Utilitarianism & Mill’s Felicific Calculus
Mill believes that the summum bonum of life is happiness, and moral rightness or wrongness obtains to the degree that an intended act produces an optimific balance between pleasure and pain (Mill 2013, 417–422). He is not an unalloyed Epicurean in that his Principle of Greatest Happiness asks us to consider not only our own happiness but also that of other members in society, including all sentient beings. To this effect, he even claims Jesus to be the utilitarian par excellence and subsumes Christ’s Golden Rule under his principle. He then proceeds to develop his theory of Utilitarianism through a series of apologetics to at least five objections.
The first objection sees the utilitarian ideal as unduly exacting on moral agents, requiring them to seek impulses to promote general happiness at every juncture of action. Mill replies by distinguishing motive from intention. Whether one rescues a drowning person out of loving or dutiful feelings or out of concealed hope for reward is irrelevant to the moral quality of the act, so long as her intention is genuinely to save the victim, i.e., aimed at a good outcome. Furthermore, the general mass may rightly focus on the private utility of their actions without worrying about a wider global application.
To the second charge that utilitarianism creates austere, indifferent men and women, he responds that utilitarianism recognizes the value of virtue; however, an action should not be judged morally because it was done by a good or a bad person. These considerations are relevant insofar as they concern judging a person rather than an act.
Thirdly, he rejects the likening of the idea of utility to expediency. For instance, shrewd opportunists may lie their way ahead and amass greater net happiness over relatively lesser harm caused. He responds that such acts erode veracity and undermine trust in a society, resulting in its eventual disastrous consequences. Moreover, even if lying was allowed, say for instance, to hide a Jew from the Nazi, it still adheres to the principle of utility in recognizing rare exceptions to rules to preserve the upshot of happiness.
The fourth objection holds that the felicific calculus is time-intensive to work out. Mill rejoinders: no action is judged ab initio in a vacuum with first principles, but at one’s disposal is a vast backdrop of historical moral memory that has distilled through trial and error. One taps into such a reservoir, through secondary principles or derived heuristics, for example, in rules of thumb that cultural norms exemplify.
Finally, he addresses the moral laxity and “dishonest casuistry” where biased moral agents may rationalize their own exception to rules. He counters that such sophistry, common to all ethical systems, can be dismantled by appealing to the Greatest Happiness Principle acting as the ultimate arbiter that collapses the dilemma between apparently conflicting choices.
Critique
A foundational flaw in Mill’s utilitarianism is its failure to account for a human person as an intrinsic end in themselves rather than as a mere means or pleasure-maximizing machine. Mill, as an empiricist, conceives a person as merely a bundle of experiences. Thus, the value of a person is evaluated solely by the consequences her actions bear. For example, if two policies, A and B, yield identical net happiness, but A, to preclude possible social unrest, forcibly suppresses an innocent and dissenting minority while B does not, utilitarianism offers no principled reason to prefer B over A. Both policies are optimific and carry equal moral weight. Thusly, his hypothetical imperative is found wanting. By contrast, a robust moral framework such as Christian Ethics that affirms the inviolable intrinsic worth of persons as bearers of the image of the creator God better safeguards rights and justice.