The Argument Of Morality, By John Stuart Mill

John Stuart Mill was a philosopher who believed in the principle of utility. Utility, as used in the text, is the principle that states morality comes from happiness and pleasure. Also known as the greatest happiness principle, utility seeks to find the greatest happiness for the greatest amount of people. Although some philosophers might not agree with Mill, he believed that progression and experience plays a huge role in morality. To begin with, lets discuss the basic model for Mill. We are all born into this world with some innate ideas, however morality is not one of them. Morality, for Mill, is based on experience and progresses through out the life span. What was moral in the past might not be considered moral today and vice versa. As a child we have lower pleasures. Pleasures that include things like ice cream and candy, however as we grow older and experience new things as well as become educated we are able to have a more abstract style of thinking and therefore we are able to formulate higher pleasures. Some examples of these higher pleasures would include things such as knowledge and happiness for others or a sense of …show more content…
Mill explains this in the following quote, “if justice be totally independent of utility, and be a standard per se, which the mind can recognize by simple introspection of itself; it is hard to understand why that internal oracle is so ambiguous, and why so many things appear either just or unjust, according to the light in which they are regarded” (Mill, 47). Furthermore, in a case in which morality was not based on experience, we all would be born with innate ideas that tell us what is just and unjust, but in fact justice is based on experience and we must learn justice throughout the