GUIDE TO THE PHILOSOPHY 1938 - 1947.pdf - Rare Books at ...

334
ETHICS
as simple and as pleasant as that. There must, one regretfully
concludes, be something wrong with a theory which
always identifies what one wants to do with what one
ought to do. It was the difficulty presented by the over-
simplicity of Bentham's view which J. S. Mill (1806-1873)
set himself to meet. His solution is curious. Mill, like
Bentham, officially holds position (A). Mill was, however, an
an intense
exceedingly public-spirited man, imbued by
dislike of what he calls the selfish egoist "devoid of every
feeling or care but those that centre in his own miserable
individuality". It is, therefore, a matter of prime import-
.ance for Mill to defend Utilitarianism from the charge
of selfish Egoism, and to prove that the good utilitarian,
no less than the good intuitionist, is required to aim at
the welfare ofothers. If, then, he can show that the greatest
happiness of the greatest number is the one supreme
good, it will, it is obvious, be the duty of the good utilitarian
to try to promote it. He attempts to do so as follows.
"No reason," he says, "can be given why the general
happiness is desirable, except that each person, so far as
he believes it to be attainable, desires his own happiness.
This, however, being a fact, we have not only all the
proof which the case admits of, but all which it is possible
to require, that happiness is a good: that each person's
happiness is a good to that person, and the general happi-
ness, therefore, a good to die aggregate of all persons."
The argument is a bad one. What Mill is, in effect,
saying is that, if A's pleasure is a good to him, B's pleasure
a good to him and C's pleasure a good to him, ami so on,
then the aggregate pleasures of A, B and C will be good
to all three of them taken together. Therefore, they will
be a good to each one taken separately.
But the pleasures ofA, Band G are no more to be moulded
into a single whole than are their persons. Nor is it clear
why, even if they could be so moulded, the resultant
pleasure aggregate should, on the basis of Mill's hedonist
premises, appear desirable to any of them singly. The
point is obvious enough, and it was obvious, to many