Utilitarianism: are some pleasures qualitatively higher than others, and is the principle of utility provable?

John Stuart Mill, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

The position in brief

Utility is the foundation of morals; actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse.12 But happiness is not a uniform quantity. Pleasures differ in quality as well as quantity: "it is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied." The competent judge — one acquainted with both — decides.3

The proof of utility (Chapter 4) proceeds by analogy with the proof that an object is visible: the only evidence that anything is desirable is that people actually desire it, and happiness is desired as an end. The doctrine is Bentham's reformed and corrected, not abandoned: pleasure and pain remain the basis, but quality is irreducible to quantity, and the higher faculties have a claim that no calculation of sensual pleasures can override.4

Sources

  1. No proof indeed can be given that we ought to abide by these laws; but neither can any proof be given, that we ought to regulate our conduct by utility. All that can be said is, that the pursuit of happiness is natural to us; and so, it is contended, is the reverence for, and the inclination to square our actions by, certain general laws of morality.
    ESSAYS ON ETHICS, RELIGION AND SOCIETY, pp. 112–113
  2. If so, happiness is the sole end of human action, and the promotion of it the test by which to judge of all human conduct; from whence it necessarily follows that it must be the criterion of morality, since a part is included in the whole.
    Utilitarianism
  3. It is quite compatible with the principle of utility to recognise the fact, that some kinds of pleasure are more desirable and more valuable than others. It would be absurd that while, in estimating all other things, quality is considered as well as quantity, the estimation of pleasures should be supposed to depend on quantity alone.
    Utilitarianism
  4. And this perverted use is the only one in which the word is popularly known, and the one from which the new generation are acquiring their sole notion of its meaning.
    Utilitarianism

Where the argument is made

  • Utilitarianism (1861), especially Chapters 2 (What Utilitarianism Is) and 4 (Of What Sort of Proof the Principle of Utility Is Susceptible)
  • Bentham (1838) and Coleridge (1840) for Mill's reformist relation to Bentham
  • A System of Logic Book VI Chapter 12 on the Art of Life

How the argument was received

The standard internal critique is Sidgwick's, charging the higher-pleasures doctrine with either circularity or abandonment of hedonism. Moore's Principia Ethica accused Mill of the naturalistic fallacy in moving from "is desired" to "is desirable" — a charge most modern Mill scholars regard as a misreading. Twentieth-century utilitarians split between preference utilitarianism (which abandons quality) and revisionist hedonisms that preserve it. Donner, Riley, and Crisp defend the higher-pleasures doctrine as coherent and central to Mill's liberal individualism.