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Instructions:
Brief Passage of the Week:
Rubric:
Resource Link: (We have read from Chapters
1-4. No further)
https://www.earlymoderntexts.com/assets/pdfs/mill1863.pdf
Consequentialism
Target Source: John Stuart Mill’s Utilitarianism
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1806-1873
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Mill’s Life and Times
(Very Briefly)
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What is The Good?
- The Question of Value
- Intrinsic vs. Extrinsic Value
- The Source of Value
- Assertions of Brute Fact vs. Conclusions of Arguments
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Pleasure, I.e, Happiness
- The Doctrine of Hedonism
- Pyschological vs. Ethical
- The Independence of the Two
- Mill’s Commitment to them Both
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The tangential issue of egoism
- Egoism is also both a psychological and an ethical doctrine
- Psychological egoism is the doctrine that all one’s actions are purely self regarding
- Ethical egoism is the doctrine that all of one’s actions ought to be purely self regarding
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Psychological hedonism is typically egoistic
- On the assumption that you can only feel your pleasures, if pleasure is the only end of action of all action, as a psychological fact, then all action will be self regarding
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Ethical egoism, though
- Need not be coextensive with ethical hedonism
- That is, one can be a non-hedonistic egoist (though it’s not clear what the value would be)
- But, more importantly, one can be a non-egoistic hedonist
- That, as we’ll see, is a fair description of Mill
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What Kinds of Pleasure Are There?
- Distinctions in the Cause
- Distinctions in the Quantity
- Distinctions in the Quality
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Mill’s Answer: Distinction in Quality
- The Fundamental Qualititative Distinction:
- Lower
- Higher
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The Lingering Question
- Are We Really Beyond Distinctions in the Cause?
- More to Come
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If Qualititative’s the Distinction, How are Pleasures So Distinguished?
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Mill’s Test
- The Structure of the Decision: A Pairwise Comparisin
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Questions About the Decision Matrix
- What are Available Alternatives?
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Who’s a Qualified Judge?
- The Central Qualification: Neutrality as Between the Alternatives
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How is Neutrality Guaranteed?
- Ask someone who’s experienced them both
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Will this Yield Mill’s Result?
- Homer vs. Lisa?
- Rigging the Procedure?
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Ask the Majority?
- Is This Serious?
- What Principle Would Have to be Appealed to to Move to a Majoritarian Condition from a Simple Case Indeterminate One?
- Quality Detection as a ‘Convergent’ Property?
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Contentment vs. Happiness
- Socrates Dissatisfied vs. Fool Satisfied
- Human Dissatisfied vs. Pig Satisfied
- Are these Contrasts Parallel?
- Questions of Neutrality Again?
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Mill’s Best Response
- A Challenge
- Life of a Cat
- 10 points off the I.Q.
- Essentially, the Pleasure Machine (more on this later)
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So, What are We Supposed to Do About Pleasures?
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Attend to The Consequences
- I.e., The Morality of an Action is a Function of Its Consequences
- Consequentialism as Value Neutral
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Mix in the Hedonism With the Consequentialism
- So, What We Are We Morally Obligated to Do vis-à-vis Consequences for Pleasure?
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Maximize The Consequences for Pleasure
- High Quality Pleasure
- Maximizing vs. Satisficing
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Maximize in What Sense and For Whom?
- Total or Average?
- For Myself (Egoism)?
- For Some Select Group (Elitism)?
- For All (Egalitarianism)?
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Mill’s Answer On Maximizing
- Maximize the Net Aggregate
- Everyone Counts for One and Only One
- This makes Mill an egalitarian non-egoist
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Problems for Mill
- Typically Counterexamples Directed at Various Facets of the Picture
- Problems with Hedonism
- Problems with Consequentialism (Hedonistic and Otherwise)
- Problems with Maximizing Consequentialism (Hedonistic and Otherwise)
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Problems For Hedonism
- Paradox of Hedonism
- Pleasure Machine
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Problems for Consequentialism
- The General Problem:
- The Use of People, I.e., People as Vessels for Delivery of Value (Whatever It Is)
- Christians and Romans; Forced Organ Donation
- Changing Values Has No Affect
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Problems With Maximizing
- The General Problem
- Delineating the Moral, the Immoral, The Amoral, and the Supererogatory
- Reducing Four Categories to Two
- Cheerios vs. Egg McMuffin
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