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According to John Stuart Mill, Utilitarism has one end and that end is happiness, or at least, diminuishing the suffering. Mill explains that the theory of utility is not something to be contradistinguished from pleasure but that it is pleasure itself, together with the exemption from pain. There is a distinctive creed in the theory of Utility called the Greatest Happiness Principle that holds that actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of hapiness. When Mill talks about happiness he means pleasure and the absence of pain. By unhappiness he means pain and the privation of pleasure.
In Utillitarianism by John Stuart Mill we can recognise that the pleasures that conform happiness are classified in different categories.Some kinds of pleasure are more desirable and more valuable than others. Mill expresses that for this classification what should be taken more into consideration is quality and not quantity. Mill holds that every human being would search for the highest level of satisfaction they can get because no one will have the consent of feeling satisfied with something inferior to them "no intelligent human being would consent to be a fool, no instucted peson would be an ignoamous, no person of feeling and conscience would be selfish and base, even thoughthy shound be persuaded that the fool, the dunce, or the rascal is better satisfied with his lot than they are with theirs". Thus, a human being of higher faculties will need more to reach happiness than a man with little intelligence. Even though a being of higher faculties requires more to be happy and is probably more capable of more acute suffering, this being can never really wish to sink in a lower grade of existence.The reason for this behaviour is dignity.
A human being of higher faculties will not envy the being who is indeed unconscious of the imperfections of the world "It is better to be a human dissatisfied than a pig satisfied." Nonetheless, many who are capable of higher pleasures sometimes choose, under the influence of temptation, a lower pleasure instead. But this is quite compatible with a full apreciation of the intrinsic superiority of the higher. Mill believes that men often make their election to the nearer good, though they know it to be less valuable.Further more, it could also happen that those who begin with youthful enthusiasm for everything noble, as they advance in years sink into indolence and selfishness. Mill doesn't believe that those who go through this change voluntarily choose the lower description of pleasures in perference to the higher. Mill considers that befoe they devote themselves exclusively to one, they have already become incapable of the other. Capacity fo the nobler feelings is in most natures something very easy to kill and in the majority of young persons it speedily dies away if the occupations they have had in life and the society into which it has thown them, are not favourable to keeping that higher capacity in exercise. Thus, men lose their high aspirations as they lose intellectual tastes, because they haven't time or opportunity for indulging them; and they addict themselves to inferior pleasures, not because they deliberately prefer them, but because they are either the only ones to which they have access, or the only ones which they are any longer capable of enjoying.
The Utilitarian standard for Happiness is not the agent's own greatest happiness but the greatest amount of happiness altogether.According to the Greatest Happiness Principle, the ultimate end is an existence exempt as far as possible from pain, and as rich as possible in enjoyments, both in point of quantity and quality; the test of quality, and the rule for measuring it against quantity, being the preference felt by those who in their opportunity of experience, to which must be added their habits of self-counsciuosness and self-observation, are best furnished with the means of comparison. This, being according to the utilitarian opinion, the end of human action, is necessarily also the standard of morality.
Utility includes not solely the pursuit of happiness, but the pevention or mitigation of unhappiness as well. When, however, it is positively asserted to be impossible that human life should be happy, the assertion, if not something like a verbal quibble (equivocate, untruth, trifle), is at least an exxageration. If by happiness we mean a continuity of highly pleasuable excitement, it is evident enough that this is impossible. The happiness that is meant is not a life of rapture (ecstasy); but moments of such, in an existance made up of a few and transitoy pains, many and various pleasures, with a decided predominanceof the active over the passive, and having the foundation of the whole, not to expect more from life than it is capable of bestowing. A life thus composed,, to those who have been fortunate enough to obtain it, has appeared worthy of the name of happiness.
The objectors perhaps may doubt whether human beings, if taught to consider happiness as the end of life, would be satisfied with such a moderate share of it. But great numbers of mankind have been satisfied with much less. The main constituents of a satisfied life appeared to be two tranquility and excitement. With much tranquility, many find that they can be content with very little pleasure with much excitement, many can reconcile themselves to a considerable quantity of pain. There is no inherent impossibility in enabling even the mass of mankind to unite both; since the two are so far from being incompatible that they are in natural alliance. It is only in those whom indolence amounts a vice, that do not desire excitement after an interval of repose it is only those in whom the need of excitement is a disease, that feels the tranquility which follows the excitement dull and insipid, instead of pleasurable in direct proportion to the excitement that preceeded it. When people who are tolerably fortunate in their outward lot don't find in life enough enjoymentto make it valuable to them, the cause generally is, caring for nobody but themselves. Next to selfishness, the principal cause which makes life unsatisfactory is want of mental cultivation. A cultivated mind finds sources of inexhaustible interest in all that surrounds it (in the objects of nature, art, poetry, history, etc.). It is possible to become indifferent to all this, and that too without having exhausted a thousandth part of it; but only when one has from the beginning no moral or human interest in these things, and has sought in them only the gratification of curiosity.
Mill explains that genuine pivate affections and a sincere interest in the public good are possible, though in inequal degrees, to every rightly brought up human being. In a world in which there is so much interest, so much to enjoy, and so much also to correct and improve, every one who has this moderate amount of moral and intellectual requisites is capable of an existence which may be called enviable.
As for vicissitudes of fortune, and other dissapointments connected with worldly circumstances, these are principally the effect either of gross imprudence, of ill-regulated desires, or of bad or imperfect social institutions. All the grand sources of human suffering are in a great degree, many of them almost entirely, conquerable by human care and effort; and though their removal is grievously slow yet every mind sufficiently intelligent and generous to bear a part, however small and unconspicous, in the endeavour, will draw a noble enjoyment from the contest itself, which he would not for any bribe in the for of selfish indulgence consent to be without.
As rewards sacrificing one's own happiness in order to increase the amount of happiness in the world, Mill admires this action profoudly nonetheless clarifying that this would be an inspiring proof of what men can do, but assuredly not an example of what they should. The utilitarian morality does recognize in human beings the power of sacrificing their own greatest for the good of the others. It only refuses to accept that the sacrifice is itself a good. A sacifice which does not increase, the sum total of happiness, it is consider as a waste. The only self renounciation which applauds, is devotion to the happiness, or to some of the means of happiness, of others. The happiness which forms an utilitarian standard of what is right in conduct is not the agent's own happiness, but that of all concerned. As between his own happiness and that of the others, utilitarianism requires him to be as impartial as a desinterested and benevolent spectator. To do as you would be done and to love your beighbour as yourself, constitute the ideal perfection of utilitarian morality. As to the means of making the nearest approach to this ideal, utility would enjoin first, that laws and social arrangements should place the happiness of every individual as possible in harmony with the interest of the whole; and secondly, that education and opinion which have so vast a power over human character, should so use that power as to establish in the mind of every individual an indissoluble association between his own happiness and the good for the whole.
Objectors of utilitarism believe that the standars is to high for humanity, that it is exacting too much to require that people shall always act from the inducement of promoting the general interest of society. Mill answers that they've mistaken the meaning of a standard of morals and that they confound the rule of action with the motive of it. It is the business of ethics to tell us what are our duties, or by what test we may know them; but no system of ethics requires that the sole motive of all we do shall be a feeling of duty. The great majority of good actions are intended not for the benefit of the world, but for that of individuals, of which the good of the world is made up; and the thoughts of the most virtous man need not on these ocassions travel beyond the particular persons concerned, except so far as necessary to assure himself that in benefiting them he is not violating the rights of any one else. The multiplication of happiness is, according to the utilitarian ethics, the object of virtue.
Utilitarianism has also received the critique of being a Godless doctrine. Mill believes that for this accusation we should pay more attention to what meaning we give to God. If God desires, above all things, the happiness of Its creatures, Utility is not a Godless doctrine, but more profoundly religious than any other.
Utilitarianism is along with ethical egoism, the main consequentialist theory. These two theories are based on creating good and believe that human beings ought to behave in ways that will bring about good consequences. However, they disagree on who should benefit from those consequences. Ethical egoism believes one should act based on one's own self-interest while Utilitarism, as we've read, believes one should act in the interest of all concerned.
Comparing Utilitarism (a consequentialist theory) with the non-consequentialist theories, we find that the main differences are that the non-consequentialist theories give more importance to the duty and the motives. Instead of taking into account the consequences, one must give importance to the motives.
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