Justice_ What's the Right Thing to Do_ - Michael Sandel [26]
The results of this experiment pose a challenge to Mill’s test. Many students prefer watching Homer Simpson, but still think a Hamlet soliloquy offers a higher pleasure. Admittedly, some may say Shakespeare is better because they are sitting in a classroom and don’t want to seem philistine. And some students argue that The Simpsons, with its subtle mix of irony, humor, and social commentary, does rival Shakespeare’s art. But if most people who have experienced both prefer watching The Simpsons, then Mill would be hard pressed to conclude that Shakespeare is qualitatively higher.
And yet Mill does not want to give up the idea that some ways of life are nobler than others, even if the people who live them are less easily satisfied. “A being of higher faculties requires more to make him happy, is capable probably of more acute suffering… than one of an inferior type; but in spite of these liabilities, he can never really wish to sink into what he feels to be a lower grade of existence.” Why are we unwilling to trade a life that engages our higher faculties for a life of base contentment? Mill thinks the reason has something to do with “the love of liberty and personal independence,” and concludes that “its most appropriate appellation is a sense of dignity, which all human beings possess in one form or other.”28
Mill concedes that “occasionally, under the influence of temptation,” even the best of us postpone higher pleasures to lower ones. Everyone gives in to the impulse to be a couch potato once in a while. But this does not mean we don’t know the difference between Rembrandt and reruns. Mill makes this point in a memorable passage: “It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, are of a different opinion, it is because they only know their own side of the question.”29
This expression of faith in the appeal of the higher human faculties is compelling. But in relying on it, Mill strays from the utilitarian premise. No longer are de facto desires the sole basis for judging what is noble and what is base. Now the standard derives from an ideal of human dignity independent of our wants and desires. The higher pleasures are not higher because we prefer them; we prefer them because we recognize them as higher. We judge Hamlet as great art not because we like it more than lesser entertainments, but because it engages our highest faculties and makes us more fully human.
As with individual rights, so with higher pleasures: Mill saves utilitarianism from the charge that it reduces everything to a crude calculus of pleasure and pain, but only by invoking a moral ideal of human dignity and personality independent of utility itself.
Of the two great proponents of utilitarianism, Mill was the more humane philosopher, Bentham the more consistent one. Bentham died in 1832, at the age of eighty-four. But if you go to London, you can visit him today. He provided in his will that his body be preserved, embalmed, and displayed. And so he can be found at University College London, where he sits pensively in a glass case, dressed in his actual clothing.
Shortly before he died, Bentham asked himself a question consistent with his philosophy: Of what use could a dead man be to the living? One use, he concluded, would be to make one’s corpse available for the study of anatomy. In the case of great philosophers, however, better yet to preserve one’s physical presence in order to inspire future generations of thinkers.30 Bentham put himself in this second category.
In fact, modesty was not one of Bentham’s obvious character traits. Not only did he provide strict instructions for his body’s preservation and display, he also suggested that his friends and disciples meet every year “for the purpose of commemorating the founder of the greatest happiness system of morals and legislation,” and that