▶︎ 0:00 We move on to our second philosopher, John Stuart Mill, but really our first ethicist. Socrates was primarily a meta-ethicist. Plato had ethical theories, but Socrates didn't have a lot. It was mainly the teaching us about ethics, what ethics is, what we need for ethics. And the main lesson that we learned was the form of an answer, what we need for an ethical theory. It has to have those three properties. Has to be universal, action-guiding, and tell us the essence of goodness.
▶︎ 0:34 But now we're going to start with answers. We're going to have three philosophers who give us forms, give us actual content to put into those abstract requirements, who meet those requirements. And we're starting with John Stuart Mill. As I said in the introductory lecture, we are doing the somewhat unusual, we have the unusual choice of going in reverse chronological order, because I have found that this is much better dialogue.
▶︎ 1:05 It's ironic, it's strange, but it's much better dialogue to have them in reverse chronological order than straight order. So we're starting with the latest and we're going backwards in time, back to Kant, and then way, way back to Aristotle, because these ideas had been around, so they're able to respond to the ideas of each other, and I find them to be much better critics in this order than in the chronological order. So Mill is our first ethicist, and he is
▶︎ 1:36 giving us the system known as utilitarianism. It was created by his father and Jeremy Bentham, but Mill is the person who put it into its best, clearest, most concise and best form in the book known as Utilitarianism.
▶︎ 1:56 Mill was a child prodigy. He spoke Greek at three, Latin at eight, wrote a history of Roman law at 11, and had a nervous breakdown at 20. Not terribly surprising. But he recovered and went on to a very, very successful career. He was a politician. He was an MP in the British Parliament. He introduced the first law for women's suffrage, for women to get to vote. Very, very strong proponent of women's rights.
▶︎ 2:25 He also founded the Libertarian Party, which has the third-largest number of elected politicians in American governments. But his most influential contribution is utilitarianism,
▶︎ 2:42 He opens the book with a complaint. He opens the book complaining about what he says on the first page is, "The little progress which has been made in the decision of the controversy respecting the criterion of right and wrong." So he's saying, and he talks about ever since Socrates, we still don't have an answer to Socrates' question. He's saying that the aporia that we saw Euthyphro ended with, the lack of an answer, has continued for all of these twenty centuries or so since then. No one has given an answer to the question, what is good, what is goodness, that satisfies the three requirements of form in a way that Mill thinks is good enough.
▶︎ 3:32 And Mill says that what we need is, on page three, we need one fundamental principle or law at the root of all morality, and that this principle will be a test of right and wrong that would be the means of ascertaining what is right or wrong. So he's saying we need a principle that will tell us the essence of goodness, and that will guide our actions universally. And he adds a couple of requirements of his own to what will be a satisfactory theory. He says that it must be self-evident.
▶︎ 4:17 Now this is a bit of a peculiar combination of qualities. On the one hand, it's been twenty-odd centuries and no one's answered this question, and on the other hand, the answer must be self-evident. And of course, Mill thinks he has the answer. He has an answer that will satisfy these requirements.
▶︎ 4:42 And he's saying that his answer will be the one fundamental principle at the root of all morality, that will give us the essence of it. It will give us the criterion for telling us what to do. It will guide our actions. It will do so universally, every action for every person, at all times, in all places. And it will be so obvious and clear that you'll smack your forehead and say, "Well, of course it's that. What else could it be? Why didn't anyone think of that beforehand?"
▶︎ 5:15 In the first three pages, Mill is setting the bar for himself extremely high. Not only will it fit all of those requirements, but it will be short and easy to understand. It'll be short enough to put on a T-shirt. The T-shirt rule of ethics. And this is what he has to meet. These are the requirements that he is setting for himself, and we have to hold him to that. We have to see if he can do this.
▶︎ 5:50 And let's think just for a second about the first requirement, universality. Because when Socrates laid this out, he was talking about one small city state, Athens. The universe that he was aware of was pretty small. Mill is in the 19th century, they're aware of the entire globe, and he wants his rule to be universal. That means it will apply to, and guide actions for everyone in every possible situation.
▶︎ 6:28 His moral law, which again, will fit on a T-shirt, will tell a caveman what he should do in every situation. Which will tell a 12th century monk what to do, an 8th century samurai, a 21st century app developer, a 25th century Martian colonist. All of them, with these massive changes in culture, in technology, in society. But this one rule that will fit on a T-shirt will be able to tell them what to do in every single situation of their life.
▶︎ 7:08 That is extraordinarily difficult to do. You should be very skeptical of this. And we have to insist that he prove that he's able to achieve such a difficult concept. Kant will make the same claim for his system as well. For Mill, Mill was
▶︎ 7:33 He did many, many things, and among them he was a pioneering social scientist. He, in fact, came up with one of the terms for social science. And so he believes that we have to approach ethics empirically. He believes that ethics is an empirical science.
▶︎ 7:58 Now, empirical means technically anything through the five senses. Anything we can see, hear, smell, touch, or taste. But more loosely, it applies to sciences that are not simply theoretical, they're not just sitting in an armchair thinking. But they use actual observational data. It goes out to the world and looks at things and gathers information. So it doesn't have to be a sense, it can be surveys, it can be other things. But it's based on observed information about the world.
▶︎ 8:32 And what Mill is saying, and he thinks this is just obvious, if we are to theorize about how humans should behave, we have to base that on a study of how they do behave. We are going to get prescriptive rules, meaning telling people what they should do, what they ought to do, we are going to base the prescriptive rules on descriptive analyses. The only way to know anything about ethics is to base it on a study of human beings, according to Mill.
▶︎ 9:17 Aristotle will agree with this, Kant will disagree with this. But this is a very important question, a metaethical question, how do we do ethics? Do we do it empirically or not? Mill, it's crucial that we do it empirically.
▶︎ 9:30 But in order to get universality, in order for his rule to apply to every human being who's ever lived and ever will live, he has to base it on some characteristic or property that is shared by every human being. The way he will get his moral rules to apply universally is by deriving them from some aspect of human nature that defines us and therefore will be found in every human being. If he can get the rules of morality from something to be found in every human being, then those rules will apply to every human being. And that's how he's gonna achieve his universality. He's gonna achieve the universality of morality by basing it on a universal analysis of human behavior. And he calls this analysis his Theory of Life.
▶︎ 10:42 Sounds a bit pretentious, but really all it is, is just a psychological theory of human motivation. Mill concludes, Mill looks at people and he says, "Well, look, people act for, in order to get things." We are, the technical term, teleological. Tele. From the Greek word telos, meaning goal or end. And all it means is we act for purposes. We don't act randomly, we don't just move for no reason. We do things in order to achieve goals.
▶︎ 11:20 Our motivation is always for acquiring, achieving, accomplishing something. And therefore, to understand human behavior, we have to understand our motivation towards getting our goals. And the Theory of Life is an analysis of how we act towards our goals, why we act towards our goals, what our motivations are.
▶︎ 11:52 In order to talk about this, this is empirical and universal, which means it should apply to anyone, anywhere, in any circumstances. So, I'm going to try to apply this to you. I don't know who you are, what you're doing. I assume that many people are watching these who are in an Introduction to Ethics class, so I'm just going to take that as my example, as what I use in class.
▶︎ 12:25 And the question is, why do people do what they do? So in order to have just the most non-biased, non-cherry-picked example, let's take the most immediate action that I do know you're doing, which is that you're watching this video. I know you're doing it because if you weren't doing it, you wouldn't hear me say that I know you're doing it. So here's an action you're doing and now the question is, why are you doing this? What is your motivation?
▶︎ 12:55 And I'm just going to assume that you're watching this as part of a help for a class, for an Intro to Ethics class. And so, if I ask you, "Why are you watching this video?" The answer would be, "In order to understand Mill." Pretty straightforward. It's a video explaining Mill's thoughts, therefore you're watching it in order to understand Mill. Makes sense. That's your goal. That's your telos. Your motivation is to achieve that understanding, and that is what explains the action that you're taking, watching the video.
▶︎ 13:32 So now we understand the action because we understand the goal, and because we're teleological, the actions are made intelligible by the goal. You're doing this because of that goal, so the goal explains the action. But it doesn't fully explain it, because although I now understand that you're watching the video in order to understand Mill, well, that answers the question, that illuminates the action, but it also just kinda pushed the question back a step. Because now my question is, well, why do you wanna understand Mill? Until I understand that goal, that goal doesn't fully explain the action that you take to get the goal. So I have to understand the goal you're trying to get with that goal.
▶︎ 14:22 Why you're watching the video is to understand Mill. Why do you want to understand Mill? Presumably, you have a test on Mill coming up. There's some kind of assignment there, and you wanna do well on it. Now I've got a better idea. That has further explained it. But yet again, I can ask the same question about that goal. Why do you want to do well on that test or that assignment? That's just a letter on a piece of paper or on a screen. Why is that valuable? Why would that motivate you to take certain actions?
▶︎ 14:56 Well, you wanna pass the class. Again, why do you wanna pass the class? Well, you want eventually to get a diploma. You wanna graduate college and get a diploma, and in order to do that, you have to get enough credits, which includes passing perhaps this Introduction to Ethics class that you're in. You know it's coming. Why do you want a diploma? A diploma is just a piece of paper with funny lettering and weird writing on it. Why is that valuable? Why would that motivate all of these actions throughout the four years, taking classes, reading books, doing assignments? What's the point of all that?
▶︎ 15:33 Well, one answer is to get a job, to get a good job. Many jobs require qualifications, require accreditation. You need a diploma for some of them, and so having a college degree enables you to get a better job. Why do you want a job? Well, among other things, jobs bring you money. And now notice, you are studying your philosophy to get money. So philosophy is lucrative, by your own admission.
▶︎ 16:06 So why do you want money? To continue our questioning. Well, we like money because we like getting things. One of the funny things about money, if you wanna win a bar bet, you could bet someone that no one wants money. Everyone thinks they want money. They don't actually. We only want the things that money gets us. No one wants money itself. Money itself is nothing. Money itself, although it's the epitome of worth, it actually is worthless on its own.
▶︎ 16:39 Imagine you're on a desert island, and there's no way you'll ever be rescued. And here comes a box floating up onto the shore, and you go to open it, and it's full of cash. How happy would you be? Would you rather have cash sitting on a desert island where you can't spend it? Or would you rather have cans of food and a can opener and a volleyball? If you can't spend the money, then it's worthless. The only reason we want money is to get rid of it. Money is purely an instrument to achieve other things. We don't want it for itself. We only want it for what it gets us.
▶︎ 17:22 So what do we want the money for? We want it for a nice house, a nice car, vacations, whatever things that you like. Why do you want those things? Well, they make us happy. Okay, why do you wanna be happy?
▶︎ 17:44 That's a stumper. What purpose are you trying to achieve by being happy? What further goal are you trying to accomplish by being happy? We ask that question at every single step along the way. Understanding Mill, getting a good grade, passing the course, getting a diploma, getting a job, getting money, getting things, and it made perfect sense every step along the way, but it doesn't really make sense here.
▶︎ 18:19 You don't want to be happy in order to do something else, in order to get something else, in order to be something else. You want to be happy because you want to be happy. Being happy is a completely different goal than all the other ones. All the other ones were what Mill calls instrumental goods. They're good, but they're good as instruments, as tools that get you something else.
▶︎ 19:00 Money is the ultimate instrumental good because it has nothing intrinsic up to it. There's no intrinsic value to money. It's only a tool to get you other things. So if you have huge piles of cash on a deserted island, it's meaningless. You don't want it. It doesn't do anything for you because you can't use it as the tool to get you other things.
▶︎ 19:27 But most of the things that we like, that we want, that we try to get are instrumental, and that's why that question, "Why do you want that?" made sense every step of the way. Because we want these things, we want to pass the class, we want to get the diploma and so on, because of what those things will get us. We want those goods because of the further goods that they enable us to acquire.
▶︎ 19:56 But what Mill argues, he got this argument from Aristotle as we'll see in two lectures. What Mill argues in his Theory of Life is that although the vast, vast majority of the goods that motivate our actions are instrumental, they can't all be. You can't have all instrumental goods. Because if you had all instrumental goods where A is only good because it gets you B, B is only good because it gets you C, C is, then none of them would have any goodness in them at all. You need to have a source pumping goodness into it from somewhere for any of these to have goodness in it.
▶︎ 20:44 So here's an analogy. If I want to borrow money from my friend, Abigail, I want to borrow 20 bucks from Abigail. She can give me 20 bucks even if she doesn't have it, because she can borrow 20 bucks from Bob. And Bob can lend Abigail 20 bucks even if he doesn't have it, if he borrows it from Charlie. And Charlie can get it from Dennis, and so on. And every step of the way, each one of these people can lend them the $20 even if they don't have it if they can borrow it from the next person.
▶︎ 21:13 But Zed, at the end of this has to actually have $20. If no one has the $20, then Abigail can't ever have it to give to me. So yes, we can keep lending and borrowing and borrowing and borrowing, but you can't do it forever. So there must be actual value in there somewhere for each thing to get it from the next one.
▶︎ 21:37 Therefore, although the vast majority of goods are instrumental, they can't all be. There has to be some other type of good that doesn't get its value from something else. Something that has value in itself so that it can insert that value into this chain of goods. And this is what he calls an intrinsic good.
▶︎ 22:07 Because it has goodness inside of it. These have goodness from something else. Abigail has her $20 from Bob, who has his $20 from Charlie. But Zed has 20 bucks. And what Mill argues in his Theory of Life is that in principle, there cannot only be instrumental goods. In principle, if there were only instrumental goods, then there would be no goodness in the chain at all and you would never act to do anything. You would not be watching this video in the first place. Unless you believe that it somehow led to something that was good in itself, you would not be doing it to attain other things.
▶︎ 23:05 So the fact that we act at all, the fact that we try to attain goals means that there is also some other type of good that exists somewhere in the world. And everything we do ultimately we do for the intrinsic good. Most of our actions, the vast, vast, vast majority of our actions are immediately for the instrumental good. You're watching this video to do well on the test, to do the test for the class, class for the... The vast majority, the goal right in front of it is instrumental and it has an instrumental. But all of the instrumental depend on the intrinsic. All of the people lending money depend on Zed having the $20. Without that, the whole thing doesn't work.
▶︎ 24:08 So everything you do, every step along the way, really if you understand it, is really not for the next step, not to do well on the test. But to get the intrinsic good, not to get the diploma, not to get the money, not to... All of it and any one of them individually and all of it collectively is for the intrinsic good, which means a lot of people come to philosophy for the meaning of life. Here's the meaning of life, get that intrinsic good. That's what motivates every single thing you've ever done and every single thing you ever will do, get that thing, because that's the source of all value that motivates your teleological behavior. Everything you do is to get that because that's the source of all the value that motivates you.
▶︎ 25:04 Aristotle says, who also said we're teleological, "In order to live well, we're like an archer. An archer can't hit the target unless they know where it is." So we can't have the right aims in life unless we know where to aim. So knowing what we want, what we're after, what the goal, what the point of all this is, is essential for us to achieve it better. It's essential for us to orient ourselves and aim ourselves at getting that thing. Until we know what it is, we're flailing about. We might get it, we might not. We don't know.
▶︎ 25:58 But figuring out what it is you really want, what you've been wanting, what you've been trying to get every second of every day will finally enable you, will improve your chances at getting it. Pretty good for watching a video.
▶︎ 26:17 The question we face now is, what are these intrinsic goods? Instrumental goods, they're everywhere, you can name anything, the vast majority of things. But what are the intrinsic goods? Because they're totally different. These are the things that we're after. And Mill says there's just one, happiness.
▶︎ 26:42 Every single thing you've ever done and every single thing you ever will do and every single thing that anyone ever does is ultimately because you want to be happy. And you think whatever it is you're doing will add to your happiness or detract from your unhappiness. This is called a eudaimonic theory or eudaimonism. This comes from the Greek word eudaimonia, which means happiness.
▶︎ 27:21 Some ethical theories are eudaimonic, which just means that they think that happiness is the highest good. Mill and Aristotle will say this. Kant is against it, as we'll see in the next lecture. But for Mill, this is the thing that we want. This is the reason why we act at all, ever, anyone. This is how he achieves the universality.
▶︎ 27:56 Now, here is the argument of utilitarianism. It's actually very, very simple. It's one step. If happiness is the only true good, the only thing that genuinely has value, then let's make as much of it as we can. That's it. That's it. That's the whole argument.
▶︎ 28:29 We start from the psychological. We start from the psychological, from the empirical, from the analysis of human nature. This is what we want. We want the intrinsic good of happiness. This is the only thing that's genuinely good. All intrinsic goods get their goodness from it eventually.
▶︎ 28:55 And from there, it moves to, in one step, the ethical theory. It moves to the form. And the form, he calls it the greatest happiness principle, the GHP, which says actions are good in proportion to which they produce happiness and they're bad in proportion to which they produce unhappiness. That's it. Lots of details, but that's the heart of the theory.
▶︎ 29:36 Start with an analysis of human behavior, of motivation, of why we behave or why we act the way we do, of goodness. We reach the conclusion there's only one true intrinsic good. That's the descriptive moment. From there, we infer the prescriptive moment. Therefore, you ought, that's a prescriptive, you ought to make as much of it as possible. Now, does this succeed at satisfying Socrates' three criteria of a form?
▶︎ 30:17 Socrates' metaethical work laid out the three requirements that any ethical theory must have. Mill says, "I can do that." And this is his answer, the greatest happiness principle is Mill's form, in the Socratic sense not the Platonic sense. It's Mill's ethical theory. And if he learned Socrates' metaethical lesson, about what an ethical theory must be, then it has to satisfy those requirements.
▶︎ 30:52 Let's see. Is it universal? He says, first of all, the theory of life is universal. Everyone acts to be happy. Every action is taken in order to be happy. And you are welcome to raise objections. This is what's fun about philosophy. Mill has no authority. He's brilliant, he's amazing, incredible. Doesn't matter, you can raise objections to him. You ought to raise objections, you should. That's your job, to raise objections to him. Look for weaknesses, look for problems.
▶︎ 31:34 But they have to be reasons. You can't just say, "I don't like it. I disagree with it. I don't, nah." You gotta have a reason. He is making a universal claim. When you make a universal claim, an objection can be any counter-example. If I say most swans are white and you say, "Well, there are some red swans over there." That doesn't refute my claim. But if I say, "All swans are white." You say, "There's a single black swan." Then I'm wrong. You've just refuted it. He is saying all actions are taken for the sake of happiness. So you can refute him if you come up with one counter-example. One example of an action that's not taken to be happy.
▶︎ 32:24 What about actions that we don't enjoy? Like practicing piano or guitar scales or your backhand in tennis or things like that. I don't like doing those. They suck. They don't make me happy. But playing the piano or guitar or tennis does. And I'm doing those to get better at those activities, and those activities make me happy. If practicing scales didn't make them better in any way, then I wouldn't do it. If those didn't lead to something that did make me happy, then I wouldn't do it. So I do them to make me happy, even though they don't make me happy, I do them in order to be happy, because I think they will eventually lead to happiness.
▶︎ 33:13 What about going to the dentist? That doesn't make me happy. I don't enjoy sitting there and getting drilled in. But why am I doing that? I go to the dentist because if I don't, I think I'm gonna have a whole lot more pain later. So although I'm getting unhappiness, I'm doing that to prevent greater unhappiness. So here we're in negative territory, but it's still a lesser negative number. And less unhappiness is the same as greater happiness. So he's got us again. But try to come up with some.
▶︎ 33:55 So he thinks it's universal. It's action guiding. We're gonna see more in a minute how it's action guiding, but what it tells us is look at all the various options, figure out which one produces the most happiness. Do that. There you go. That's guiding my actions. All I have to do in any situation that I'm in is figure out which one produces the most happiness, the greatest happiness, and then I know that's the right thing to do. It guides actions; it tells me exactly what to do in every situation.
▶︎ 34:35 And it tells me the essence of goodness. What Mill is trying to do here isn't just giving us a rule, but explaining the nature of ethics. Why are these things good? Just telling us this group of actions is good and this group of actions is bad is helpful, it's useful, it's worth knowing, but it's still superficial and it's limited just to what the list contains. What we really want to know is why are these actions on this list and why are those actions on that list?
▶︎ 35:15 Giving to charity. That's good. I agree. That's a good thing. But why? What makes that good? It's so obvious that it's hard to even focus our thoughts on it. We just immediately go past it. Of course, it's good, and go on. But why?
▶︎ 35:30 This is what philosophers do. Plato and Aristotle said, "Philosophy begins in wonder." What that means is when everyone else takes for granted, we stop and scratch our heads about it and think, "Well, why is that right? What does that mean?" So why is giving to charity good? You say it helps people. Okay, but that just pushes it back a step. Why is helping people good?
▶︎ 35:52 Mill's answer is the reason why helping people is good is because it produces more of the only good thing in the universe, happiness. I'm not sure that's right or wrong, but it is an actual answer to the question, why? It tells me the specific reason for this to be good. And why is hurting people bad? Because it reduces the only thing that is truly intrinsically absolutely good in the universe.
▶︎ 36:29 Now I understand. If it's true, which that's up to you to decide, I can't decide for you, but if it's true, then it tells me the intrinsic nature of what it means to be good, what it means to be bad. It does tell me which actions are good and bad, but it also tells me why. And for a human, that's really important. We, as rational beings, have the obligation to comprehend, not just to follow blindly. This is one thing that Socrates taught us. Now, another thing that Socrates taught us was the importance of definitions.
▶︎ 37:15 Mill has just defined goodness in terms of happiness. That's good, but now we have to understand what happiness is. And he does. He defines happiness. He says, "Happiness is pleasure and the absence of pain." There you go. That's the meaning of happiness according to Mill.
▶︎ 37:44 Now, he immediately entertains an objection to this. Mill, like the vast majority of philosophers, is not writing a dialog like Socrates does, so he doesn't get to have a character posing objections. But he knows the reader is gonna come with objections, and later, philosophers are gonna come with objections, so he anticipates some and will lay them out and then respond to them. And here's an objection that people have had about any pleasure-based ethics, which is,
▶︎ 38:16 They say, "It's a philosophy worthy of swine." Pigs, they sit around all day wallowing in mud and they enjoy it, and that's their whole life. And that's great for pigs because they're pigs, they can't do anything else. But humans are capable of much more. Humans aren't mere animals. We don't live just for pleasure. We can have greater interests. We love art, we love philosophy. We are capable of higher things than mere pleasure. Come on. That's horrible. That's disgusting. You are selling us short, Mill.
▶︎ 38:58 And Mill has a great response to this. He wouldn't have put the objection in there unless he had a great response, of course. His response is a judo flip on the objectors, use their objection against them. He says, "Hey, look, when I said pleasure, I didn't define what pleasure was. You, objector, you're the one who immediately said it's wallowing around in mud. You're the one who said the only pleasure humans, if I say pleasure, all that means is wallowing around in mud. I never said that. When I, Mill, say pleasure, I mean some of those higher activities too."
▶︎ 39:42 Of course we're capable of philosophy and art and wonderful things, but why do we like those? We like those because they give us a kind of pleasure. It's a different kind of pleasure than wallowing in the mud or whatever you wanna put in the place of wallowing in the mud. It's a different kind of pleasure, but it's pleasure. And so he distinguishes between these higher and lower kinds of pleasures. Higher tends to be intellectual, cultural and sophisticated, and the lower tend to be physical and lowbrow and so on. It's a bit snobby. But it enables him to accommodate different kinds of pleasures.
▶︎ 40:32 Bentham, the person who partnered with his father to create the initial version of utilitarianism, recognized only quantitative differences. There's only more or less pleasure. For Mill, there are qualitative differences. There are different types of pleasure. And that's, he thinks, what enables us to get out of this objection. And he says, "There's contentment." And yes, animals are more content than us, but happiness, human happiness is a much more complex phenomenon. It's much harder to get, but it's also much thicker, has many more components, and it's much, much greater than mere contentment.