Mill's Utilitarianism: Happiness as the Moral Ideal

Mill's Utilitarianism: The Pursuit of Happiness

In this work, Mill attempts to show that the ideal of the greatest happiness of the greatest number is a perfectly moral ideal, an ideal which is the sole discretion of morality.

Mill anticipates the idea that the uses of "reason" and "rationality" are many, and it is absurd to attempt to reduce all rational justification to the model of logic or of science. What he states in A System of Logic, and develops extensively in Utilitarianism, is that reason is rooted in desire (relationship to Hume).

Thus, for Mill, the moral is justified only when human desires accord with its precepts. Do we not want mankind to be happy? Do we not also want this especially and above all things? Then happiness is desirable, and also the only thing desirable. The contrast with Kantian morality is presented immediately. In Kant, morals do not show us the path to happiness, but on the contrary, through self-denial, sacrifice, and effort, we will finally be worthy of being happy.

Mill's Perspective on Happiness

For Mill, man wants happiness; therefore, happiness must be procured for him. Man has a right to be happy, and the community has the duty of guaranteeing the means to achieve this purpose.

Kant's Perspective on Happiness

For Kant, happiness is a "prize" that demands peculiar moral merits. Happiness is rather something that is received at a time and place "to come" as the fruit and consequence of having pertinaciously pursued virtue in our lifetime.

In a Kantian perspective, a long time to live is to suffer. Only in another life are virtue and happiness, which arguably make up the Supreme Good, reconciled. In this "valley of tears," man seems to be necessarily doomed to choose between "virtue" and "happiness" as two opposite and incompatible options.

Mill vs. Kant: Contrasting Views

Mill, contrary to Kant in this respect, conceives the human personality from an optimistic perspective, almost Greek, in such a way that virtue and happiness are combined and presuppose each other, as in Plato, Aristotle, and Epicurus. In Mill, as in the Greek classics, ethics is the art of living, as in Epicurus, while to live is to think, as in Plato.