The Good Life

The final graded assignment is an 8-10 page paper on the question: what is the good life? This assignment will be completed in four parts, so you may want to use section headers to organize your paper. This paper is somewhat cumulative, so you may need to review material from previous weeks to prepare for this essay. Remember to explain the theories you reference with supporting citations to the textbook and online lectures before contrasting them in correct APA format. You may want to use examples to illustrate your understanding of key ideas in each theory. 

Address the following in your paper:

1. The Consequentialism Debate: Compare and Contrast deontology and utilitarianism. Briefly discuss the differences between Bentham and Mill’s versions of utilitarianism. Discuss the political and ethical implications of utilitarianism.
2. Explain virtue ethics and care ethics and discuss how these approaches offer an alternative to the deontological and utilitarian focus on how we should act.
3. Explain existential ethics and briefly discuss the role of free will in ethical decision making. The explanation of existentialism should discuss the following ideas: authenticity, ambiguity, freedom, anxiety, and bad faith. 
4. Illustrate the theories discussed with examples, including situations relevant to your current or future career.

Don’t forget you must use textbook: 

Roots of Wisdom: A Tapestry of Philosophical Traditions Helen Buss Mitchell 

as your main reference and any other sources you may want to use.

Utilitarianism as a Measure of Justice

Like the classical theorists, utilitarians argue that the social good, or the good of society, is what really matters. Unlike Plato and Aristotle, however, they define what is good in terms of pleasure. The question they pose is a simple one: What is most useful, or utilitarian? Their answer is also simple: more pleasure and less pain for the greatest number of people. If we really want to have a just society, then according to

utilitarianism

, right or just actions are those that ordinarily produce the greatest amount of happiness and the least amount of unhappiness in the world at large.

utilitarianism
the theory that an action is right if it seeks to promote the greatest amount of happiness in the world at large

We must also consider matters of degree, for there may in fact be cases in which the mild unhappiness of many might be offset by the extreme happiness of a few. Living as we do in a society rooted in basic freedoms, the idea of being forced to donate blood is a repugnant one. Still, if my demanded pint of blood saves a life, might it not be possible to argue that the greater good more than balances the lesser evil?

When we use words like good and evil, what we really mean, utilitarians insist, is pleasurable and painful. We often pretend that these words have some independent reference, that they represent the will of God, for instance, but in truth we do not know what the will of God is. What we do know is what gives us pleasure, and we simply assume that those same things must be pleasing to God. As Ludwig Feuerbach pointed out (see

Chapter 4

), humans have a strong tendency to project their own human characteristics, including their needs and wants, onto God. Utilitarians believe that we should be honest about seeking pleasure and trying to avoid pain, rather than dressing up those desires in abstract language and pretending they are divinely decreed.

Utilitarianism is, then, a sort of social

hedonism

; the individual hedonist seeks pleasure for herself or himself, whereas the social hedonist seeks pleasure for the society. Social good is advanced and justice is done, according to utilitarians, if more people experience a balance of pleasure over pain than vice versa. It is all a kind of math problem on a social scale. Produce more pleasure than pain, and the result will be justice; produce more pain than pleasure, and the result will be injustice.

hedonism
the theory that pleasure is the highest good

Jeremy Bentham

Jeremy Bentham, the first modern utilitarian, had in mind exactly this kind of mathematical conception of pleasure over pain. As a British critic of crown policy toward the American colonies and a supporter of their subsequent revolt in 1776, Bentham declared the U.S. government the only existing one that upheld utilitarian principles. When we speak of a community, Bentham wrote, we speak of a fictitious concept, for a community is nothing more than the individuals of which it is made; make them happy as individuals and you make a happy community. Those who fashion the law ought to have this goal in mind, and they must recognize that their only hope of enforcing the law lies in the promise of pleasure or the threat of pain:

· The happiness of the individuals, of whom a community is composed, that is their pleasures and their security, is the end and sole end which the legislator ought to have in view; the sole standard, in conformity to which each individual ought, as far as depends upon the legislator, to be made to fashion his behaviour. But whether it be this or any thing else that is to be done, there is nothing by which a man can ultimately be made to do it, but either pain or pleasure.

7

THE MAKING OF A PHILOSOPHER

Jeremy Bentham

(1748–1832)

Nicknamed “philosopher” at the age of five, Bentham had already begun studying Latin at the age of four and went on to finish college and law school while still a teenager. He grew up to write commentaries on English law and society and became a supporter of both the American and French Revolutions. As the good friend of James Mill, Bentham became godfather to Mill’s son John, and together they crafted an ambitious program of study for the young boy. Unfortunately, it focused exclusively on reason and ignored the other aspects of a growing boy.

Because a community is nothing but the sum total of its individuals, the principle of utility can be most clearly stated and understood through the life of the individual. According to Bentham’s theory, moral dilemmas can become a sort of arithmetic exercise in which we add up the units of pleasure and pain and subtract one from the other. For Bentham, the quantity of pleasure mattered most; the greater the quantity of pleasure, the more desirable and useful the result.

Suppose you are considering two job opportunities. In one you will make a large salary and have many “perks,” but you will have to relocate to another city and leave your family, friends, and significant other behind. In the second job, located in your current city of residence, the salary and “perks” are fewer, but you will retain a very satisfying social and emotional life. Bentham would suggest that you simply assign values to each of these units of pleasure and pain and then make the calculation. The result will tell you clearly what you should do (

Table 9.1

).

TABLE 9.1 BENTHAM’S QUANTITATIVE CALCULUS In this calculus, each plus and minus would be weighted before the final calculation is performed. What matters is the quantity of pleasure—more is definitely better.

Societies, Bentham contended, must do something similar to this on a communal scale. Whereas the individual has only his or her individual pleasure and pain to consider, society must consider the happiness of all, and thus the utilitarian solution calls for social rather than egoistic hedonism. The task is to calculate the sums of all pleasures and pains before selecting the right or just action to take.

Sometimes called the hedonic calculus, Bentham’s method of calculation offers a guide to what is good and what is bad both for the individual and for society:

· Sum up all the values of all the pleasures on the one side, and those of all the pains on the other. The balance, if it be on the side of pleasure, will give the good tendency of the act upon the whole, with respect to the interests of that individual person; if on the side of pain, the bad tendency of it upon the whole . . . Take an account of the number of persons whose interests appear to be concerned; and repeat the above process with respect to each . . .

8

One danger here is the temptation to be very aware of your own pleasure while minimizing another’s pain. In the antebellum American South, for instance, slave owners had clearly persuaded themselves that the pleasure a slave society brought them exceeded the pain slavery caused the slaves. Had slaves been making the calculation, they might have reached a different conclusion.

John Stuart Mill

Bentham’s intellectual heir and the better-known nineteenth-century utilitarian philosopher was John Stuart Mill. Although he accepted much of what Bentham wrote, Mill contended that the quality of pleasure was more important than the mere quantity of pleasure. Here we have echoes of Plato and Aristotle, who believed pleasures of the mind to be superior to those of the body. Mill insisted that none of us would trade the pleasures of being human

TABLE 9.2 MILL’S QUALITATIVE CALCULUS What matters is the quality of the pleasures—more is not necessarily better.

When we compare higher pleasures with lower ones, Mill pointed out, only those who have experienced both are competent to judge which is better:

· From this verdict of the only competent judges, I apprehend there can be no appeal. On a question which is the best worth having of two pleasures, or which of two modes of existence is the most grateful to the feelings, apart from its moral attributes and from its consequences, the judgment of those who are qualified by knowledge of both, or, if they differ, that of the majority among them, must be admitted as final.

9

Mill applied the principle of quality over quantity to one of the great debates of his day, the question of intellectual and social equality for women, arguing that the legal subordination of one sex to the other, besides being wrong, was “one of the chief hindrances to human improvement.” In his famous essay “The Subjection of Women,” Mill argued for gender equality on utilitarian grounds: If women were liberated, all of society would benefit.

Nobody’s free until everybody’s free.

FANNIE LOU HAMER

Mill saw the family as the prototype for society. If relationships in the family were based on the right of the strong father over the weak mother and children, it would be difficult to imagine relationships in the wider society based on anything other than might. In the primary social unit, the family, children learn what it is appropriate and inappropriate for members of each sex to do. If both girls and boys have the experience that men make decisions while women make bread, they will likely repeat these expectations in their own lives. If, on the other hand, social roles assigned to men and women are to be altered for the ultimate good of society, then these alterations must begin—if not first, at least simultaneously—in the family:

· What marriage may be in the case of two persons of cultivated faculties, identical in opinions and purposes, between whom there exists that best kind of equality, similarity of powers and capacities with reciprocal superiority in them—so that each can enjoy the luxury of looking up to the other, and can have alternately the pleasure of leading and of being led in the path of development—I will not attempt to describe. To those who can conceive of it, there is no need; to those who cannot, it would appear the dream of an enthusiast.

10

By contrast with this ideal, however, the condition of married English and American women during this time was in fact one of civil bondage. A husband had the power to control his wife’s inherited property, her wages, and even the lives of their children. As Mill put it in his essay “The Subjection of Women,” “Marriage is the only actual bondage known to our law. There remain no legal slaves, except the mistress of every home.”

11

To those who demanded to know whether humanity would be better off if women were free, Mill responded, “All the selfish propensities, the self-worship, the unjust self-preference, which exist among mankind, have their source and root in, and derive their principal nourishment from the present constitution of the relation between men and women.”

12

A house is not a home unless it contains food and fire for the mind as well as for the body.

MARGARET FULLER (1845)

How can this experience of inequality not have a profound effect on a young boy, who quickly comes to see himself as superior to his mother? Like a hereditary ruler, Mill argued, the boy grows up with “unearned distinctions, and he may well turn a deaf ear to the notion that only good conduct entitles one to respect.” The law of justice—the principle that the weak have equal rights with the strong—can never “get possession of men’s inmost sentiments” as long as a strong contrary lesson is imbibed along with mother’s milk.

13

It is not surprising that Elizabeth Cady Stanton, after reading this essay in 1869, wrote Mill to say:

· I lay the book down with a peace and joy I never felt before, for it is the first response from any man to show he is capable of seeing and feeling all the nice shades and degrees of woman’s wrong’d state and the central point of her weakness and degradation.

14

Harriet Taylor Mill

Like her husband, John, Harriet Taylor Mill constructed her essay “Enfranchisement of Women” on utilitarian principles, asking whether the condition of women in her day really furthered society’s overall good. If a man wishes to cultivate his character and improve his intellect, she asserted, he must associate with those who, if not his superiors, are at least his equals. Under the prevailing conditions, Harriet Mill argued, women, although intelligent, were often so limited in their concerns by societal restrictions that they could not help but drag their husbands down morally and intellectually:

· If one of the two has no knowledge and no care about the great ideas and purposes which dignify life, or about any of its practical concerns save personal interests and personal vanities, her conscious, and still more her unconscious influence, will, except in rare cases, reduce to a secondary place in his mind, if not entirely extinguish, those interests which she cannot or does not share.

15

Yet the answer is not to give women a smattering of general knowledge, of art, poetry, even science and politics, because the question of power remains the central one. “The most eminent men cease to improve,” according to Harriet Mill, “if they associate only with disciples,”

16

and a woman will be forced to gain her own ends by manipulation, by contriving to make her husband think something is really his own idea. Thus, both partners are corrupted: “In the one it produces the vices of power, in the other those of artifice.”

17

If it were in fact deemed either necessary or just to keep one portion of humankind “mentally and spiritually only half developed,” then the wisest course would be to keep the remaining group “independent of their influence.”

18

Because in marriage exactly the opposite occurs—the halfdeveloped women exert their influence on men—it is not in society’s best interest to perpetuate the incomplete development of women. Elsewhere in the essay, Harriet Mill argues that it is also unjust to do so, but here her argument, like John’s, rests on the implied benefit to the community: Justice for women will be accompanied by an elevation in the condition of all society.

THE MAKING OF A PHILOSOPHER

John Stuart Mill

(1806–1873)

Harriet Taylor Mill

(1807?–1858)

These two philosophers had a twenty-eight-year relationship. John was a precocious child, raised by his father James Mill and the utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham to become their intellectual heir. He was reading Greek at age three, and the rigorously rationalist education he received did not include any of what we would call “social skills.” At age eighteen he was emotionally impoverished and described himself as a “dry, hard logical machine.” After a crisis in his twenties, he resolved to cultivate his feelings. In late 1830 Mill met Harriet Taylor at a dinner party, and over the next two years the two wrote essays for each other on the subject of women and the marriage relationship. Harriet took the more radical position, arguing for the elimination of all laws on marriage and giving women full responsibility for their children even in the event of divorce. John’s more moderate position called for postponement of childbearing until a couple tested their compatibility and for communal living so that in the event of divorce children could be provided for by a kind of extended family.

Although the object is the same—equality of rights for women—the arguments made by the Mills differ from those made by advocates for women’s rights in

Chapter 8

. There, women such as Mary Wollstonecraft and Elizabeth Cady Stanton argue from a belief in natural rights and from an Enlightenment presupposition of the inherent natural equality of all human persons. For them, the issue is simply one of right: It is unjust and not rationally defensible to deprive women of their rights as citizens. For the Mills, equality of rights for women is urged primarily on the basis of utilitarian principles: Not only will women benefit, but men as well—and more important, society as a whole will be better off.

Like Bentham, the Mills advocated pleasure over pain; unlike Bentham, however, they looked more for a qualitative experience of pleasure than a merely quantitative measurement. For the Mills, more might not necessarily be better; indeed, many people of their day argued that women had more pleasures than men, being able as they were to stay within the family circle, protected from the demands of earning a living and free to read magazines and eat sweets. The Mills and others like them could not be convinced that any amount of the pleasures of interacting with children and servants might compensate for lacking the benefits of full citizenship and personal autonomy, especially when the things they were missing included independence and political decision making.

John Stuart Mill’s contribution to the intellectual defense of women’s rights has been enormous. As the first man in the modern Western world to apply the best arguments of his day in support of the movement for women’s equality, Mill forced many who might not have done so to take the issue seriously. He always insisted that his works represented a collaboration between himself and Harriet; in his Autobiography of John Stuart Mill, he wrote explicitly about his powerful essay “The Subjection of Women”:

· As ultimately published it was enriched with some important ideas of my daughter’s, and passages of her writing. But in what was of my own composition, all that is most striking and profound belongs to my wife; coming from the fund of thought which had been made common to us both, by our innumerable conversations and discussions on a topic which filled so large a place in our minds.

19

Although the utilitarian argument can be a powerful one, not all social philosophers find it adequate. Let’s consider another alternative.

Section 9 pages 402 to 409