Utilitarianism and Natural Rights

Utilitarianism, is the theory that the rightness of an act derives from the happiness or pleasure it produces as its consequences. Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832), was the famous utilitarian. Here we mention him for his view that talk about natural rights is so much nonsense. And, indeed, utilitarian philosophy in general does not easily accommodate a belief in natural rights. Why? Well, consider a possible natural right—for example, the right to keep what you have honestly earned. If taking from you what you have honestly earned and distributing it to people who are poorer than you are increases the sum total of happiness, utilitarianism apparently requires that we do this, despite your “natural right.” Utilitarianism seems to require violating any so-called natural right if doing so increases happiness.

Utilitarians often attempt to accommodate our intuitions about natural rights by maintaining that in civilized society more happiness results when what are called natural rights are respected than when they are not. They say that natural rights should be regarded as secondary rules of conduct that must be obeyed for the sake of the general happiness. However, in viewing natural rights as a system of moral rules that promote general happiness, utilitarians do not always explain why such rules should not be overridden when doing so better promotes the general happiness.

Harriet Taylor

Like many women philosophers, Harriet Taylor (1807-1858) has been known to the public primarily through her association with a male philosopher; in Taylor’s case the male philosopher was John Stuart Mill. Taylor and Mill shared a long personal and professional intimacy, and each shaped and influenced the ideas of the other. However, Taylor was a published author of poetry before she even met Mill in 1831. Recently, a draft of an essay on toleration of nonconformity was discovered in Taylor’s handwriting; it appears to have been written in 1832. She was a regular contributor of poetry, book reviews, and a literary piece to the radical, utilitarian, and feminist journal The Monthly Repository. Later, Mill, too, became a regular contributor, and eventually Taylor and Mill began writing together. However, their writings were published under Mill’s name, partly because a man’s name gave the work more legitimacy within a sexist culture but also because Taylor’s husband was unhappy with the idea of his wife’s gaining notoriety. Nevertheless, from the evidence of their manuscripts and their personal correspondence, it is possible to piece together an idea of which works were primarily Taylor’s and which were Mill’s; she was a profound thinker in her own right.

Taylor was interested both in sweeping transformations of society and in specific legal reforms. One of her greatest concerns was the tendency of English society to stifle individuality, originality, and radical political and religious views. English society, in her opinion, was intolerant of opinions that failed to conform to the mainstream. She considered the intolerance of nonconformity to be morally wrong and ultimately dangerous to human progress. Taylor’s essay on such intolerance is a stirring statement of the theory that “the opinion of society—majority opinion— is the root of all intolerance.” Her defense of minority viewpoints and individuality predated by twenty-seven years Mill’s famous treatise On Liberty 

John Stuart Mill

PROFILE: John Stuart Mill (1806-1873)

Many years ago, one of the authors came across a table of projected IQ scores for various historic “geniuses” in a psychology text. (Who knows how the scores were calculated?) At the top of the list, with some incredible score, was John Stuart Mill.

Mill began reading Greek at three and Latin at eight; by adolescence he had completed an extensive study of Greek and Latin literature as well as history, mathematics, and logic. Mill’s education was administered by his father, who subjected young John to a rigorous regimen.

At fifteen Mill settled on his lifelong objective, to work for social and political reform, and it is as a reformer and an ethical and political philosopher that he is most remembered. Mill championed individual rights and personal freedom and advocated emancipation of women and proportional representation. His most famous work, On Liberty (1859), is thought by many to be the definitive defense of freedom of thought and discussion.

In ethics Mill was a utilitarian, concerning which we have much to say in Chapter 10. He published Utilitarianism in 1863.

Mill’s interests also ranged over a broad variety of topics in epistemology, metaphysics, and logic. His System of Logic (1843), which was actually read at the time by the person in the street, represented an empiricist approach to logic, abstraction, psychology, sociology, and morality. Mill’s methods of induction are still standard fare in university courses in beginning logic.

When Mill was twenty-five, he met Harriet Taylor, a merchant’s wife, and this was the beginning of one of the most celebrated love affairs of all time. Twenty years later, and three years after her husband died, Mrs. Taylor married Mill, on whose thought she had a profound influence. On Liberty was perhaps jointly written with her and, in any case, was dedicated to her.

Harriet Taylor died in 1858. Mill spent his remaining years in Avignon, France, where she had died, to be near her grave.

Mill’s Autobiography, widely read, appeared in the year of his death. Mill still is the most celebrated English philosopher of his century.

Mill's Political Philosophy

Like Locke and Rousseau, John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) was much concerned with liberty. Mill, you will recall from the previous chapter, was a utilitarian. He believed that happiness not only is good but also is the good, the ultimate end of all action and desire. “Actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness,” he wrote. But remember that utilitarians are not egoists, and Mill believed that it is not one’s own happiness that one should seek but instead the greatest amount of happiness altogether—that is, the general happiness.

Unlike Rousseau, Mill did not view a community, a society, a people, or a state as an organic entity separate and distinct from the sum of the people in it. When Mill said that one should seek the general happiness, he was not referring to the happiness of the community as some kind of organic whole. For Mill, the general happiness was just the total happiness of the individuals in the group.

Now, Mill, following Bentham and Hume and like Rousseau, rejected Locke’s theory that people have God-given natural rights. But he maintained that the general happiness requires that all individuals enjoy personal liberty to the fullest extent consistent with the liberties of others. “The only part of the conduct of anyone, for which he is amenable to society, is that which concerns others. In the part which merely concerns himself, his independence is . . . absolute.” Mill regarded personal liberty, including freedom of thought and speech, as essential to the general happiness. It is essential, he argued, because truth and the development of the individual’s character and abilities are essential to the general happiness, and only if there is personal liberty can truth be ascertained and each individual’s capacities developed. It therefore follows that an individual should enjoy unrestrained personal liberty up to the point where his or her activities may harm others.

Of course, it is difficult to identify when an action may be said to harm others. Liberalism places the burden of proof on the person who claims that harm to others will be done. That the burden must be so placed is Mill’s position.

The best form of government, according to Mill, is that which, among all realistic and practical alternatives, produces the greatest benefit. The form of government best suited to do this, he maintained, is representative democracy. But Mill was especially sensitive to the threat to liberty posed in democracies by the tyranny of public opinion as well as by the suppression by the majority of minority points of view. For this reason he emphasized the importance of safeguards such as proportional representation, universal suffrage, and enforcement of education by the state.

Now, promoting the general happiness would seem sometimes to justify (if not explicitly to require) restrictions on personal liberty. Zoning ordinances, antitrust laws, and motorcycle helmet laws, to take modern examples, are, arguably, restrictions of this sort. Mill recognized the dilemma that potentially confronts anyone who wishes both to promote the general happiness and to protect personal liberty. His general position is this: The government should not do anything that could be done more effectively by private individuals themselves; and even if something could be done more effectively by the government, if the government’s doing it would deprive individuals of an opportunity for development or education, the government should not do it. In short, Mill was opposed to enlarging the power of the government unnecessarily.