John Stuart Mill was born in England in 1806. He contributed to many areas of philosophy, including logic, metaphysics, and epistemology, but is most famous for his political theory, and for his utilitarian ethics.
Mill believed that happiness was the greatest good – that it was the one thing that every human being wants, and that our desire for happiness was the root behind all other desires. For example, we may want a bicycle, or an education, or a chocolate cake, but we want these things because we believe they will make us happy.
Theory of Pleasure
Happiness, according to Mill, is "pleasure and the absence of pain," and unhappiness is "pain, and the privation of pleasure." Thus, like the ancient philosopher Epicurus, he was a hedonist; that is, he believed that pleasure was of ultimate importance. However, Mill did not believe that our goal was simply to increase the amount of pleasure; he placed great importance in the type of pleasure one experiences. While pleasures of the body – food, drink, sex – are indeed conducive to happiness, he also discussed the "higher" pleasures associated with intellectual pursuits, education, and mental activities of all sorts. While an animal could be fully happy with a life of lower pleasures, a human being could not fully be happy unless attention was paid to these higher pleasures.
Greatest Happiness Principle
The engine of Mill's ethical theory is his Greatest Happiness Principle, according to which "actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness." Every human being tries to promote his or her own happiness, and avoid unhappiness. This is natural, not ethical. Promoting happiness becomes an ethical theory when it is applied to all human beings, not just ourselves. Mill's utilitarian calculus thus figures out how many people are affected by an action, how they are affected, and therefore whether the action is right or wrong. Thus, the Greatest Happiness Principle tells us that an action is right in so far as it promotes happiness in all people affected by that action, and wrong in so far as it brings unhappiness to the people affected by that action.
For example, suppose someone is made happier by travel, and books himself a trip to Tahiti. The pleasure he experiences by this trip is taken into account in Mill's utilitarian calculus. However, if he robs a bank to pay for his trip, then the utilitarian calculus also takes into consideration the pain many people were caused by the bank robbery. The unhappiness created by the robbery vastly outweighs the happiness of one traveler, and thus, this action is immoral.
Consequentialism
The morality or immorality of an act, for Mill, is based entirely on the consequences of that action. Whereas the ethics of Immanuel Kant, for example, would tell us that lying is always immoral, no matter the consequences of the lie, Mill's ethics leads us to the conclusion that lying is sometimes wrong, and sometimes right, depending on the consequences. Thus, the little white lie told to make someone feel good might be the moral thing to do, according to Mill.
The most important part of Mill's utilitarian calculus is that it removes the importance of our own happiness from the calculation. We are allowed to include our own happiness in the calculation, but it counts exactly the same as everyone else's. We are forbidden by the Greatest Happiness Principle to cause others pain for the sake of our happiness. Thus, while it may be in our nature to pursue our own happiness at any cost, according to Mill, we only are ethically justified in this pursuit if we do so without harming other people. Further, the best action is that which brings happiness not only to ourselves, but to many others as well.
References
Brink, David. "Mill's Moral and Political Philosophy." Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2007.
Mill, John Stuart. Utilitarianism. Hackett Publishing Company, 2002.
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