Justice_ What's the Right Thing to Do_ - Michael Sandel [24]
Mill has an answer to these challenges, but it carries him beyond the confines of utilitarian morality. Forcing a person to live according to custom or convention or prevailing opinion is wrong, Mill explains, because it prevents him from achieving the highest end of human life—the full and free development of his human faculties. Conformity, in Mill’s account, is the enemy of the best way to live.
The human faculties of perception, judgment, discriminative feeling, mental activity, and even moral preference, are exercised only in making a choice. He who does anything because it is the custom, makes no choice. He gains no practice either in discerning or in desiring what is best. The mental and moral, like the muscular powers, are improved only by being used… He who lets the world, or his own portion of it, choose his plan of life for him, has no need of any other faculty than the ape-like one of imitation. He who chooses his plan for himself, employs all his faculties.21
Mill concedes that following convention may lead a person to a satisfying life path and keep him out of harm’s way. “But what will be his comparative worth as a human being?” he asks. “It really is of importance, not only what men do, but also what manner of men they are that do it.”22
So actions and consequences are not all that matter after all. Character also counts. For Mill, individuality matters less for the pleasure it brings than for the character it reflects. “One whose desires and impulses are not his own, has no character, no more than a steam engine has character.”23
Mill’s robust celebration of individuality is the most distinctive contribution of On Liberty. But it is also a kind of heresy. Since it appeals to moral ideals beyond utility—ideals of character and human flourishing—it is not really an elaboration of Bentham’s principle but a renunciation of it, despite Mill’s claim to the contrary.
Higher pleasures
Mill’s response to the second objection to utilitarianism—that it reduces all values to a single scale—also turns out to lean on moral ideals independent of utility. In Utilitarianism (1861), a long essay Mill wrote shortly after On Liberty, he tries to show that utilitarians can distinguish higher pleasures from lower ones.
For Bentham, pleasure is pleasure and pain is pain. The only basis for judging one experience better or worse than another is the intensity and duration of the pleasure or pain it produces. The so-called higher pleasures or nobler virtues are simply those that produce stronger, longer pleasure. Bentham recognizes no qualitative distinction among pleasures. “The quantity of pleasure being equal,” he writes, “push-pin is as good as poetry.”24 (Push-pin was a children’s game.)
Part of the appeal of Bentham’s utilitarianism is this nonjudgmental spirit. It takes people’s preferences as they are, without passing judgment on their moral worth. All preferences count equally. Bentham thinks it is presumptuous to judge some pleasures as inherently better than others. Some people like Mozart, others Madonna. Some like ballet, others like bowling. Some read Plato, others Penthouse. Who is to say, Bentham might ask, which pleasures are higher, or worthier, or nobler than others?
The refusal to distinguish higher from lower pleasures is connected to Bentham’s belief that all values can be measured and compared on a single scale. If experiences differ only in the quantity of pleasure or pain they produce, not qualitatively, then it makes sense to weigh them on a single scale. But some object to utilitarianism on precisely this point: they believe that some pleasures really are “higher” than others. If some pleasures are worthy and others base, they say, why should society weigh all preferences equally, much less regard