Justice_ What's the Right Thing to Do_ - Michael Sandel [25]
Think again about the Romans throwing Christians to the lions in the Coliseum. One objection to the bloody spectacle is that it violates the rights of the victims. But a further objection is that it caters to perverse pleasures rather than noble ones. Wouldn’t it be better to change those preferences than to satisfy them?
It is said that the Puritans banned bearbaiting, not because of the pain it caused the bears but because of the pleasure it gave the onlookers. Bearbaiting is no longer a popular pastime, but dogfighting and cockfighting hold a persistent allure, and some jurisdictions ban them. One justification for such bans is to prevent cruelty to animals. But such laws may also reflect a moral judgment that deriving pleasure from dogfights is abhorrent, something a civilized society should discourage.You don’t need to be a Puritan to have some sympathy with this judgment.
Bentham would count all preferences, regardless of their worth, in determining what the law should be. But if more people would rather watch dogfights than view Rembrandt paintings, should society subsidize dogfight arenas rather than art museums? If certain pleasures are base and degrading, why should they have any weight at all in deciding what laws should be adopted?
Mill tries to save utilitarianism from this objection. Unlike Bentham, Mill believes it is possible to distinguish between higher and lower pleasures—to assess the quality, not just the quantity or intensity, of our desires. And he thinks he can make this distinction without relying on any moral ideas other than utility itself.
Mill begins by pledging allegiance to the utilitarian creed: “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.” He also affirms the “theory of life on which this theory of morality is grounded—namely, that pleasure and freedom from pain are the only things desirable as ends; and that all desirable things… are desirable either for pleasure inherent in themselves or as means to the promotion of pleasure and the prevention of pain.”25
Despite insisting that pleasure and pain are all that matter, Mill acknowledges that “some kinds of pleasure are more desirable and more valuable than others.” How can we know which pleasures are qualitatively higher? Mill proposes a simple test: “Of two pleasures, if there be one to which all or almost all who have experience of both give a decided preference, irrespective of any feeling of moral obligation to prefer it, that is the more desirable pleasure.”26
This test has one clear advantage: It does not depart from the utilitarian idea that morality rests wholly and simply on our actual desires. “[T]he sole evidence it is possible to produce that anything is desirable is that people actually desire it,” Mill writes.27 But as a way of arriving at qualitative distinctions among pleasures, his test seems open to an obvious objection: Isn’t it often the case that we prefer lower pleasures to higher ones? Don’t we sometimes prefer lying on the sofa watching sitcoms to reading Plato or going to the opera? And isn’t it possible to prefer these undemanding experiences without considering them to be particularly worthwhile?
Shakespeare versus The Simpsons
When I discuss Mill’s account of higher pleasures with my students, I try out a version of his test. I show the students three examples of popular entertainment: a World Wrestling Entertainment fight (a raucous spectacle in which the so-called wrestlers attack one another with folding chairs); a Hamlet soliloquy performed by a Shakespearean actor; and an excerpt from The Simpsons. I then ask two questions: Which of these performances did you enjoy most—find most pleasurable—and which do you think is the highest, or worthiest?
Invariably The Simpsons gets the most votes as most enjoyable, followed by Shakespeare. (A few brave souls confess their