Pleasures Under Mill’s Utilitarianism

The Higher and Lower Pleasures in Mill's Utilitarianism1

In Utilitarianism, John Stuart Mill outlines his belief that, contrary to Benthem's utilitarianism, there are actually variations not just in the quantity of pleasure an action produces, but also in the pleasure's quality. Mill finds two distinct pleasures: that of the "fool satisfied" (hereinafter referred to as "beast," "fool satisfied," or "lesser being") and that of the intelligent, instructed, person of feeling and conscience (hereinafter referred to as "human beings" or "Socrates dissatisfied") (9). The latter of the two is able to expand his mind and achieve the highest quality of pleasure, though he must also experience pain; the fool satisfied is of a lower grade of existence, his "capacities of enjoyment are low" (10) and thus has a much greater chance to become fully satisfied, but is unable to experience higher pleasure. Mill's addition to the utilitarian school of thought amounts to a modification of utilitarian writers who, Mill says, already "have placed the superiority of mental over bodily pleasures" (8). Though Mill's distinction between the pleasure of humans and the pleasure of satisfied fools appears well-founded, the confinements and restrictions that such a distinction imposes on the beasts undermine his argument. Essentially, the satisfied fools lack both freedom and choice and, therefore, cannot achieve pleasure in a utilitarian world which, incidentally, would make living life as one of them unequivocally worse than as an intellectual, free, instructed human.

Mill states that, if all pleasures are equal and the only difference is in their quantities (basic utilitarianism), human beings and "swine" (8) would receive gratification from the same sources of pleasure. Whereas Benthem's utilitarianism makes no distinction between different beings and assigns the same pleasure to all members of the community, Mill strives to separate human beings and lesser beings (animals, etc.), which, he says, have pleasure that is both of a different type and value. Because a beast's pleasure could not always fulfill a human's thirst for happiness (a cat may get great pleasure out of eating a mouse, but a human certainly would not), Mill arrives at the conclusion that there are certainly "some kinds of pleasure that are more desirable and more valuable than others." (8) He continues to assert that even within the community of human beings there are pleasures of different values.

It is in the disparity between the two types of pleasure that Mill departs most from basic utilitarianism. Essentially, Mill describes a simple trade off. On one hand, one can be a satisfied fool and live with a constant, lower level of ignorant bliss, or he can live as a human being satisfied and have the ability to achieve much greater gratification while being more susceptible to pain. Of course, this isn't to say that there is a choice made by human beings and animals at some indiscriminant point as to how they obtain their pleasure, but rather that each is born into one