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

OBJECTIVE UTILITARIANISM $35
minds less acute than Mill's. The philosopher F. H. Bradley
(1846-1924) justly observed that the aggregate of all
persons is nobody, yet every good must, on Mill's premises,
be a good for somebody; therefore, again on Mill's premises,
the good of all, being the good of nobody, cannot be
good at all; while Carlyle not unfairly caricatured Mill's
argument by saying that, because each pig desires for
himself the greatest amount of a limited quantity of hogwash,
we are entitled, if Mill is right, to conclude that
each pig necessarily desires the greatest quantity of hogwash
for every other pig and for all the pigs.
The criticism serves to throw into relief the difficulty
which underlies Mill's whole theory, namely, that of
holding simultaneously both, position A and position C.
The fallacy involved has already been indicated in a
previous chapter 1
by Bishop Butler's criticism of Hobbes's
account of pity. The consistent egoist cannot give a
satisfactory account of either pity or sympathy. For
even if it be admitted that sympathy constitutes a
motive for action only in so far as the alleviation of the
misery of others confers pleasure upon the agent, the
possibility of the agent's pleasure is dependent upon and
conditioned by what happens to other people. It is conditioned,
in other words, by the possibility of our being
moved disinterestedly by the misfortunes of other people.
Adam Smith (1723-1790), an objective utilitarian he held
that a right action is one that makes for the happiness
of the community who was, nevertheless, not hampered,
as were Bentham and Mill, by an egoistic psychology,
treats sympathy more convincingly. "Sympathy," he
writes, in his Theory of the Moral Sentiments, "is not a transfer
to ourselves of passions which we note in others; it is an
envisaging of the objective situation which our neighbour
confronts, so that it calls forth in us independently its due
emotional reaction." He even goes so far as to insist that
for a
4
'a view of the facts may arouse us to indignation
man's wrongs, even when he does not feel it himself".
x Scc Chapter VI, pp. 185, 186.