Utilitarians: How People Gain Their Ideas Of Happiness

. One of the greatest problems utilitarians have had to face is that of measurement and evaluation. Since the majority of people gain their ideas of happiness from a process of abstraction. I.E "I have a general idea of what a plesaureable experience is, so I will attempt to find commonalities until I determine what exactly pleasure is." There are bound to be different interpretations of what pleasure is as humans tend to have different types of experiences they enjoy. The first piece of this problem is that of measurement. If pleasure is an experience that happens in the physical world it should be measurable, observable, and comparable, but it seems every attempt to measure happiness cannot account for comparative happiness. For example, …show more content…
A problem also arises when drugs that induce happiness are introduced into the equation. If I were to kidnap a generally miserable homeless person and put them on an I.V that would give them continuous opioids until they eventually die, it could be argued I am a model utilitarian. Since it seems that pleasure can be induced without any regard to the individuals choice it puts utilitarians in a very precarious position if they want to defend things like free speech or privacy laws. Mill would argue against the heroin example through his argument of "higher and lower pleasures." His argument is simply that when these pleasures are in conflict we should turn to "qualified individuals" who have experienced both yet vastly prefer one. The problem with this idea is the it is neither predictive nor determinate. Imagine you are in a room with nine other people and a poll is taken to determine whether Coke or Pepsi is more pleasureable. All nine other people vote that Coke is the superior