American Christianity was remarkably, i would say shockingly diverse. It was basically all over the place. There was a lot of independent preachers and revivalists and brand spanking new denominations. Some of them don't even exist anymore. um and they were all competing for followers. And here on my slides, i'm I'm very careful about the language that I use. I said that they often developed highly original interpretations of Christian doctrine.
Speaker: If I'm speaking a little bit more loosely, I would say that they were verging on heresy. Like if they, some of these denominations were you know in a country like maybe Mexico or some very Catholic country in in in Europe like Spain,
Speaker: where there was a a Holy Inquisition, which is an institution that just checks that beliefs are accurate as they are supposed to be according to the Catholic Church. If anything like the Holy Inquisition existed in the USA, then you know these the these some of these preachers would have been condemned as heretics. But it it didn't exist. And so it's very interesting that a lot of people were just kind of really pushing the envelope as to what it is that you know Christianity was was about and how to be a good Christian.
Speaker: So basically, there's all kinds of flavors of Christianity going on in this time period. Now, some of them obviously opposed slavery, but others did not. In fact, some preachers definitely aligned with sort of a ah broader counter-enlightenment.
Speaker: The more liberal denominations and preachers were not always directly lined up with enlightenment somewhere, but you know, they were maybe sometimes friendly to it, sometimes very much lined up with it, sometimes just not conflicting with it.
Speaker: But there were definitely some counter-enlightenment brands of Christianity. And they opposed all the things that the radical enlighteners from Europe were for.
Speaker: For example, they opposed radical democracy. The USA at this point is a republic and they, you know, some people wanted something like a radical democracy or direct democracy. These preachers went against that. They also opposed deism, which is a ah Kind of a belief in a supernatural deity. I mean, they do believe in a God, but just not one that has all the traits of the Christian God, right?
Speaker: So not exactly all loving, kind of created the universe and then is uninvolved with it now. These counter-enlightenment preachers also opposed abolitionism and any kind of religious liberalism. In fact, they defended slavery as part of the divinely ordained social order. They said this is the way God wants it to be.
Speaker: and Frederick Douglass, who is an important American abolitionist. He was active for a very long time. He's a former slave, eventually becomes friends with Abraham Lincoln, right? So Frederick Douglass is a key figure in this movement. And in one of his autobiographies, he kind of, um you know, i mean, I shouldn't even say hinted. He very much explicitly and bitterly observed that some of the cruelest slaveholders were also some of the most outwardly devout Christians, right? So some of the people that really kind of performed the religion, you know, really hard were also some of the the most abusive and sadistic slave owners.
Speaker: So that was a situation with Christianity. Lots of flavors, some you know in the middle, some very liberal, and some of course very much counter enlightenment in general.
Speaker: So early abolitionists did ah try to appeal to scripture itself. Some people call this the the biblical wars, which is kind of a cool name.
Speaker: And of course, these abolitionists would argue that, look, slavery sort of violates the spirit of Christianity. Aren't we all God's children, right? That was the the main idea. And so slavery seems to go against that general thesis.
Speaker: But pro-slavery Christian preachers had some ready-made responses because they can just point to the Bible. ah There's passages in Genesis, in Leviticus, in Colossians that seem to if not outright, say that slavery ah you know seems like vindicates slavery or or it sanctions slavery. they They at least don't condemn it, these passages. So slavery, you know, might be construed and by these Christian preachers as basically, you know, it's just part of the the natural order of things.
Speaker: One of these stories, by the way, is ah this picture that I have here is about one of those stories that seems to sanction slavery. That is, it gives permission to slavery. And so that so Hagar is a slave and she was a slave of Abraham and Sarah.
Speaker: Sarah was unable to have children. And so she coerced um that is forced Hagar to have sex with Abraham. so they can start a family. And after Hagar got pregnant, lo and behold, Sarah started mistreating Hagar, which is not surprising. i mean any i mean, obviously, if she's she so sleeps with your husband to make babies, that is going to be upsetting. But um so naturally, jealousy arises.
Speaker: Anyways, Hagar escapes and she is found by an angel. who says something like, you know, you got to go back, return to your mistress and submit. So if you have an angel saying that, that basically sounds like, you know, you're a slave. You have to go back to your master and do whatever they say.
Speaker: So these Christian preachers were pointing out passages like that one and said, well, you know, obviously it seems like slavery is okay. And so there you go.
Speaker: And so abolitionists, especially people like Theodore Parker, who is here pictured, started turning away from trying to defend abolitionism through the Bible. And instead they were looking at radical enlightenment philosophers, also a newer kind of German philosophical tradition that was emerging.
Speaker: And so, you know, people like Parker were drawing from all kinds of ah of thinkers. Thomas Paine and Diderot, we've we've talked about both of them. Thomas Paine is an American. Diderot was a French um individual who was very much... so influential on people like Dolbach, whom we talked about in previous lessons. There's also this new German tradition that I was mentioning. People like Ludwig Feuerbach and Fichte and Karl Marx and his buddy Friedrich Engels.
Speaker: And so these new newer thinkers were you know even more radical than the Enlighteners in some ways. And they were also a little more anti-theist then than previous thinkers. Now there's a greater liberty in you know basically not hiding your antipathy toward religion. So that is what some abolitionists started to turn towards and they happen to be incredibly influential and sort of, you know, became the philosophical backbone of abolitionism.
Speaker: Sidebar, I do have to mention what was going on in Europe at this point because it is relevant. So you must know about 1848, what a year of revolution it was.
Speaker: Lots of revolts all across the continent. ah Most of them, by the way, brutally suppressed, utter failures, right? Basically, the authorities cracked down on them harshly. And so many Europeans, among among them notable intellectuals, emigrated to the United States of America. it wasn't only the U.S. Some people went down to Mexico and South America, but most of them went to the U.S.,
Speaker: and you can call these the 48ers, they of course brought their radical ideas with them. And this means that they were abolitionists. They were sometimes anti-religious, sometimes very anti-religious, and even anti-Republican. Now you might think to yourself, oh, they're anti-Republican, that means they're anti-democracy. No, they were, they were, they critiqued Republicanism from the left, so to speak. They wanted something like direct democracy or radical democracy.
Speaker: So no middleman, no middle person, you get to vote directly for whatever you you know you think is the right policy. And so these 48ers began to um emigrate to the United States and they made influential friends with other intellectuals in the United States.
Speaker: One of them was, I won't be able to pronounce her name correctly, Atali Assing. She became very close friends with Douglas. In fact, maybe they there was some romantic thing going on, but extramarital affairs aside, she was very influential on Douglas. She helped Douglas learn German because Douglas was really into ah some of these German philosophers at the time, and that way he could read the philosopher's work in their original language.
Speaker: Later, by the way, she becomes sort of ah an intermediary between Europe and the United States because Asing translated Douglass's autobiography into German. And then she wrote hundreds of articles interpreting American slavery for European audiences.
Speaker: Which brings us back to Frederick Douglass. Here he is now as an older man. We'll call this his mature philosophy. Once he got exposed to all these radical ideas and changed his mind on some of things.
Speaker: Here is one of the things that he wrote about. Slavery is not merely forced labor or legal domination. Of course, it is that. But it's much more than that. It also denies recognition itself.
Speaker: When you treat people as property, this prevents the development of full personhood. In other words, We all have the capacity to flourish as human beings, but without sort of like a mental component, without being recognized by others, you never quite develop your potential to flourish. So you need others to recognize you as an equal. And only with that sort of mental mind frame can your mind develop in the way that it should, that it can.
Speaker: in an ideal situation. He also added that racism racism is sort of a mistake. And what he means by that is that racism distorts recognition by projecting false differences onto others and obscuring their shared humanity. Ultimately, um We are the same kind of biological creature. And by having these ideas of race and how there's differences between the races and how you can rank races and that kind of stuff, all of that is pseudoscience, a But B, it sort of clouds your understanding of what a human is capable of. You have to get rid of those pernicious beliefs about race
Speaker: to sort of really understand the shared human you know nature that we all have. So that is another thing that Douglass wrote about.
Speaker: Thus, emancipation requires more than removing chains. Yes, you have to remove the chains, but a free society must recognize the equal dignity and moral worth of every person A, while B, creating opportunities for each to develop their capacities. So we have to become equal citizens first and recognize each other as equal citizens. That's an important sociological ingredient in a society that can really develop, you know, toward the flourishing of all its individual citizens. You have to have first a shared relationship
Speaker: ah awareness of your shared humanity. So an awareness of your shared humanity. and That's what I meant to say. And the the further thing is that you have to create the conditions through which people can develop themselves and really become the best version of themselves.
Speaker: So literacy, key, right? That's important. Labor. And I wrote labor in here. What I meant to say is something like, you know, Developing your talents in a craft or in some kind of you know profession so that you become very competent at something. That is another important thing.
Speaker: Civic participation, understanding your society and getting involved and taking a um you know a stand for things that you believe in. and shaping it in a way that benefits everyone. This stuff matters. And these are all the tools of self-creation. It is through these tools that you can actually develop yourself into a fully formed, a flourishing human being.
Speaker: I'll finish here with a quote from Douglas. Knowledge unfits a child to be a slave. So slavery, much more than just, you know, a legal domination situation. It is actually impeding ah not only um human flourishing, but even awareness of the potential of human flourishing.
Speaker: And so this brings me to my summary of American abolitionism. I just wanted to say again, even though I hinted that abolitionism could be motivated by something like utilitarianism, which is the view that we will cover today,
Speaker: American abolitionism wasn't actually motivated by utilitarianism in large part because, you know, utilitarianism was developing as a theory at the exact same time that American abolitionism sort of was, was you know, taking shape and then eventually, you know, it goes into the civil war. so um they They it wasn't possible for utilitarianism to really deeply influence American abolitionism. Instead, the abolitionists were influenced by the radical enlightenment.
Speaker: which we've mentioned a lot in this course. German idealism, which we have not mentioned a lot in this course. Naturalism slash pantheism. There was this idea that nature itself is divine. And so some people were really into that.
Speaker: the eudaimonistic ideal this idea that humans have you know the capacity to flourish and it is good that we should create the conditions such that people actually flourish so this influenced some of the american abolitionists And there's a little bit of socialism in there too, some Christian revivalism. It's a big mess, of course. um And so some of these ideas coming over from Europe, some of them being basically homegrown for Americans, right? The Christian revivalism, that is very much you know an an American phenomenon.
Speaker: And so there you go, there you have it. American abolitionism influenced by many, many different strands of thought or ways of thinking. And they they melded together in a very interesting way ah during the late eighteen hundreds Also the time period, when and universities were becoming a thing, right? And it wasn't only about teaching ah new priests, you know, or or new clergy, training new clergy members, but actually about ah industry and agriculture and and other things. So all these ideas influenced um not only the abolitionist movement, but also even eventually higher education. And it was all toward this idea that real freedom
Speaker: You know, it's about becoming fully human, reaching our true potential, each of us as individuals. And so there you go. American abolitionism, very, very interesting, but not directly influenced by the individual whom we are covering today, John Stuart Mill.
Speaker: Mill is, he's English and he was very, very diverse in the things regarding the things he was interested in not only philosophy, but also the political economy.
Speaker: basically politics in general, logic, psychology, political theory. he was sort of all over the place. He was considered a genius from, you know, the time he was like, you know, before he was even 10 years old, he was being called a genius. Also, he had a father that was very influential, intellectual. So that maybe is expected. he is most known for John Stuart Mill.
Speaker: his moral theory which we typically just call utilitarianism now there's many flavors of utilitarianism i'm going to give you the mill version of utilitarianism today he also wrote very influential texts on liberty what it really means and individuality how we should protect it with his wife he wrote a book on women's equality And he also wrote on representative government. So he is a very influential individual. i listed here several of his notable writings because I looked at all of them to make this lesson. So he is kind of, um you know, he's not a super...
Speaker: systematic writer. As a matter of fact, if you want to understand his views, you kind of have to read like, you know, everything you wrote, which is kind of interesting. So, okay. John Stuart Mill, the person we are covering today. Let's get into real quick story time.
Speaker: The year is 1861. We are in England and let's tell you about what's happening ah for the Europeans in this time period.
Speaker: The Americans are over across the pond wrestling with slavery. In fact, And then they're about to go into a civil war and that will take a couple of years to resolve itself.
Speaker: In Europe, philosophers were asking a broader question, not necessarily just lined up with slavery. Here is what they were thinking about. Many of the thinkers pictured here reflected on exactly this, even if they didn't say it explicitly.
Speaker: If morality is not grounded in revelation, what should it be grounded in? In other words, if we can't base our morality on religion and supernatural deities and that kind of stuff,
Speaker: What is morality based on Increasingly, more thinkers argued that morality should be evaluated by its contribution to human flourishing, what we've referred to as eudaimonic ethics. Now, we've talked about eudaimonic ethics before.
Speaker: If you have a very long memory, you might remember that I distinguished eudaimonic ethics from divine command morality, sometimes called divine command theory. Eudaimonic ethics, they focus on flourishing, happiness, well-being, all that stuff. And it tends to be focusing on achieving those things in this life.
Speaker: Divine command morality, well, every philosopher and theologian that backs that view typically believes in a heaven and or a hell. And so the whole idea there is that morality is defined by God's commands. He says, do this, don't do that.
Speaker: And the ultimate reason why you want to do those things that he told you to do and not do those things he told you not to do is that God will send you to a really bad place if you don't follow his commands, but you get a reward if you do follow his commands. And so it's not so much about this life, but rather the next.
Speaker: Well, the people that we were just looking at, they were saying something like, you know, We're not going to base our views on that anymore. And so basically everyone in this picture here, we have Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Karl Marx and Mill.
Speaker: They were all either agnostic or atheistic. And so, of course, they you know didn't really think that morality could be grounded in in god uh nietzsche might be a special case but let's not talk about that right now they basically didn't think that you should be good because that was going to get you to heaven and so you had to kind of develop your your new views okay so what is morality rooted in now.
Speaker: Today, of course, we are focusing on Mill. So let's look at the situation that Mill found himself in. By now, literally millennia of philosophical argumentation had produced a couple of key ideas that are important for understanding John Stuart Mill.
Speaker: Of course, Epicurus, 2000 years prior to this, argued that happiness consists in tranquility and freedom from unnecessary suffering.
Speaker: If you want to know all about Epicureanism, we have an ancient philosophy course, so that's definitely where you get your dose of Epicurus.
Speaker: David Hume in the 1700s argued that morality is grounded in human sentiments and social utility. In other words, morality comes from our feelings and our feelings are tied to ideas about how society can work well.
Speaker: And so there are some ideas that Mill would pick up on. Finally, Joseph Priestley, he's actually the person that popularized the phrase, the greatest happiness of the greatest number. i don't think he came up with it, but he did popularize it.
Speaker: And so all this was sort of in the air, especially in England. And so this brings us to a person named Jeremy Bentham. So Bentham was maybe the first sort of official utilitarian.
Speaker: Maybe you can dispute that a little bit, but he's definitely among the first, if not the first. And he basically proposed a very simple moral principle.
Speaker: Actions are right insofar as they tend to promote happiness and actions are wrong insofar as they tend to produce suffering. So good consequences, right? Pleasure being boosted up, that's good. and suffering goes up, that's bad, right? So it's actually quite straightforward and intuitive.
Speaker: And so if this principle is our leading, our North Star, then the goal of morality is produce the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people.
Speaker: And so that is Bentham's utilitarianism. Bentham was of course a pioneer in thinking about this kind of morality, but when you compare his utilitarianism to that of later thinkers, you can kind of tell it's elementary, right? Because what is happiness? How should we think about happiness?
Speaker: Well, for Bentham, happiness was more or less just pleasure. So J.S. Mill, a century later, almost, further developed Bentham's theory and further expanded upon Bentham's notion of happiness.
Speaker: For Mill, happiness is more than just pleasure, right? It's not that simple. Real happiness, what we might even call flourishing, it also includes things like intellectual growth.
Speaker: You have to cultivate your mind to really reach the highest levels of happiness. You also have to have meaningful relationships. If you were just pursuing pleasure all the time, then maybe just eating crumble cookie every day is enough, but that's not real happiness or that's not the fullest kind of happiness. You really need close friends, good relationships with your family members. This is important for us as humans, the kind of biological organism that we are with our psychology. It simply requires that we have very healthy relationships.
Speaker: It also involves aesthetic appreciation, right? You cannot be happy without to the fullest extent at least, if you don't sort of you know have this tendency toward appreciating the beauty of things, not only art and music, but like there's beauty everywhere. And so you should be able to recognize that and and live it and that it expands or enlivens your life.
Speaker: Moral development is very important for John Stuart Mill and his theory of happiness. You have to train yourself and eventually make it a habit so that you do the right thing, but like not in a begrudging way. Sometimes we do the right thing and we are sort of upset that we had to do it.
Speaker: You want to do the right thing and feel good about it without much internal conflict. That's That's basically being fully morally developed.
Speaker: You also want to be an individual and develop your individuality. It's kind of crazy because John Stuart Mill was worried about how in his day and age, society was sort of creating a homogenous kind of you know mass produced personality. Everyone was kind of like being the same person. i think Bill would be horrified at today, social media influencers, that kind of stuff.
Speaker: That might seem to him a little bit like people aren't being their own person and instead they're being kind of other people, right? You shouldn't want to be like other people. You shouldn't want to be like yourself. And so individuality and freedom, these are all very important to John Stuart Mill because without essentially all of them, you can't be happy to the fullest extent. And so that's the whole idea for John Stuart Mill. We do want to produce happiness, right? The greatest happiness possible, in fact. But it's not just eating crumble cookies every day. It's all these things that we have to really kind of cultivate and develop.
Speaker: So that is one way that John Stuart Mill expanded on the utilitarian thinkers before him. Another really interesting factoid is that this is a time period when Charles Darwin ah published his works on natural selection and eventually his book on how humans evolved, right? So this is that time period.
Speaker: And Mill um basically had a view that was very consistent with that of Charles Darwin. Now, Mill's utilitarianism is not directly influenced by Charles Darwin. Charles Darwin, um I think he wrote his works, but kind of sat on them for a long time. He didn't publish them. And so John Stuart Mill basically developed his views independently of Darwin, even though they were they were the two most influential English um thinkers, or intellectuals of their day. I don't think they ever met, which is that's fascinating right there. But
Speaker: In any case, their projects are at least consistent with each other. You can kind of you know see them as being in the same spirit. Mill grounded morality, as we've already hinted at in human biology,
Speaker: and psychology. Basically, he moved away from the kind of morality that is based on the existence of God and toward a kind of morality where you just say look, if we want to explain morality, we don't have to talk about God. We can just look at human nature, our shared psychology, and we can say, ah all right, look, given the way that we are, the kind of animal or organism that we are, here are the kinds of things that are good for us. And so we should try to maximize those things.
Speaker: That's Mill's view, in a nutshell, his naturalism. And that's all consistent with Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection. According to Darwin, human beings emerged through a natural process or a set of natural processes.
Speaker: There was no special creation, right? It's just kind of things being explained without God. That's kind of where they are very consistent. And so,
Speaker: In line with this, Mill suggested that morality is a natural outgrowth of human nature rather than something imposed from the outside. You do not need God to explain morality. You can explain it just with human biology and psychology. And so that is very interesting.
Speaker: There must have been, like I said, something in the air because these views are highly consistent. And yet, as far as I know, Mill and Darwin did not, they didn't write any letters to each other and then never met. So that's very interesting.
Speaker: Okay, so what we want to do according to Mill, is essentially create the conditions for human flourishing, right? That should be what morality is about and that is what's right, right, to do.
Speaker: So that leads us to this question, right? An unavoidable question. How should we decide which actions actually produce the greatest good?
Speaker: How do we figure this out day in and day out? Well, Mill's answer is not easy to summarize into a nice simple sentence. For Bentham, who we mentioned earlier, we can just kind of say his principle and say, yeah, that's it, you know, the greatest happiness for the greatest number.
Speaker: But that's not as easy to do with Mill. And so I'm going to try to outline this view for you and the rest of this lesson. But what I can say now is that what Mill eventually produced is one of the most influential ethical theories to this day.
Speaker: So we take that up. Utilitarianism, next.
Speaker: Let's get into Mill's utilitarianism finally. What I'm going to do is I'm going to do two things actually. I'm going to present utilitarianism the way it's sort of normally presented.
Speaker: And to be honest, it's a little bit of a homogenized, generic kind of utilitarianism. And a lot of instructors do this, even me. I used to do this.
Speaker: I've only recently decided I should give you a specific person's kind of utilitarianism. so I'm going to give you the generic version of utilitarianism, and then I'll specify Mills' particular brand of utilitarianism in each slide. So first thing we have to make sure is clear is that utilitarians are in general moral naturalists. And moral naturalism is a view that morality is ultimately grounded in the natural world rather than in a separate non-natural moral realm.
Speaker: We have already covered what that means. We are not basing morality, if you are a utilitarian, on God or God's commands or anything like that. you base it on this world, right? Morality is about living well in this world or achieving pleasure in this world based on human organisms, nothing having to do with the supernatural at all.
Speaker: For Mill, He is very you know specific about what morality means for him, why he's a naturalist. For Mill, morality develops from natural human capacities, desires, and social life. We live in a certain way. We naturally have certain desires.
Speaker: and certain ways of thinking. And that is what gives rise to this idea of morality. And the authority of morality is grounded in the natural ends that human beings seek, especially, of course, happiness.
Speaker: What does Mill mean by morality's authority is grounded in things that humans want? Well, for the divine command theorists, right the other kind of morality, the basically the polar opposite kind of morality, the authority of morality comes from a super powerful God, right? That's why you should do these commands or follow these commands. This super powerful thing Waiting at the other end, if you don't do what he said, then you're going to get punished. Well, that's where authority comes from for a divine command theorist.
Speaker: For someone like Mill, the reason why you should follow morality is because of the kind of human or the kind of animals, the kind of organisms that we are. We get welfare and happiness from certain ways of being. And so that's why you should do those things, because things that take you to flourishing are good for you. Right. That's the whole idea.
Speaker: So naturalism, just like eudaimonic ethics, is actually something that we've already covered before. ah In prior lessons, we actually covered sort of naturalism about explanations. And one example of that is how some enlightenment thinkers didn't want to say that certain conditions were, you know, caused by demonic possession or like a witch put a spell on you.
Speaker: And so as they were moving away from these supernatural explanations, they moved toward natural explanations. Things like, hey, look, I think this person has some kind of mental illness. And so that is a move away from supernaturalism toward naturalism.
Speaker: The utilitarians are basically doing something like that. They're not basing morality on God, but instead on humans and the kind of thing that they are and the kind of societies that they build.
Speaker: So there you go. Moral naturalism. We're going to get next into ethical hedonism, but I have to define some words for you. An intrinsic good is a kind of thing that is good for its own sake, right? So maybe wisdom is an intrinsic good. Basically, you want wisdom because maybe you just value it. It's the kind of thing that you want to develop in yourself for its own sake. That's the kind of person you want to be.
Speaker: So that would be an intrinsic good. an extrinsic good is something that you just want it because of what it brings you. So now I'm speaking personally here.
Speaker: Money, you know, I want it because of what I can get with it. I don't want a ton of money just because I want to look at it and, you know, dwell around it or anything like that. Or just to say that I have it. I want it because it gets me stuff that I want. Right. And so money for me is an extrinsic good.
Speaker: it doesn't have any value in and of itself. It's just the things that I value are the things that it gets me. So that's an extrinsic good. By the way, of course, some things can be both an intrinsic and an extrinsic good. Maybe ah for me, health might be like that. So I value my health and i I take pride in being the kind of person that takes care of themselves. But at the same time, obviously being healthy ah brings me some other things that I definitely want.
Speaker: The healthier that you are, then typically the better you look and the better you feel and the less money you're going to spend on doctors and stuff.
Speaker: And so those are good consequences. And I like that. And so maybe health is both an intrinsic good. I want it because it's important to me, but also an extrinsic good, meaning I want it because it, you know,
Speaker: produces the kind of consequences that I really enjoy. Right? So though those are two words that we want to understand. Well, a question arises as to maybe there's only one kind of intrinsic good. Philosophers have tried to argue that for a long time.
Speaker: Ethical hedonism is the view that the only intrinsic good is actually happiness. Okay, so most utilitarians basically would say something like, yes, happiness is the only intrinsic good, but they would maybe think of happiness in terms of pleasure. So Bentham, of course, focuses on pleasure and that's basically all that really matters for him.
Speaker: Now we've mentioned before that male does not define happiness in such a simple way. For male, happiness is not merely bodily pleasure, but it also involves your higher cognitive capacities, right? Developing your intellectual skills, having meaningful relationships, being your own person, developing your moral character, being free and being aware that you are free. These are all important to Mill. And so they all contribute to our overall happiness and they are part of happiness. They're part of the definition of happiness.
Speaker: So Mill is, of course, again, having just kind of a different conception than maybe your run of the mill utilitarian. One person that I need to bring up here is Thomas Hobbes. Hobbes was influential in England. And so Mill, of course, responded to Thomas Hobbes, even though he was around a century more later.
Speaker: a couple of things I want to say here. Mill rejects a couple of isms that were around at the time. One of them is psychological hedonism. This is a view that people always act from a desire for pleasure, right? All you want is pleasure.
Speaker: And Mill also rejected a view known as psychological egoism. And that's the view that people always seek their own pleasure. So this is the view of Thomas Hobbes or something very much like it.
Speaker: And Mill rejects both of these views, right? So Hobbes, just to be clear, was a psychological egoist. Anyway, Mill doesn't like either one of these views. No, you don't always act for pleasure. And of course, if you don't always act for pleasure, that also means that you don't always act for your own pleasure.
Speaker: So Mill is going against these views and he had a whole theory as to how it is that the mind works. I won't get into that theory. Let me just say this much.
Speaker: Yes, sometimes you might find some ideas to be very pleasurable. And sometimes that pleasure of an idea might actually lead to an action. For example, perhaps the motive to act to perform some action comes from the pleasure we experience in the contemplation of the act. Let me give you a concrete example.
Speaker: Maybe you have a thought like this. You say, I'm going to take out my mom for brunch. And so that thought brings you some pleasure. You're like, oh, that you know that would be a nice thing to do, right?
Speaker: And then eventually you do take your mom out to brunch. If you're someone who's been reading a lot of Thomas Hobbes, they might think to themselves, see, everything that you do is always for pleasure, right? But Mill says no. basically is making a very um ah interesting observation here. And he basically is just saying, look, just because a pleasurable thought might have some role in some action coming about, that doesn't mean that the object of our action is pleasure. Let me just explain that bit.
Speaker: Maybe you're taking your mom out to lunch, not because it's going to bring you a bunch of pleasure, but because you think that it is the sort of thing that a good son or daughter does. Or maybe you have a strained relationship with your mom. or dad I don't even remember what I said. And by taking them out, you basically are repairing that relationship and you think that's a good thing to do, but you're not really going to enjoy it, right? So even though a pleasurable thought is involved, it doesn't mean that you're going to feel a bunch of pleasure from it. In fact, maybe you're not going to enjoy the brunch at all.
Speaker: but you're doing it because your mom or dad will enjoy it a lot. And so Mill just basically says, look, not everything that you do is for pleasure and certainly not your own pleasure. You can act for the benefit of others.
Speaker: And so he wants to reject these kind of simple ideas about human nature, like, oh, everything that you do is based on pleasure or your own pleasure or your own interests or whatever. So Mill definitely rejected all of that.
Speaker: And that's important to understand for kind of comprehending Mills more, you know, his broader views on morality. Speaking of his broader views on morality, we have already distinguished deontology from consequentialism. Deontology is the kind of moral theory, of course, that Immanuel Kant gives us.
Speaker: So of course, now we're focusing on consequentialism and Mill was indeed a consequentialist. What you have to think about when you are considering morality is the consequences of the action or the policy or the strategy or whatever, right? Consequences are what matter.
Speaker: So you might now think to yourself, the consequences on who? ah So this is where the idea of sentience comes in. The word sentience gets used in a bunch of different ways. Some people use the word sentience to essentially mean consciousness. That is not the way that we are using it here. For Mill, sentience is simply the capacity to feel pleasure and pain. And so if that's the case, then you might have some animal that can feel pleasure and pain, but maybe doesn't have consciousness. I'm thinking maybe here of like a bird or like a small mammal. So maybe you don't want to say that they they think like humans, but they can definitely feel pleasure and pain.
Speaker: For Mill, Sentience is key, right? If you have sentience, if you can feel pleasure and pain, then we have to take you into consideration. And this differs dramatically from the views of Immanuel Kant.
Speaker: Kant believed that personhood or moral rights or whatever you want to call it. are basically assigned to anyone who is a rational being. If you can live according to moral principles, then you are a part of the moral community. And Kant, that was basically just humans.
Speaker: Mill believed that all sentient creatures deserve moral consideration. So that includes dogs, cats, chimps, whatever. Any animal that can feel pleasure or pain...
Speaker: They are a part of the moral community. And so when you are deciding the consequences of an action, right, you're calculating the consequences of a plan of action, you have to take into consideration not only the humans that will be affected by an action, but also the non-human animals.
Speaker: So of course, that leads to a very different ethical theory than that of Kant. Okay, now we finally get to the principle of utility. For most utilitarians, this is sort of like, you know, hey, this is the view right here. It's not so simple for mill, but here is what the principle of utility states.
Speaker: Happiness or the general welfare, that is the ultimate standard of morality. The greatest happiness for the greatest number, basically actions, rules, institutions, character traits, whatever. Everything is to be evaluated by its tendency to promote happiness and reduce suffering. So is an action right or wrong? Well, that depends on whether it had good consequences. If it did, awesome. And if it didn't, well then no. What about a rule?
Speaker: Good rules produce good consequences. Bad rules, well, they produce bad consequences. so you should change those rules. Those rules suck. An institution, maybe if that institution is working effectively and it's producing good consequences, you would say that institution is good.
Speaker: But if it's not producing good consequences, well then it's bad, right? So that's the principle of utility and action. And typically we only talk about actions, right? Individual acts that we perform.
Speaker: But of course, you know, you you can really expand this to much more than just, you know, the actions of an individual. Even character traits can be evaluated through the principle of utility. Of course, something like patience might be really good and it might have, you know, really good consequences. And you would call that a good character trait.
Speaker: Impatience, of course, that probably will lead to some negative consequences. And you can call that a bad character trait. So that is the principle of utility.
Speaker: And now, of course, we complicate things when we think about Mill's particular approach to the principle of utility. for Mill, This principle is an ultimate standard, right? that's That's the ultimate measure of whether something is good or bad. But he doesn't think you should actually use it every day. Like you shouldn't go around calculating your everyday actions according to the hedonic calculus where you're like, oh, is this going to produce more good than bad? and You don't have to do that every day.
Speaker: In fact, you shouldn't do it every day. Instead, Mill says that you should follow rules. I'm going to call these subordinate rules.
Speaker: And subordinate rules are basically just rules that tend to to promote happiness. They have been learned through the experience of many generations. And so we should just internalize them. We should actually follow them quite rigidly. You just abide by these rules because it's a kind of common sense morality. It's like a morality that's been crowdsourced and tested for generations. And these rules just basically work. And you can test them if you want, according to the principle of utility. But you'll notice that following these more often than not leads to good consequences.
Speaker: And these rules are very intuitive. Keep your promises. Don't cheat. Don't steal. Obey the law.
Speaker: Don't kill in innocents. These are just, you know, again, common sense morality. These are good to follow. And Mill says you should basically always follow them. So here's how I summarize muse Mills views on that.
Speaker: The best plan of action is to rigidly adhere to subordinate rules, this common sense morality, because ordinary attempts to calculate utility often end up in error.
Speaker: Let me just double click on that, because this is really important. If you go around trying to figure out, okay, what action should I take here? Let me let me try to take everyone's welfare into consideration and do the calculations. And what's the probability that this will lead to this, will lead to that? If you try to do that, you're going to mess up and you're going to end up doing something bad with the best of intentions, by the way.
Speaker: That's why I have Peter Pan here. I read Peter Pan, the like the original book, the one from like, I don't know, the early 1900s or something. It was a weird summer. I don't know why I read it. Anyway, Peter Pan in the book was way worse than Peter Pan in the Disney movie.
Speaker: Peter Pan in the book was basically like he always had these half-baked ideas that he thought would work out, but then they didn't and a bunch of inc innocents were harmed. But he was really immature about it and was like, oh, you know, whatever.
Speaker: That's sort of what you're going to end up with if you try to calculate the utility of every single one of your actions. You're going to maybe you won't be as callous and immature about it, but you're going to end up you know thinking, oh, this is the best thing for everyone.
Speaker: And you'll be wrong and you end up hurting people. That's what Mill thought would happen. Other utilitarians thought the same way, such as Henry Sidgwick. And so what you should really do, honestly, is just follow the law. Just follow the rules that society has established for you. That's probably the best course of action for being a good person. It's only in extraordinary cases, extremely rarely,
Speaker: such as when the consequences are unusually clear or there's moral rules that conflict, those are the only cases when we should appeal directly to the principle of utility. In other words, only when it's very, very, very obvious that to break a rule would actually create better consequences and to follow it. Only then should you, you know, then say to yourself, okay, let me do the principle of utility here. Let me calculate. I'm going to have to break this rule, but that will actually be better for everyone involved. Only in those cases, Can you should you appeal to the principle of utility or when the moral rules conflict? You have, say, one rule that says do this thing and another rule that says don't do this thing. Well, in that case, you have to go and calculate yourself, OK, which action will be the best.
Speaker: Barring those kinds of situations, which which basically never happened, by the way, you should just follow rules. That is what John Stuart Mill said. and so that puts us in a situation we have to think about.
Speaker: day in, day out, you basically just follow rules. But once in a while, maybe you will be put in a situation where you're like, okay, I think this common sense rule isn't gonna work out in this situation.
Speaker: That means that I have to sit here and actually calculate what would produce the best consequences. And so that's when the principle of utility kicks in Let's think about some thought experiments that um that invoke these kinds of situations. And these thought experiments have typically been produced to challenge utilitarianism.
Speaker: So let's get into that now. We're going to call this first one the near and dear argument. Here we go.
Speaker: Consider that your apartment building is on fire. You run in to save your spouse. On the way in, you hear the fireman yell, don't do it. The building will collapse in 60 seconds.
Speaker: You run in anyway. As you search the building for him or her, you hear your neighbor call out for help. You happen to know that your neighbor is a world-renowned cancer researcher who's on the verge of a major breakthrough.
Speaker: If this researcher survives the fire, she will likely find a cure for breast cancer and will save millions of lives. Right at that moment, you see your spouse too.
Speaker: Who do you save? And let's imagine for your set for a second here that your spouse not going to save millions of lives. This sort of situation sort of ah suggests that what you should do if you're a utilitarian is save the cancer researcher.
Speaker: But that violates some of our moral intuitions. It seems like we have duties to those who are a near and dear to us. Let me say that again.
Speaker: If you have a spouse, you sort of made a promise to them, right? I'm going to take care of you. But then this situation happens and you're like, ah, you know, i think it'd be better for like society if I save this cancer researcher.
Speaker: And so that kind of, you know, it makes it seem like utilitarianism is cold and and just, you know, it's not really about relationships as the way Mill was saying it was. Something is dark and twisted about utilitarianism because you have to always be maximizing happiness and basically giving up on your loved ones in some cases. okay, this is a very standard argument or thought experiment against utilitarianism and it's supposed to help you see that, yeah, you know what, it seems like utilitarianism is is too cold to be a theory of morality. It's just like heartless in a way.
Speaker: I'm not actually sure exactly how Mill would respond to this, but I have a feeling sometimes that he might say, look In some situations, maybe you do have to make tough choices like this. And here is a quote from his essay called Utilitarianism.
Speaker: Though the application of this standard may be difficult, it is better than none at all. Yeah, it's true, you're going to have to make hard choices, but at least you have the principle of utility to guide you Otherwise, you're running into that house and you're just having to think on the fly, like what is the best thing to do here? Well, at least you have the principle of utility that will basically nudge you in the right direction, which seems to be saving the cancer researcher and letting your loved one die.
Speaker: All right, that is one thought experiment that some people... seem to believe undermines utilitarianism. Maybe you don't like Mill's response.
Speaker: Here's another one. It's called The Experience Machine and it comes from a man named Robert Nozick. And it's something like this.
Speaker: Suppose there was an experience machine that would give you any experience you desired. Super-duper neuropsychologists could stimulate your brain so that you would think and feel you were writing a great novel, or making a friend, or reading an interesting book.
Speaker: or winning the NBA championship or whatever, right? Yet all the time you will be floating in a tank with electrodes attached to your brain. In other words, it's not real.
Speaker: You're just imagining it. Should you plug into this machine for life, pre-programming your life experiences? Of course, while in the tank, you won't know that you're there.
Speaker: You'll think that it's all actually happening. would you plug in? Robert Nozick, of course, here is trying to get you to realize that you care about more than just pleasure.
Speaker: You want that pleasure to be rooted in something real. You don't want your, you know, your good feelings to be just based on imaginary things.
Speaker: And so that is sort of the challenge presented to utilitarianism by Nozick. Pleasure isn't all there is. Okay, well, Mill, um as we know, didn't have the view that pleasure is all that matters. So if you are a Millian kind of utilitarian, you can respond in quite a few ways to Nozak's thought experiment.
Speaker: First of all, you can say happiness is not just a pleasant experience. A million utilitarian wouldn't even be tempted to go into the experience machine because it's about also developing your intellectual capacities, about having strong social relationships. I mean, honestly, a million utilitarian is almost invulnerable to this particular thought experiment because It just isn't that kind of simple view of pleasure that maybe Nozak is presuming in that thought experiment.
Speaker: And of course, we also have a duty to be out here in the real world changing it for the better. Right. So there is a further point that a million utilitarian could make. And so the experience machine may give pleasure.
Speaker: But it won't give us the kind of happiness that Mill values. And it also ignores the fact that we have a duty to go out there and make the world better. And of course, a million utilitarian believes that.
Speaker: So there you go. One final thought experiment. This one's called the organ harvest. You are a surgeon.
Speaker: You took a shift at a hospital you don't normally work at. You were just doing pro bono work. You know how it is for taxes. You see that there are five patients awaiting organ transplants and you wish you can help them.
Speaker: Just then the nurse calls you to see a walk-in patient. The man is homeless, has no family or friends and is complaining of a foot ache. As you are reviewing his files, you notice that he is a perfect match for all five patients awaiting a transplant.
Speaker: You could, and theory, give the man a morphine overdose providing a peaceful and painless death. and transplant his surprisingly healthy organs to the five patients saving their lives.
Speaker: That is five lives for the price of one. What should you do? The implication here, of course, is that a utilitarian seems forced to kill the homeless man and harvest his organs and implant them into the five patients.
Speaker: Of course, this means that utilitarianism condones murder. Is that really the case? Well, some people are convinced by that thought experiment.
Speaker: A million utilitarian can respond in quite a few ways. First of all, they might say that killing the innocent patient violates one of the most important secondary principles, security.
Speaker: So let me just talk about security for a second. Security is a social good. You, to be honest, don't just care about your own security.
Speaker: You want to live in a society where everyone's security is accounted for. It's not even that we have a right to security. But Mill actually believes that we have a right to be aware that we are secure. We have to know that we are safe in our society because this right the right to security like all the other rights they actually enable us to live in the kind of conditions under which we can thrive right so if you don't have rights as the preconditions of society
Speaker: you have You don't have a situation where people can trust each other, where they can plan, where they can really live in intimate relationship with each other. If you think that you might die tomorrow, you're not going to really act the same as if you are secure that your person is safe, right? Society isn't going to erupt in violence at any second. you You're not going to go to the hospital and get killed.
Speaker: So security is essential for a well-functioning society. And if you do kill some random homeless guy for a footache and, you know, dole out his organs to different people, you are shattering. that trust that people have in their society and in hospitals and in other institutions and in schools and whatever, right? So you are causing a world of harm by shaking the foundations of the trust that we have in our institutions. So undermining those rights like security and privacy and all those things that would damage the very social conditions that make happiness possible.
Speaker: Mill is, of course, a very sophisticated theorist. And he had these arguments on the ready because people were obviously lobbying counter examples like this at him. And he had all these different ways of thinking and responding to them. And so there you go. there Those are some highly abstract um thought experiments that sort of put you in a situation where you can realize that there are some perhaps counterintuitive implications to utilitarianism that we have to be aware of, right? Because it might be the case that Mill might actually say, yeah, you do have to save the cancer patient.
Speaker: At the same time though, these same thought experiments sort of require that we are very clear as to what it is that we need to do if we want to live according to the principle of utility. Mill would say, look, you're not supposed to kill homeless people.
Speaker: and and dole out their organs. And you're also not supposed to like only care about pleasure. You have to have the right theory of happiness if you are to be a million utilitarian.
Speaker: Having said all that, there's still some issues with utilitarianism that even a million utilitarian won't have an easy time responding to So rather than giving you these abstract thought experiments, I'm gonna give you some real situations that were happening in the 1800s.
Speaker: And you tell me how a utilitarian should respond. Let's begin with the president of the union in the Abraham Lincoln.
Speaker: early eighteen sixty s abraham lincoln Now Lincoln did some things that, of course, his political opponents characterized as tyrannical.
Speaker: Let's talk about one such thing right now. Lincoln repeatedly justified temporary restrictions on liberty by appealing to preserving the Union.
Speaker: One example of this was suspending habeas corpus. What is habeas corpus? Basically, when you are detained, you have a right to go through some legal procedure where they ensure that your detainment is lawful.
Speaker: In other words, let's just say you get detained and it's your right that you go in front of a judge and the judge figures out whether or not the police detained you legally. And if they didn't, they have to let you go.
Speaker: Well, Lincoln kind of put a freeze on that ah for a bit. And his argument was that, look, this situation that we're in where the country is tearing itself apart, this is an extraordinary case. This is not normal.
Speaker: And if we want to save the union, that is the nation, then we have to kind of put some restrictions on liberty. We have to, in other words, violate some of the rights that we enumerated in our political documents, right? And so Abraham Lincoln there taking away rights for a little bit, but of course it was for the a greater cause, right? It was preserving the Union, maintaining um the nation together, ending slavery, by the way, and and freeing you know all the slaves, right? So this is a situation that Lincoln found himself in. And again,
Speaker: This is a violation of constitutional rights. So can this be defended using a utilitarian line of reasoning?
Speaker: If the cause is good enough, can you violate the rights of people? This is a tough situation for the utilitarians because Mill himself said yes.
Speaker: Right. So if the situation is such that it would obviously benefit to violate rights, then you should do so if it's ultimately going to lead to better consequences. Now, he says, again, it has to be extremely important.
Speaker: out of the ordinary, right? But should such a situation obtain, then maybe that's what you have to do.
Speaker: Is that a moral theory that you can get behind? So there is one interesting example where maybe some people would say, i don't know, that's that's kind of tough. I don't know if I want to back that, right?
Speaker: Here is another situation. This is John Brown. John Brown gets portrayed sometimes as sort of like a crazy person. um And I think he was a little different. I won't say crazy, but he was definitely different. And it's like his family kind of like treated him like um like a special sage. It's kind of interesting. But anyway, what John Brown wanted to do is to wage a guerrilla war.
Speaker: against Southern slaveholders using freed slaves. In other words, he was gonna get a bunch of freed slaves and a bunch of weapons and periodically go into the South and make it basically so that Slaveholders are spending a lot of money on defense and, you know, and they're losing a lot of money because their crops are getting burned and they're losing a lot of money because, you know, some of them are getting assassinated sometimes or whatever. Right. John Brown basically wanted to attack ah slaveholders in any way that he could, killing
Speaker: damaging their property, whatever, making it so that ultimately it isn't profitable to be a slave owner. So this is, I mean, you know, there's no way around it. This is political violence. This is arson. This is all kinds of, you know, standardly considered illegal things and immoral things.
Speaker: But of course, the whole point of this was to make it so that slavery goes away. In that case, Can you defend defend these actions using a utilitarian line of reasoning?
Speaker: If the end goal is substantially better than the status quo, does that mean you're allowed to hurt people, to kill people, to burn their stuff?
Speaker: That's a tough one. Someone like Immanuel Kant would say, look, you got to do this in the right way, right? What is that saying that I started this lesson with?
Speaker: The ends does not justify the means. If you're going to get rid of something awful, don't become a monster during the process. There's a famous quote from Friedrich Nietzsche, something like, those who fight monsters should take care that they don't become one.
Speaker: So that is another situation where someone who is considering utilitarianism as an ethical theory, they really have to think about this, right? Does that mean that you...
Speaker: I mean, technically, you would be required to do these violent things if you thought it was right to do. So does this make you think differently about utilitarianism?
Speaker: I'll give you one more here. This is William Tecumseh Sherman. And you can read about Sherman's total war that he waged against the South in books on war strategy.
Speaker: What William Tecumseh Sherman did is deliberately inflicted massive hardship on civilians.
Speaker: Now typically, political philosophers and moral philosophers might say that war is okay in some circumstances, but that you're only supposed to attack actual soldiers.
Speaker: not just the regular population. These are in non-combatants. and You're not supposed to go after them. These are, in many cases, women and children, old people.
Speaker: So that part is not allowed. But Tecumseh Sherman basically thought to himself, well, you know, war is hell.
Speaker: And if we want to make it as painless as possible, we should get it over with as quickly as possible. And how do you end it quickly?
Speaker: Well, you don't just go after the soldiers, you go after everyone. And he of course attacked Georgia. he the The saying was that he made Georgia howl.
Speaker: And for him, He was actually doing something morally good. He was making the war shorter. And according to some people, he did.
Speaker: When soldiers for the Confederacy understood what was happening back home with Tecumseh Sherman going around burning down cities, they left the front lines to go back to protect their families, which of course made it so that it was easier to defeat the South.
Speaker: So this is a situation where you're wondering, does a utilitarian have to defend this idea that if you are in a war and let's just say that the war is for a just cause, then you're allowed to do basically anything to win it, including intentionally harming non-combatants, just regular people going about their lives.
Speaker: These are just some situations that make you wonder whether or not utilitarianism is, properly speaking, a moral theory.
Speaker: Because it seems like it might be used to defend really immoral actions. And we're not even done with the objections to utilitarianism.
Speaker: Not by a long shot.
