Mill's ‘proof’ of the claim that intellectual pleasures are better
in kind
than others, though, is
highly suspect. He doesn't attempt a mere appeal to raw intuition. Instead, he argues that those
persons who have experienced both view the higher as better than the lower. Who would rather
be a happy oyster, living an enormously long life, than a person living a normal life? Or, to use
his most famous example — it is better to be Socrates ‘dissatisfied’ than a fool ‘satisfied.’ In this
way Mill was able to solve a problem for utilitarianism.
Mill also argued that the principle could be proven, using another rather notorious argument:
The only proof capable of being given that an object is visible is that people actually see it
....
In
like manner, I apprehend, the sole evidence it is possible to produce that anything is desirable is
that people do actually desire it. If the end which the utilitarian doctrine proposes to itself were
not, in theory and in practiced, acknowledged to be
an end, nothing could ever convince any person that it was so. (Mill, U, 81)Mill then continues
to argue that people desire happiness — the utilitarian end — and that the general happiness is “a
good to the aggregate of all persons.” (81)
G. E. Moore (1873–1958) criticized this as fallacious. He argued that it rested on an obvious
ambiguity:
Mill has made as naïve and artless a use of the naturalistic fallacy as anybody could desire.
“Good”, he tells us, means “desirable”, and you can only find out what is desirable by seeking to
find out what is actually desired
....
The fact is that “desirable” does not mean “able to be desired”
as “visible” means “able to be seen.” The desirable means simply what
ought
to be desired or
deserves to be desired; just as the detestable means not what can be but what ought to be
detested... (Moore, PE, 66–7)
It should be noted, however, that Mill was offering this as an alternative to Bentham's view
which had been itself criticized as a ‘swine morality,’ locating the good in pleasure in a kind of
indiscriminate way. The distinctions he makes strike many as intuitively plausible ones.
Bentham, however, can accommodate many of the same intuitions within his system. This is
because he notes that there are a variety of parameters along which we quantitatively measure
pleasure — intensity and duration are just two of those. His complete list is the
following:
intensity, duration, certainty or uncertainty, propinquity or remoteness, fecundity,
purity,
and
extent.
Thus, what Mill calls the intellectual pleasures will score more highly than the
sensual ones along several parameters, and this could give us reason to prefer those pleasures —
but it is a quantitative not a qualitative reason, on Bentham's view. When a student decides to
study for an exam rather than go to a party, for example, she is making the best decision even
though she is sacrificing short term pleasure. That's because studying for the exam, Bentham
could argue, scores higher in terms of the long term pleasures doing well in school lead to, as
well as the fecundity of the pleasure in leading to yet other pleasures. However, Bentham will
