Mills Utilitarianism

>Student studying philosophy at Oxford
Not a Professor or a grad student, but I have read and studied Mill. I may try to help. What is your problem exactly?

>>2183323
I would add, for general reference the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has a worthy article with basic understandings of Mill: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/mill/

>>2183323
Why do I want to masterbate when I see white women with black men?

>>2183339
Mill would say that you have not found the higher pleasures in life, which can come from practicing the greatest good for the greatest number and recognizing that a good cup of tea and the latest addition of Dickens novel will get your jimmies off just as well as you ponder the next Rajj to colonize.

>>2183309
What kind of high school has philosophy courses? And how do you get a job at such a ritzy high school and not even know Mill good enough to explain to teenagers? Whew.

>>2183309
All I know is that he famously used something other philosophers claimed to be a equivocation to prove utilitarianism, where the meaning of "desirable" changed half-way trough the argument. I'm sure >>2183323 know more about it, was years since I studied him.

Here's one text about it.
http://philosophy.intellectualprops.com/summaries/john-stuart-mill-utilitarianism-a-critique-part-4/

You could kill two birds in one stone by finding his example and explain for the class why equivocations are bad.
Example of an equivocation:

>Noisy children are a real headache.
>Two aspirin will make a headache go away.
>Therefore, two aspirin will make noisy children go away.

>Nothing is better than a cold beer
>A warm beer is better than nothing.
>A warm beer is better than a cold beer.

>>2183323
Hi. So my problem is trying to prepare his reasoning in such a way as to make it understandable for high-school students.

He is basically saying: for utilitarian calculations we should not only regard the quantity of pleasure, but also the quality. There are higher and lower pleasures, the higher pleasures being worth more than the lower ones. We can distinguish between the two by deferring to people who have experienced both kinds to see which they prefer.

I myself am a philosophy graduate and keep finding myself having doubts about many of the things I need to teach.

Here my problem is that this method of differentiating higher and lower pleasures just doesn't seem to work, especially not in our modern world.

Mill would probably say literature, theater and philosophy are higher pleasures, while eating good food, sexuality and taking drugs are lower pleasures. My students have probably experienced all of these and believe me, they would laugh were I to suggest this.

Continued...

>>2183391
Then I would get hammered with examples of famous writers who loved both literature and drugs (and sex and food and wine). I guess here I could make the point that most writers would prefer literature over drugs if they were forced to make the choice... but I still feel very uneasy about the whole argument.

>>2183415
So I guess I'm answering my own question here: Mill is saying the higher pleasure (out of two) is the one chosen by someone who has experienced both, if they were forced to choose between the two.

>>2183391
Well, of course Mill is not going to touch the sensibilities of modern youth. Our elderly German professor was as happy to rid himself of Mill and move to Nietzsche as the rest of us were. However, I don't believe the point is to convert your students to Utilitarianism, but rather to demonstrate how philosophy students can borrow and utilize conceptual frameworks in Utilitarianism for their particular project, if they find them useful. That being said, it takes an understanding of his arguments as they are.
He was a19th century English Parliamentarian concerned with keeping the market in float, not a 60s French Communist. His position informed his philosophy and how he can maintain his world is supported by Utilitarianism. That being said:

Yes, the quantity of pleasure lengthens with its quality. We can always be reading philosophy, or engaging in political discourse, however drunkenness wanes with time and we come back to sobrierty. We can constantly participate in higher pleasures, and they can be participated in by all of society to the same degree. Also, most importantly, higher order pleasures have no victim. For Mill, the only right of Government is to protect others property from harm. They have no right to infringe on the personal decisions of others as far as those decisions are not harming other people. Thus, higher order political pleasures do not include riot starting, but rather democratic discussion.
We may find more intensity in the lower order pleasures, but for Mill they cannot be experienced by all of society without throwing society into chaos.
These pleasures must maintain the "Greatest Good for the Greatest Number".

>>2183391
I'd add to my last point that Mill essentially integrated the categorical imperative of Kant into his work. His argument was that if we were to act as if our actions were maxims,and treat others as ends, we can only derive how to do so by analyzing consequences. Which means seeing how these things play out in the world by trying them, rather than attempting to logically deduce their morality. Thus, he is a consequentialist as opposed to a deontologist, but largely what would be ethical for Kant still applies to Mill.

>>2183382
Most schools in Europe.

>>2183458
Thanks for the detailed answer!

I'm not trying to make them utilitarians, instead I'm trying to find ways of making his argument more easily understandable for younger students (who already have a lot on their minds). In this case it's really just about his differentiating between higher and lower pleasures in a philosophical, utilitarian sense, not a political one.

Mill was a utilitarian. Yes, albeit a more moderate one than Bentham or Daddy Mill. His liberalism is actually fairly syncretic one and combines elements of natural right theory, Aristotelianism, and even French positivism. In the end however it's mostly revised utilitarianism.

https://youtu.be/McqlDK2zBjY

Another problem I have, in case anyone is still here:

Bentham gave a pretty detailed explanation of how to calculate net pleasure and pain.

What is Mill adding to this? As far as I can tell he is merely saying that some forms of pleasure should count more than others (i.e. be worth more in a utilitarian calculation). But does this mean that Bentham was really just measuring the level of pleasure (i.e. using some sort of pleasure-measuring device) regardless of the type, while Mill is suggesting that even if two people experience the same level of pleasure doing different things, we still need to differentiate between *what* they are doing?

>>2183781
>still need to differentiate what they are doing

Exactly this. Just finished a course on him last semester. Our professor brought up that while Mill declares himself a hedonist (only pleasure is intrinsically good), he states in whatever chapter he goes into the higher and lower pleasures that "an unhappy Socrates is worth more than a happy fool" (paraphrasing)

Here, he seems to say that even if you take all of Bentham's criteria for measuring pleasure and the fool has more pleasure, Socrates is still morally superior.

Mill seems to be tacitly admitting that a criterion other than only experienced pleasure can determine the moral worth of a person/action.

Of course, if Mill is a hedonist, then he can only use pleasure to determine the value of a person /action.

That distinction might be a little heavy for highschoolers though, if you want to know more about weaknesses in utilitarianism check out Moore's Principia Ethica, it has a pretty savage takedown of Mill, really hammers home why simple principles can never be equated

>>2183781
>>2184351
You can also just tell your students that people realized quantifying pleasure is stupid so they came up with act/rule utilitarianism instead

>>2183382
pretty much all high schools in eastern Europe have those.