John Stuart Mill - Utilitarianism and Other Essays

1. From An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and
   Legislation by Jeremy Bentham

JOHN STUART MILL (180673) was educated by his father and through his influence obtained a clerkship at India House. He formed the Utilitarian Society which met to read and discuss essays, and in 1825 he edited Benthams Treatise upon Evidence. In 1826 he suffered an acute mental crisis and found that poetry helped him recover the will to live, particularly the work of Wordsworth. Having reconsidered his aims and those of the Benthamite school, he met Harriet Taylor and she inspired a great deal of his philosophy. They married in 1851. Utilitarianism was published in 1861 but before that Mill published his System of Logic (1843), Principles of Political Economy (1848) and On Liberty (1839). His other works include his classic Autobiography (1873). Mill retired in 1858 and became the independent MP for Westminster from 1865 to 1868. During the rest of his life he spent about half of each year in France and died in Avignon.

JEREMY BENTHAM (17481832) was educated at Westminster and Queens College, Oxford. He was called to the bar but found the work morally and intellectually distasteful and set out to theorize a simple and equitable legal system. The law of utility, for which he is best remembered, states that the goodness of a law can be measured in accordance with the measure in which it subserves the happiness of the individual. His democratic views are expressed in his Constitutional Code (1830). With J. S. Mill he founded the Westminster Review, the organ of his philosophical radicals. True to his principles, Bentham left his body to be dissected and his remains are on view at University College, London.

ALAN RYAN is Warden of New College and Professor of Politics at the University of Oxford. He was educated at Christs Hospital and Balliol College, Oxford. At the age of fifteen he was asked to write an essay on Mills Liberty and concluded that Mill was more than a match for his innumerable critics and a writer with much to say to the twentieth century. The Philosophy of John Stuart Mill (1970) and J. S. Mill (1974), defended that conclusion at greater length. Alan Ryans other books include Property and Political Theory (1984), Bertrand Russell: A Political Life (1988), John Dewey and the High Tide of American Liberalism (1995) and Liberal Anxieties and Liberal Education (1998). He jointly edited The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Political Thought (1987).

Mills Utilitarianism is one of the best known of all philosophical texts. Any student of philosophy and almost any student of English literature and English history will at least have glanced at it, and will have heard something about the philosophical and political movement to which its author belonged. Since it is short, readable, polemical and eloquent, it has always offered an easy way into the complexities of moral philosophy and into the creed of the utilitarian movement. But it has only kept that place because utilitarianism itself is the best known of all moral theories. It is doubtless an exaggeration to suggest that the greatest happiness principle is widely accepted as an ultimate moral principle by plain men and philosophers alike; it is certainly an exaggeration believed more readily by the opponents of utilitarianism than by its defenders. But much of what utilitarians argue has an immediate appeal to contemporary common sense. The idea that it is at least some argument in favour of a course of action that it gives happiness, the thought that numbers make a difference to the merits of any action or policy because they make a difference to how much happiness or misery it causes, the belief that basic morality is a matter of preventing us being a nuisance to our fellows and by extension getting us to do them some positive good all these are familiar utilitarian claims and commonplaces of everyday argument.

Most people have a good idea what is meant when, say, one politician accuses another of sacrificing justice for merely utilitarian considerations, or someone declares that city planners have sacrificed aesthetics to utility; but if they had accused each other of preferring teleological to deontological considerations, not one person in a hundred would have had the least idea what they were arguing about. This is far from saying that many people

Utilitarianism is associated above all with two men Jeremy Bentham (17481832) and John Stuart Mill (18061873). There were other distinguished utilitarians, among them Mills father and John Austin; since then there have been innumerable moral philosophers, philosophers of law and economic theorists who would have described themselves as utilitarians. None the less, it is Benthams brutally clear statement of the greatest happiness theory and Mills anxious reflections upon that theory which between them define utilitarianism. Bentham was the son of a Tory lawyer and was almost as precocious as J. S. Mill; he went to Westminster School at seven and Queens College, Oxford at the age of fifteen. He loathed both places, and all his life resented the hypocrisy of a university which forced its students to swear their belief in the Thirty-nine Articles of the Church of England but really cared for nothing but its own privileges. He was called to the bar in 1768, but almost immediately decided that the practice of the law was less important than its reform. For the next sixty-four years he wrote increasingly complicated proposals for that reform.

His earliest works are generally his most readable. Certainly that is true of the Fragment on Government of 1776 in which he demolished Blackstones Commentaries on the Laws of England together with the doctrine of the social contract and the theory of natural right. Its publication coincided neatly with the American Revolution, a revolution aimed at drawing up a new social contract for the protection of the natural rights of Americans. In 1789 he published his Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, seven chapters of which are printed here. (It had been written some time before 1780, according to his preface.) It has always been taken to be the definitive statement of Benthams utilitarianism; it is certainly the clearest and plainest statement. It in turn coincided with the outbreak of the French Revolution, though this was inspired by principles which Bentham dismissed as nonsense.

Much of Benthams energy was devoted to his project for a new design of reformatory, which he named the Panopticon on the strength of the prisons main feature a central observatory which would enable the gaoler to keep an eye on all his prisoners at any hour of the day or night and without their being aware of it. (The prison was designed on a star plan, with corridors radiating out from this central office.) Bentham offered his design to the government in the early 1790s, but nothing ever came of it, and after years of argument he was paid 23,000 for the time and expense the scheme had cost him. The effect on him of what he thought was ill-treatment by successive governments was to turn him from a believer in benevolent despotism into a believer in radical democracy. In early life, he had thought that an enlightened monarchy would be only too willing to institute legal reforms along utilitarian lines; the