John Stuart Mill Utilitarian Analysis

How to ground one's ethical positions is an important question that often arises for anyone studying moral philosophy. Over the course of many centuries, philosophers from Aristotle to Kant have attempted to provide answers to this question. Among the most famous of the proposed solutions is utilitarianism. Coming in many forms and permutations, utilitarianism is an approach to ethics that emphasizes providing the most happiness to the greatest number. It is an approach perhaps most famously advanced by scholars Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill. Although both Bentham and Mill believed strongly in utilitarianism, each man brought his own ideas and interpretations to the subject. In part due to the work of both men, utilitarian ideas have …show more content…
As previously mentioned, in its most basic form, utilitarianism emphasizes the greatest happiness of the greatest number. In other words, the goal of morality is to increase aggregate happiness and well-being and reduce aggregate suffering. With this being said, utilitarians have often disagreed on how happiness and well-being are measured and how to best increase the level of aggregate happiness. For example, direct utilitarianism, advanced by Bentham, claims the moral rightness of our actions should be determined by the amount of pleasure our actions produce for those impacted minus the amount of suffering it also potentially produces. Bentham argues that each action we take should be scrutinized for the potential positive and negative effect it may have on others and calculated numerically on a pleasure and pain spectrum. If an action produces negative outcomes for someone, that person's suffering should be assigned a negative pleasure number on a scale of one to ten. If an action produces pleasure for anyone impacted, that person should be assigned a positive pleasure number. Once every pleasure number has been determined for those involved, the person taking an action should add the positive and negative numbers. If the final number is negative, that means the aggregate effect is negative, and the action should not be taken. If the final …show more content…
For Mills, Bentham's approach is impractical, requires too much burdensome calculation, and erroneously presumes that pleasure is most important. To correct for these perceived shortcomings, Mill's suggests that all that is required of an individual is that they choose a set of rules that, when known and adhered to, produce the most happiness. Mill's approach to utilitarianism is often called direct utilitarianism or rule utilitarianism. From Mill's perspective, this approach is more sound and easier to apply. With these two definitions in mind, we can proceed with an examination of the play Between Riverside and