Introduction
Personal happiness is one of the most important and complex philosophical issues. According to Mill, utilitarianism states that an individual should perform those actions that produce the most happiness, but that one’s very character should also be directed to the same end. The aim of the paper is to explore the main tenets of utilitarianism and happiness, apply them to personal vision of happiness and compare it to Aristotle’s notion of happiness and ideal life. Thesis Mills claims that Happiness is linked not only with the regulation of actions, but with the self-education of the sentiments; this position would be rejected and opposed by Aristotle who sees happiness as an ultimate and universal thing, a perfect in itself.
Main text
According to Mill, happiness is concerned not only with the regulation of actions, but with the self-education of the sentiments. This is so not merely because the character one has affects the actions one does, which in turn affect the level of happiness overall, though of course this matters. Rather, self-education is important in coming. Happiness enables those human beings who possess to understand the important difference between ‘higher’ and ‘lower’ pleasures.
Mill underlines that what is important—what the greatest happiness principle itself required—is to get people straight on these secondary principles. In his writing on these contentious issues, Mill is of course attempting to state what he believes; but he is also using the skills of a rhetorician to persuade (Mill 82). This knowledge is in the background in Utilitarianism. Mill explains that utility or happiness consists in pleasure. Mill supposes that pleasure in happiness can be proved, and this is part of his proof of utilitarianism itself. Happiness is connected with ethical theory, sanctions’ and moral motivation. Mill’s position on sanctions are closely tied up with his arguments for utilitarianism.
For instance, if driving or reading promotes m happiness, then to that extent it has a tendency to promote my happiness. And to the extent that it promotes unhappiness, through providing me with a splitting headache hours later, it has a tendency to promote unhappiness. According to Mill,
By happiness is intended pleasure, and the absence of pain; by unhappiness, pain, and the privation of pleasure. To give a clear view of the moral standard set up by the theory, much more requires to be said…But these supplementary explanations do not affect 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 (Mill 81).
Happiness can be seen as a systematic account of what makes actions right or wrong. Mill states his understanding of happiness is that: ‘Actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness” (Mill 43).
Mill would not be content even with an intuitively founded utilitarianism. There must be a first principle in happiness and it cannot be self-evident, since this would imply some special moral sense which people do not have. But this is not to say that utilitarianism and happiness can be proven. According to the utilitarian principle, happiness cannot be offered up as just obvious to those who properly understand it. Mill rejects the idea that it would be a simple issue to demonstrate that common happiness has been shaped largely by the utilitarian principle, though that principle has remained unrecognized. People are by nature concerned with their own happiness.
This issue of happiness can be extended to others even if they are not fully being aware of it. Mill recognizes that it would be as impossible to be a single-level act utilitarian and succeed as it would be to negotiate a complex voyage without navigational aids (Mills 99).
This understanding of happiness would be rejected by Aristotle who supposes that happiness is the most perfect of all things. Aristotle believed that happiness is chosen for its own sake and never for anything else; it is never chosen for the sake of honor or pleasure as Mill supposes. For Aristotle, happiness is not just an end, but a perfect end. Aristotle says that:
Now something that is pursued for its own sake we call more perfect than what is pursued because of something else; and something that is never chosen because of something else we call more perfect than the things that are chosen both for their own sake and because of the other thing (Aristotle 77).
Aristotle would criticizes Mill’s understanding of happiness as self-education of the sentiments. For Aristotle, happiness is more perfect than things like wealth which are always chosen for the sake of something else. Happiness is perfect like honor which is selected for its own sake. The complete whole which is happiness is the activity of complete virtue in a complete life. So that when Aristotle goes on to list examples of moral and intellectual virtues, the virtues are parts of happiness. For instance, a human’s virtue whose activity is the supreme good is a virtue which is constituted by the several virtues (Aristotle 72). Aristotle underlines that “Just as good bodily condition is compounded of the partial virtues, so is the virtue of the soul considered as an end” (Aristotle 101).
For the ideally happy man the issues good, pleasant, and noble coincide in their application. People can bring this into relief by examining the cases where the concepts do not coincide (Aristotle 45). Pleasure has already been discussed: what kind of thing it is, and in what sense it is a good; and how things which are pleasant simple are noble, and things which are good more simple are also pleasant. There cannot be pleasure except in action: and so the truly happy man will also have the most pleasant life, Aristotle singles out two factors which happiness must fulfill. Happiness must be perfect, and it must be self-sufficient. The perfection of happiness is his main argument.
The property which must now be considered is its self-sufficiency. Aristotle, in making self-sufficiency a requirement of happiness, defines the self-sufficient as “that which on its own makes life worthy of choice and lacking in nothing” (Aristotle 91). Aristotle’s requirement that happiness must be self-sufficient is used as a principal argument by those who wish to press an inclusive interpretation of the concept of happiness. If happiness on its own makes life desirable and lacking in nothing, then, so it is argued, it cannot be restricted solely to contemplation (Aristotle 62).
In contrast to Aristotle, Mill supposes that the happiness of each person—that is, the pleasurable experience of each person—is a good to that person. The suggestion that pleasure is desirable is hardly difficult to accept, and one might be forgiven for wondering why Mill thought he had to argue for it. The paragraphs following paragraph 3 provide the answer. Mill uses the same type of argument in an attempt to demonstrate something much less plausible, that people desire nothing other than happiness or pleasure.
Mill underlines that the only reason a person can give why the general happiness—that is, maximum pleasure overall—is desirable is that each person desires his own happiness. It is easy to see why so many interpreters over the years have been deeply concerned about this part of Mill’s position. The gap between hedonism and the utilitarian view of the greatest happiness is vast, and Mill appears to be trying to leap it in one bound. The phrase ‘every human being’s happiness is a good to every other human being’ is almost certainly meant as equivalent to “the sum of all individual happiness is a good to each human being” (Mill 51).
So a desire by any person deliberately and consciously, independently of customary morality, to maximize happiness would almost certainly be disastrously self-defeating. Mills explains that since his theory about moral thinking will in fact produce the most happiness overall, messy as the theory is, it is justified by the supreme principle of practical reason, the principle of utility.
We cannot know for sure whether any action of ours was or was not the maximizing action, so it is not clear how we are to decide when to feel guilty. By recommending that we follow customary morality most of the time, Mill makes it difficult for us to feel guilty about doing what is really wrong. If I lie, for example, and it is indeed a failure to maximize utility, I shall feel guilty about lying. My conscience is likely to be unaffected by my failure to maximize (Mill 72).
Mill means that good is additive, in that two people’s goods have twice as much goodness, other things being equal, as either of them taken alone. What Mill needs in his position to prove is what he denies in this letter that that argument contains. For the egoist could agree with Mill’s additive assumptions, but deny that goodness translates directly into the rationality of ends. As moralists, then, readers might be expected to allow that, since happiness is a good, other people’s happiness should matter to them.
So to prove his case that happiness alone is desirable Mill must defuse this objection (Mill 62). One of the obvious candidates which one of Mill’s intuitionist opponents would have offered as an end different from happiness is virtue. Mill agrees with this and supposes that people do desire virtue. One strategy he might then have adopted would have been to claim that people desire virtue only as a means to happiness, whereas his own criterion for desirability involves desires for ends.
One way he could get to his conclusion would be by arguing that virtue is in fact an enjoyable experience. His desire criterion is intended to locate which objects are desirable. If it turns out to be the case that everything people desire is in fact an enjoyable experience, then he can claim that nothing other than enjoyable experiences is desirable, even if people desire happiness for themselves independently of its being enjoyable (Mill 44).
Summary
In sum, Mill supposes that happiness is concerned with the self-education of the sentiments while Aristotle idealizes this state. One way he could get to his conclusion would be by arguing that virtue is in fact an enjoyable experience. His desire criterion is intended to locate which objects are desirable. If it turns out to be the case that everything people desire is in fact an enjoyable experience, then he can claim that nothing other than enjoyable experiences is desirable, even if people desire virtue for themselves independently of its being enjoyable. Mill needs only the first claim in this argument, since all he wishes to suggest here is that it is only pleasurable experiences that are desired. Recall that full human happiness includes both the claim that welfare is constituted by pleasurable things, and the claim that these emotions are valuable because they are enjoyable.
Works Cited
- Chang, L. Aristotle on Happiness. VDM Verlag Dr. Mueller e.K. 2008.
- Mill, J., Sher, G. Utilitarianism. Hackett Publishing Company; 2 edition, 2002.