Do I Violate the Utilitarian Standard by Loving My Children?

Utilitarianism starts with a basic premise: every person on earth desires happiness.¹ Since happiness/pleasure/well-being (I will use these all interchangeably) are universally desired for their own sakes (not desired as means to some other end, but desired for themselves), they must be intrinsically good, i.e. good for their own sakes, as opposed to instrumentally good.² If we wish to live an ethical life then, we must aim our actions toward achieving that which is intrinsically good: happiness. This does not mean happiness for ourselves only, but also (more importantly) happiness for others. In fact, it is our moral duty to maximize well-being to the greatest extent possible. If we boiled utilitarianism down to its simplest message, it might read: do as much good in the world as is humanly possible.³

Utilitarianism requires us all to look outward, and judge our actions based on how they impact the community of persons affected by our decisions. But often there is a conflict between what the individual desires and what would most benefit the community. In this case utilitarianism issues a direct challenge to the individual: if you desire an end that does not maximize general happiness, you are required to abandon your desire. This turns out to be a very strict standard indeed, one that may require us to make tremendous personal sacrifices for the good of others.

If utilitarianism is supposed to be our guide for living ethical lives, we must recognize right off the bat that most of the decisions we make throughout the day do not maximize general happiness. After all, by taking the time to write this essay, I am choosing not to use that time to serve food to the homeless. Does that mean it is unethical to write this essay, because by doing so I fail to maximize utility? Must I strive to meet the utilitarian standard in all my daily actions? This forceful version of utilitarianism seems to demand that we all become saints, constantly subverting our own desires for the benefit of others. If so, then is utilitarianism even feasible as an ethical theory? If the moral requirement is so strict that normal people are incapable of meeting the challenge, is the theory practical at all?

We all have busy lives full of persons and obligations which require our full attention. Our children, our parents, our spouses, our bosses, and our friends all (rightfully) make demands on our time, leaving us very little bandwidth with which to decipher what “the general happiness” means, let alone time and energy to maximize it. For many parents with young children and full-time jobs, it can feel impossible to do anything for the community while trying to juggle such a home life. Faced with such a complex and intractable dilemma, many people ignore completely the needs of the community, and focus instead on the daily demands of life.

We could attempt to justify such a lifestyle choice (from a utilitarian standpoint) by defining a busy parent’s ‘moral community’ in a narrow way: it includes only her family and friends and colleagues; everyone outside that circle is excluded from the community and therefore excluded from the utilitarian calculus. Does a person with such a narrow moral community live an ethical life? Is it ok to define one’s community so that it only includes those persons one is actually capable of serving while still living a “normal” life? Or must a person restructure her entire life in order to expand that moral community, i.e. tailor her whole existence around service to the wider world, even at the expense of her own family’s happiness?

Really I’m asking: whose happiness should we care most about? Jeremy Bentham answers: “the greatest happiness of all those whose interest is in question [is] the right and proper, and only right and proper and universally desirable, end of human action.”⁴ This is famously known as the Greatest Happiness Principle. J.S. Mill, a few years after Bentham, demands (in a statement which contradicts many other statements in Utilitarianism) that our moral standard be “not the agent’s own greatest happiness, but the greatest amount of happiness altogether.”⁵ Seems clear enough. But for the mother of young children, who has professional, familial, and domestic obligations coming out of her ears, this standard can easily come off as impractical, useless, even meaningless.

Imagine there are three concentric circles:

The smallest circle contains only your family and closest loved one. The next circle contains all your friends, acquaintances, colleagues, and neighbors, your community, your network. The final circle includes larger populations of strangers, such as your city or perhaps even your whole country. Which of these circles are we to focus on, if we wish to live according to the utilitarian standard? If we dedicate our energies toward creating happiness for one of the circles, we use up time and energy that cannot be spent spreading happiness to the other circles, so a choice must be made. But which is the most ethical option?

If I dedicate myself fully to building the best possible life for my children, wife, and parents (my smallest circle), I will certainly do a lot of good; but such a choice requires that I neglect, to a large extent, the wider world. An afternoon spent playing with my children is an afternoon not spent working at the local food bank; a weekend trip to Arizona with my father requires money that can not be donated to a more worthy cause. Do I truly meet the utilitarian standard if I pour most of my love, care, energy, wealth, and spare time into my family, but largely ignore the happiness of the wider world? Though the happiness within my home will be maximized, and my children more likely to grow up well-adjusted and emotionally stable (compared to children who are neglected), my dedication to the ‘greatest happiness principle’ is questionable at best.

If instead I dedicate my life to spreading well-being to the largest possible number of persons (the outer circles), I might accomplish truly great things!… but at a cost. Those who make such a choice – tireless activists for the poor, traveling community organizers, dedicated and focused union leaders, political dissidents – often make huge sacrifices in the personal sphere in order to fulfill the utilitarian ethic, an ethic which they believe requires them to serve the wider world. Yes my children will be sad if I don’t return at night to tuck them in because I’m working late at the homeless shelter, but so many others will benefit from my actions. If I’m away repeatedly, over the course of many years, my children may develop neuroses and abandonment issues and anger, may grow to hate me, may even have tragic lives. But over those years I could improve the lives of thousands of people. Is this the ethically correct sacrifice: spread joy to the greatest number, at the expense of a few (who happen to be my children)?

Mahatma Gandhi faced this very question, and he chose to serve the widest circle. He was a famously neglectful father, but a saint to a nation.⁶ Gandhi’s work for the poor, disenfranchised, impoverished, victimized, and low-caste was the ultimate display of utilitarian action.⁷ He dedicated his entire life to helping the less fortunate; this included extensive travel, the founding of communes, organization of large-scale protests, hunger strikes, the construction of a political party, travel to foreign nations to negotiate with world leaders, and many other activities which demanded his full concentration and energies. In the end his sacrifices and selfless actions improved the lives of millions of people around the world,⁸ and his legacy continues to inspire people today. However his children felt acutely the sadness and anger that come from having an absent father. His oldest son Harilal, whose relationship with Gandhi was always strained, never forgave his father for the ill-treatment, and later became an alcoholic. It seems there is no way to dedicate our full selves to the service of our closest loved ones AND to the wider world; there will always be a sacrifice one way or the other, and so we must choose.

On the surface the ‘greatest happiness principle’ appears to teach us that the price of a few very sad and neglected children is a reasonable price to pay, if their sadness purchases happiness for thousands of others. But this feels intuitively wrong. How can I be expected to ignore the unfathomably deep love bond I share with my two children? To put it more generally, how can I be expected to care more for strangers than I do for my loved ones? The utilitarian principle seems to insist that if my mission in life is to maximize happiness, it would be absurdly unethical to give special weight to the happiness of two children over the happiness of the larger population. Mill insisted that one must be “as strictly impartial as a disinterested and benevolent spectator” when it comes to moral questions.⁹ A truly disinterested spectator would never choose the well-being of her own child over the well-being of many children. Yet if the average mother was told it is “unethical” to dedicate her time and energy almost exclusively to her own children at the expense of thousands of others, she would likely reply that she is content in that case to live unethically. Is this her own selfishness at work? Or does this reveal the sheer inapplicability of the utilitarian standard in the real world, and the hollowness of the idea that a person can ever be a disinterested spectator in her own life? When I relish the innate, mammalian love bond I feel for my offspring, everything inside me (my body, my intuition, my experience, my analytical mind) tells me it is right and good. I recognize that I fail to maximize happiness by giving all of my free time to my children, but I genuinely struggle to see the merit in a moral system that tells me it is unethical to do so. I’m ready to state boldly (and obviously) that of course it is ethical to love our children! So how do we reconcile this with the greatest happiness principle?

To begin to answer this question, let’s hit it from another angle: if we universalized the duty to serve the widest circle at the expense of the inner circle, would that actually create a happier world? Imagine if humanity widely practiced such a morality: a generation of children neglected and traumatized by parents who felt obligated to serve the world instead of care for their children, an army of young people carrying with them the anger, bitterness, resentment, and sense of abandonment that ill-treated children often carry. Though it is impossible to test such a scenario, it isn’t hard to imagine that such a world would be worse-off than our own. It seems good for the species if we instead give extra weight to the happiness of our children, and bad for the species to create a generation of persons who have never been taught how to love or how to build lasting relationships. A world of neglected children is a sadder and angrier world. So it seems this can’t possibly be the utilitarian standard, if the enactment of such a principle would bring more pain than happiness.

In this light the greatest happiness principle must mean something besides “always serve the greatest number“. Either that, or the principle itself is false according to its own utilitarian standard, since its enactment would make the world worse-off. It is deliciously ironic that the greatest happiness principle would, if taken literally, fail to maximize happiness. It also goes without saying that such a principle would also be completely impractical in the real world, since most parents feel morally and evolutionarily driven to help their offspring flourish. Perhaps we more fully satisfy the utilitarian standard (we create a happier world) by spending most of our time serving the smallest of circles: our tiny, helpless babies, our loved ones and immediate family. As Utilitarianism.com says: “As there are obviously good utilitarian reasons to want the next generation of people to grow up to be emotionally healthy and capable agents, there are thus good utilitarian reasons to endorse the social norms of parental care that help to promote this goal.”¹⁰

(Consider adding: Singer intro to utilitarianism 110-113: utilitarianism is self effacing, or esoteric. This means if you constantly try to maximize utility all day, you won’t. It’s a moral theory that requires us to follow the guidance of other theories instead of its own.) this could be applicable here, since we make the world worse if we all abandon our families in some obsession to maximize general happiness all day. Humanity cannot function under such circumstances.

That all being said, there must be some part of the utilitarian standard which does indeed require us to serve people outside our inner circle. We showed above that if we universalized the duty to serve exclusively the outer circle, it would, in the end, likely fail the utilitarian standard, since it would create a worse-off world. Well the same is true if we universalize the duty to serve exclusively our inner circle. Such a principle would require us to maximize happiness for our loved ones and acquaintances, while allowing (or encouraging) us to feel complete indifference or even hatred for strangers, foreigners, the poor, and members of political parties whose policies do not directly benefit our circle. If we have no moral obligations whatsoever to persons outside this tiny circle, we adopt for ourselves an isolationist moral philosophy: my duty of care extends to my own property line, and no further. This state of affairs, which weakens community bonds and encourages a myopic and lonely outlook toward the wider world, sounds tragically like the actual world in which we live.

Clearly utilitarianism, if it is to be useful in this big, scary world, requires a bit of nuance in its application. The reality is that real humans do love their children and wish to serve the wider world, and we cannot (if we wish to live morally) serve exclusively one or the other. Perhaps the answer then is simple: try for a balance. We should give as much love as possible to our inner circles, and occasionally (if we can spare the time) do some work for the outer circle. This seems like a practical solution, but as a moral theory it is weak tea: you’ve got a bunch of love to give, so spread it around in whatever direction feels right. There is some power in the aphorism, “as long as you are loving somebody, you are doing the right thing,” but is this really what utilitarianism is supposed to boil down to?

Mill follows this thread in his attempt to make utilitarianism a workable and useful theory for every day morality. Though he does promote the greatest happiness principle,¹¹ he also downplays our individual commitment to the greater good.¹² So with Mill, we acknowledge that we have some kind of obligation to serve the greater good, but that obligation is fuzzy and ill-defined. Meanwhile, in every day life we are free to follow our hearts and do as we please, so long as we don’t go around violating the rights of others (see Mill’s other most famous work, On Liberty [1859], for more on that aspect of his philosophy). In this way Mill does create a much more practical utilitarianism, since it allows us so much leeway to live our lives in the real world. But it also reduces the utilitarian standard to something vague and amorphous, perhaps even something incoherent. What exactly is our moral obligation? Clearly it is correct to maximize happiness in our smallest circle, but also it seems correct to do whatever we can to benefit the wider circles, but Mill gives us no guide for how we should, if we wish to live ethical lives, divide our time and energy. Utilitarianism under Mill becomes an ethical principle that refuses to state clearly what it requires of us.

The idea that at times it is morally right to serve our families, while at other times it is morally right to serve the community, delivers us to the conclusion that utilitarianism cannot be the sole guiding moral law in our lives. Since we are expected to know when it is appropriate to switch between one or the other circle, there must be a principle that we can follow to guide us to the ethically correct decision, a principle which will tell us when to serve our families and when to serve others. Importantly, this principle cannot be utilitarianism itself, because serving any of the circles seems to meet the utilitarian standard in one way or another. A pluralism of ethical theories will be needed to navigate this unending dilemma. That would mean that utilitarianism (at least as Mill and Bentham understood it) cannot properly serve as an end-all, be-all moral system; more lenses are required if we wish to fully see and appreciate all the complexities of real life.

In conclusion, one of the following must be true:

1. The greatest happiness principle tells us that good parenting is immoral,
2. or good parenting somehow fully satisfies the greatest happiness principle,
3. or the greatest happiness principle is incoherent,
4. or good parenting partially satisfies the greatest happiness principle, but we are still required to serve the wider circles to a certain extent. If this is true, there must be some other standard besides this principle to guides our obligation here.

Option 1 goes against our nature, and option 2 seems like a real stretch. Neither of these is satisfactory. Option 3 seems too simple to be entirely true. Intuition suggests that we do in fact have some kind of obligation to the wider world, to the species as a whole. While the greatest happiness principle on its own is unable to clarify the extent of this obligation (and perhaps there are some real problems with the principle), I am not ready to rob utilitarianism of one of its core pillars. But option 4 seems entirely feasible. A pluralism of ethical systems may be just the ticket to understanding how we are supposed to live in the world.

Most people understand, without needing to be told by an ethicist, that it is morally correct to love our children, work hard at our jobs, listen patiently to our spouses, call our parents, and generally work to maximize happiness within the smallest circle of loved ones, while simultaneously doing whatever we can, with our scanty spare time and limited resources, to help the wider circles too. Perhaps, for all its messiness, this is the most ethically correct thing to do, because it is the best we can do. This outlook forces ethics to be entirely realistic, never idealistic; impossible standards have no place here. We know intuitively that the love we feel for our children is urgent, necessary, implacable, a pure force for goodness. The goodness of this love is so undeniable, that we are forced to warp the greatest happiness principle until it confirms what we already know: it is good to love our families. In this way we transform the principle into something applicable, and we also get to feel good because we can now use the principle to justify the actions we would have taken either way. I think it is possible that we might just be dressing up our instinctual urges and calling them ethics. But really, is there any point in trying to invent an ethical principle that goes directly against our instincts?

Sidebar: the generalization test

An objection from xdSTRIKERbx on Reddit:
“Here’s a thought experiment. Given that universality exists, that if a moral judgment is made in one situation it must be made in every other relevantly similar situation, then if we make the moral judgement that loving and nurturing children is wrong (without specifying a specific parent or child, general statement) then it should be done by all. But, the hell? That leaves babies and children without their biological and psychological needs? This outcome is something we can reasonably understand to be anti-utility, which outlines the importance of the responsibilities and relationships between parent and child.”

You are correct that if EVERY person abandoned his/her children, the consequences would be disastrous for our species. We are much more likely to maximize utility if we ALL love our children, if the only other alternative is that we ALL abandon our children.

But is a given action automatically immoral simply because the result of ALL persons performing that same action would be catastrophic? If we take a utilitarian principle that applies to an individual (I should abandon my family to dedicate myself to serving the destitute), and force that principle onto ALL persons simultaneously (we should ALL abandon our children to serve the destitute), what does that actually reveal about the individual principle? I advise we use caution when drawing conclusions from such thought experiments. The “generalization test” may be a weak tool for making or refuting utilitarian arguments.

Aside from the obvious fact we don’t live in a world where 100% of persons will ever all perform the same action at the same time (and therefore we should be suspicious of any conclusions we draw from imagining such a world), this “generalization test” can produce absurd results in other ways. Take, for example, this classic moral dilemma: should I tell a white lie to my good friend in order to spare her feelings? The individual faced with such a dilemma might decide that by telling the lie she can maximize her friend’s happiness, whereas by telling the naked truth she would cause the friend great sadness, and if she is right in her analysis than her action seems justified. Now let’s generalize that same principle: imagine we ALL lied to our friends any time we wanted to spare their feelings. A worldwide collapse in friendships might ensue. So I suppose we could draw the conclusion that it must be morally wrong to lie to our friends, perhaps even that we should avoid lying to our friends regardless of the consequences. But such a principle is distinctly un-utilitarian. In fact it resembles a Kantian moral imperative (do the right thing, consequences be damned).

Imagine I skip voting on Election Day in order to play baseball with my son. In that particular situation, I realize that my individual vote is unlikely to make any impact upon the election, whereas a couple hours of baseball with my son will greatly increase his happiness (yes I realize the irony of using a “nurturing children” example to prove my point here, but such is life), so I opt to play ball rather than voting, and I consider my action justified. But what if we ALL skipped voting to play ball with our kids? Democracy would collapse! It would spell the end of America! Therefore it is morally imperative that we ALL vote, and morally wrong for anyone to skip voting. In essence we are claiming that because it would be bad if we ALL failed to take a certain action, we therefore must ALL take that action. But is this the argument we really wish to make about voting, that it is morally repugnant to skip the polls, even if you have a good reason?

Just for fun, a particularly absurd example: If we ALL produced food for a living, that would likely create less favorable outcomes than the outcomes produced by our current economy, wherein only certain individuals produce food while other persons pursue various other useful careers (architecture, carpentry, medicine, etc.). But because it would produce a worse outcome if everyone produced food, does that mean it is wrong for anyone to produce food? Obviously not, but that is the conclusion we are forced to draw if we believe that it is morally wrong for an individual to perform any act that cannot be shown to produce good outcomes when the act is generalized. Fascinatingly, we can use this same generalization test to draw the opposite absurd conclusion. If every person refused to produce food, the outcome would be horrible (mass starvation). Therefore it is wrong for any person to refuse to produce food. We are all morally obligated to produce food. But this is the opposite conclusion we just produced, though it was drawn from the same standard of generalization. Both conclusions are clearly wrong, but the real culprit here is the generalization test.

So, returning to the question of whether a person violates the utilitarian standard by refusing to abandon her family in pursuit of a career serving the poor. It is true, if we ALL abandon our families the results will be horrendous: an entire generation of children traumatized, families torn apart, perhaps our species on the verge of collapse. But do those imagined outcomes prove that every individual is morally bound never to make such a choice? Since such thought experiments can so easily produce absurd results, I am inclined to say no.

I am not yet convinced of the hypothesis that the utilitarian standard requires us to abandon our families, but I do know that we won’t disprove that hypothesis by appealing to the generalization test.

Related Articles:

Is J.S. Mill’s Utilitarianism Really “Ethics” at All?

Life Lessons from the Bhagavad Gita

What is Pluralism?

Notes

1. Whenever I quote from Mill’s Utilitarianism [1863] I will cite the chapter/paragraph in the following format: Mill, Utilitarianism, 2.2: “The creed which accepts as the foundation of morals, Utility, or the Greatest Happiness Principle, holds that actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness. By happiness is intended pleasure, and the absence of pain; by unhappiness, pain, and the privation of pleasure. To give a clear view of the moral standard set up by the theory, much more requires to be said; in particular, what things it includes in the ideas of pain and pleasure; and to what extent this is left an open question. But these supplementary explanations do not affect the theory of life on which this theory of morality is grounded- namely, that pleasure, and freedom from pain, are the only things desirable as ends; and that all desirable things (which are as numerous in the utilitarian as in any other scheme) are desirable either for the pleasure inherent in themselves, or as means to the promotion of pleasure and the prevention of pain.” The version of Utilitarianism I reference is John Stuart Mill, “Utilitarianism” [1863], in The Philosophy of John Stuart Mill: Ethical, Political, and Religious, ed. Marshall Cohen (New York: Random House, Inc., 1961), 321-398. ↩︎
2. In Mill, Utilitarianism, 4.8, the intrinsic goodness of happiness is a key feature of Mill’s famous ‘proof’ that utilitarianism is right: “…there is in reality nothing desired except happiness. Whatever is desired otherwise than as a means to some end beyond itself, and ultimately to happiness, is desired as itself a part of happiness, and is not desired for itself until it has become so. Those who desire virtue for its own sake, desire it either because the consciousness of it is a pleasure, or because the consciousness of being without it is a pain, or for both reasons united; as in truth the pleasure and pain seldom exist separately, but almost always together, the same person feeling pleasure in the degree of virtue attained, and pain in not having attained more. If one of these gave him no pleasure, and the other no pain, he would not love or desire virtue, or would desire it only for the other benefits which it might produce to himself or to persons whom he cared for. We have now, then, an answer to the question, of what sort of proof the principle of utility is susceptible. If the opinion which I have now stated is psychologically true- if human nature is so constituted as to desire nothing which is not either a part of happiness or a means of happiness, we can have no other proof, and we require no other, that these are the only things desirable. If so, happiness is the sole end of human action, and the promotion of it the test by which to judge of all human conduct; from whence it necessarily follows that it must be the criterion of morality, since a part is included in the whole.” ↩︎
3. Russ Shafer-Landau, The Fundamentals of Ethics, 4th ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 120. ↩︎
4. Jeremy Bentham, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (New York: Hafner Press, [1789] 1948), 1. ↩︎
5. Mill, Utilitarianism, 2.9 ↩︎
6. See Ramachandra Guha’s Gandhi Before India (New York: Vintage Books, 2013) for a heart-breaking look at Gandhi the absentee (yet often still over-bearing) father. ↩︎
7. Gandhi was actually quite critical of utilitarianism the political philosophy. He saw the ‘greatest happiness principle’ as justification for majority rule and the exploitation of minorities. In a country torn apart by religious strife, the threat of a slight majority attacking, disenfranchising, even colonizing the minority was very real. Instead of the greatest happiness of the greatest number, Gandhi preferred the greatest happiness of all, a concept which he called Sarvodaya, a Sanskrit term meaning “Advancement of All”. Despite this critique of political utilitarianism, Gandhi’s personal actions typified the strict utilitarian ethic which requires immense personal sacrifice as a means to generate as much happiness for others as possible. For an example of Gandhi’s critique of utilitarianism, see his article in Indian Opinion dated May 16, 1908, which appears in The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi (New Delhi: Publications Division Government of India, 1999), Vol. 8, 316-319. ↩︎
8. This is a debatable point. However the debatability of this point might not have bothered Gandhi. The philosophical text which most excited Gandhi was Bhagavad Gita which instructs us to focus more on intentions than outcomes. Like utilitarians, we should aim to do as much good as possible in the world, but we should not allow ourselves to become emotionally invested in outcomes outside our control. God may not allow our plans to come to fruition, and we may even be forced to endure tragedy and heart-break and loss; but we must continue to strive for a better world no matter how many times we fail. This is the key to living an ethical life and flourishing personally. This message was very important to Gandhi, who encountered many failures and set-backs and unintended consequences during his long career. For example, despite Gandhi’s best intentions, his actions as an anti-colonial activist were an indirect cause of the horrible sectarian violence that erupted after the partitioning of India in 1947. So though Gandhi made tremendous sacrifices to improve the lives of his people, the actual short-term outcome for much of the Indian people was a mixed bag. There is a lesson here for utilitarians: though a person may sacrifice much in order to maximize happiness for the many, there is no guarantee that she will be successful at maximizing happiness. If we judge a person’s actions solely according to the actual outcomes they produce, we are forced to condemn a person who sacrifices everything in order to spread happiness to the masses but ultimately fails to increase the general happiness. This would mean that Gandhi was not acting ethically any time that his actions inadvertently led to more pain than happiness (any time he failed to maximize utility). But this feels intuitively incorrect, given the sacrifices Gandhi made in the service of so many persons, and given the limited knowledge all humans have about how our decisions will affect the future. The Gita teaches that if you have an honest intention to do good in the world, you work selflessly toward your goal, and you fail, you are still living ethically. Later utilitarian thinkers have distinguished between the actual utility of a certain action (the actual outcome), versus the expected utility of that action (the outcome we expect), which allows utilitarianism to shrug off some of its consequentialist tendencies: if we judge actions based on their expected utility rather than actual utility, we really shift from focusing on outcomes and instead focus on intentions. This brand of utilitarianism teaches: “as long as we truly intend our actions to maximize the happiness of others, our actions are ethical even if we ultimately fail in our goal”. Gandhi would not have called this concept ‘utilitarianism’, but would have instead called it the message of The Gita. Regardless of what he called it, this ethic formed the foundation of Gandhi’s philosophy of action. See: Uma Majmudar’s “Mahatma Gandhi and the Bhagavad Gita” on The American Vendantist website, published Dec. 6, 2014. If you want to explore the philosophy of The Gita further, read this essay. ↩︎
9. Mill, Utilitarianism, 2.18: “… the happiness which forms the 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 others, utilitarianism requires him to be as strictly impartial as a disinterested and benevolent spectator. In the golden rule of Jesus of Nazareth, we read the complete spirit of the ethics of utility. To do as you would be done by, and to love your neighbour as yourself, constitute the ideal perfection of utilitarian morality. As the means of making the nearest approach to this ideal, utility would enjoin, first, that laws and social arrangements should place the happiness, or (as speaking practically it may be called) the interest, of every individual, as nearly 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 of the whole; especially between his own happiness and the practice of such modes of conduct, negative and positive, as regard for the universal happiness prescribes; so that not only he may be unable to conceive the possibility of happiness to himself, consistently with conduct opposed to the general good, but also that a direct impulse to promote the general good may be in every individual one of the habitual motives of action, and the sentiments connected therewith may fill a large and prominent place in every human being’s sentient existence. If the, impugners of the utilitarian morality represented it to their own minds in this its, true character, I know not what recommendation possessed by any other morality they could possibly affirm to be wanting to it; what more beautiful or more exalted developments of human nature any other ethical system can be supposed to foster, or what springs of action, not accessible to the utilitarian, such systems rely on for giving effect to their mandates.” ↩︎
10. R.Y. Chappell and D. Meissner, “The Special Obligations Objection,” in R.Y. Chappell, D. Meissner, and W. MacAskill, eds., Introduction to Utilitarianism, <https://www.utilitarianism.net/objections-to-utilitarianism/special-obligations>. ↩︎
11. See footnote 9 as an example, as well as large sections of Utilitarianism Ch. 3, in which Mill repeatedly emphasizes the importance of a community-focused ethics, a morality which honors above all else the happiness and well-being of our fellow humans. In the final paragraph of Ch. 3, Mill argues forcefully that once this benevolent social feeling is cultivated within a person, it becomes an “internal binding force” which drives her to care deeply for others; no rational person who has cultivated such a feeling would choose to live without it: “But already a person in whom the social feeling is at all developed, cannot bring himself to think of the rest of his fellow creatures as struggling rivals with him for the means of happiness, whom he must desire to see defeated in their object in order that he may succeed in his. The deeply rooted conception which every individual even now has of himself as a social being, tends to make him feel it one of his natural wants that there should be harmony between his feelings and aims and those of his fellow creatures. If differences of opinion and of mental culture make it impossible for him to share many of their actual feelings- perhaps make him denounce and defy those feelings- he still needs to be conscious that his real aim and theirs do not conflict; that he is not opposing himself to what they really wish for, namely their own good, but is, on the contrary, promoting it. This feeling in most individuals is much inferior in strength to their selfish feelings, and is often wanting altogether. But to those who have it, it possesses all the characters of a natural feeling. It does not present itself to their minds as a superstition of education, or a law despotically imposed by the power of society, but as an attribute which it would not be well for them to be without. This conviction is the ultimate sanction of the greatest happiness morality. This it is which makes any mind, of well-developed feelings, work with, and not against, the outward motives to care for others, afforded by what I have called the external sanctions; and when those sanctions are wanting, or act in an opposite direction, constitutes in itself a powerful internal binding force, in proportion to the sensitiveness and thoughtfulness of the character; since few but those whose mind is a moral blank, could bear to lay out their course of life on the plan of paying no regard to others except so far as their own private interest compels.” ↩︎
12. Mill downplays his “benevolent spectator” commandment when he says in Utilitarianism 2.19, “The objectors to utilitarianism cannot always be charged with representing it in a discreditable light. On the contrary, those among them who entertain anything like a just idea of its disinterested character, sometimes find fault with its standard as being too high for humanity. They say it is exacting too much to require that people shall always act from the inducement of promoting the general interests of society. But this is to mistake the very meaning of a standard of morals, and 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; on the contrary, ninety-nine hundredths of all our actions are done from other motives, and rightly so done, if the rule of duty does not condemn them.” So for 99% of our actions, we are not required to be benevolent spectators, because these daily actions fall outside the realm of moral duty entirely. Mill openly acknowledges here that individuals are allowed, 99% of the time, to care more about their own well-being than the well-being of others. Or, to put it more mildly, we are free to go about our daily lives. There is no moral obligation to structure our entire lives around maximizing the well-beings of others. As Mill puts it later (5.14), “There are other things, on the contrary, which we wish that people should do, which we like or admire them for doing, perhaps dislike or despise them for not doing, but yet admit that they are not bound to do; it is not a case of moral obligation; we do not blame them, that is, we do not think that they are proper objects of punishment.” While me may admire such above-and-beyond acts of selfless service, such acts are “not a case of moral obligation.” Perform them if you wish, but you are not compelled. Henry West suggests in his essay “Mill’s ‘Proof’ of the Principle of Utility” that when Mill says the “general happiness” is a good, he does not mean it is the ultimate good that every individual human should dedicate her life to fulfilling, but instead it is just the arithmetic sum of many individual’s personal happinesses added up [this article appears in Mill’s Utilitarianism: Critical Essays, ed. David Lyons (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 1997), 85-98]. If my personal happiness is important to me, the general aggregate of happiness is important to the general aggregate of persons (I guess this means that society wants society to be happy). This doesn’t tell us much about our duty to the general happiness, but instead just provides a pretty obvious statement: if happiness is good, then lots of happiness is also good. Whether we are ethically required to prioritize the general happiness over our own personal happiness is not a question for which Mill provides a definitive answer. One could argue that Mill, with his strong belief in personal liberty and personal development, cares more about persons promoting their own happiness than persons dedicating their lives to promoting some kind of aggregate happiness. So what exactly is our moral obligation when it comes to the greatest happiness principle? Well, Mill’s inability to clearly answer that question is one of the reasons why his utilitarianism comes off as a bit vague and wishy-washy. ↩︎