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Mill, Utilitarianism, and Rights
by Jason DeShaw

This is indeed my second paper/article on John Stuart Mill.  If you are interested, you can find the first, The Justice Show with John Stuart Mill, by clicking that link.  I wrote this paper for my Modern Political Philosophy class, but it ended up being more of a debate over Utilitarianism.  It is much less jovial than the first paper I wrote about Mill (for my ethics class), but hopefully someone, somewhere, will find this one interesting...

The Paper

            I am going to be discussing John Stuart Mill's attempts to justify having rights based off of utilitarian ideals.  John Stuart Mill was a Utilitarian, which means he believed that everyone should always act to promote the most utility for the most people.  Mill was also a Eudaemonist, which means that he believed only flourishing was intrinsically good and only not flourishing was intrinsically bad.  This leads to Mill's first premise for the justification of rights.

            Mill's first premise is that we should always act in the way that will promote the most overall net utility, which is flourishing, for everyone.  We should do the best action not just because we think it would be nice, but because it is the only morally right choice and not doing the action that produces the most flourishing would be the morally wrong choice.  This means that if you did action A hoping for the most flourishing result B, but ended up instead with evil result C, you would have done a morally wrong action (but most likely applauded by Mill for trying).  Mill believes that flourishing can be defined as having certain elements, such as sense of dignity, liberty, security, individuality, development of oneself, and concern for others well being.  Obviously, any action that would put these elements at risk or take them away completely would not be a right action.

            The second premise of Mill's argument would be that a society where our rights (life, security, property, tyranny of the majority) were not secure would not be a society that produces the most flourishing.  Mill believes we need to adopt these rules as rights for multiple reasons: we are biased, we can't see long-term consequences, and we sometimes let our emotions overrule reason.  Because of these reasons, we adopt rules that have in the past allowed us to maximize utility, such as our rights.  Without our rights secured, society could at any time take away your life, security, etc. which would overall make society very unpleasant, thus producing a non-flourishing society.

            The conclusion that follows from these two premises is that to promote the most utility, our society should have secure rights.  By adding this rule to utilitarianism, Mill is able to overcome many common arguments against utilitarianism.  Without this rule in place, it would be easy to think of situations that would maximize utility but seem inherently wrong.  We could kill someone, take all their organs, and give them to many other dying people so they would live.  Perhaps someone is rich with lots of land.  We could just take their land and divide it up so the homeless could live there instead.  While it seems that helping dying people and the homeless are good causes, the means to which they are achieved are dubious, at the least under basic utilitarianism, but with Mill's security of rights, he overcomes these situations.  As stated above, a society will flourish much better if we aren't in constant fear that at any moment our organs could be harvested or our property taken away.  Thus concludes Mill's argument for rights.

            One problem with how Mill justifies rights is that he bases it off the principal of utility, which is already a shaky foundation to build anything off of, let alone why we should have rights.  Although Mill overcomes some of the arguments against utilitarianism by securing rights, he does not overcome them all.  For example, by following utilitarianism, we must always do the action that promotes the most utility.  Although Mill believes that we can never know what the correct action is, because we can’t foresee long-term consequences, let's say that we can.  Sometime, in a far distant future, we have become so obsessed with utility that we have created a device that tells us without a doubt what the right action is all the time.  This device is never wrong and takes everything into account when calculating utility.  And since it’s the future, we can say we are all very giving, so everybody gets one for free.  Now we can without a doubt always perform the right action in every single circumstance, just by following what this device says.  Yet, if we delve a little deeper, we see something wrong with this.  Isn’t always doing what someone or something else tells you take away your free will?  People would become mindless zombies by following this device, only being able to do what it says.  One could argue that free will is an essential part of a flourishing life.  We need to make choices and do what we want without being controlled by someone or something else.  This is how we grow, by making our own choices.  Yet, by always following this device, we would have no free will.  In fact it would seem that by following this device and always doing the action that produces the most utility, we would not be producing the most utility.  That is a contradiction.  Conversely, if we maintained free will and decided to not follow the device, we would still not be doing the action that produces the most utility, because we are not following the device.

            It seems now that because pure utilitarianism in its highest form (knowing what action produces the most utility in every case) is a contradiction, we should not be able to make claims about it when we know even less.  Such as life is now, like Mill said, we cannot foresee long term consequences of our actions, so we never know if we truly are doing the action that produces the most utility.  Mill tried to rectify this by making rules to follow, in order to make it so we did know what to do in every case, but that, as shown in the above paragraph, would eliminate free will.  Since utilitarianism cannot hold when followed, we can’t make claims about rights based off of it.

            If Mill were to respond to this problem, I think he could go about solving it in a few different ways.  First of all, the problem is completely hypothetical.  Mill could easily claim another hypothetical claim in response.  Perhaps, in the future, we have evolved so much that we can see the consequences of our actions to the fullest extent, and since we are such good utilitarians, we always want to do the best action.  Since we always want to do the action that produces the most utility, it is under our own free will that we do it, not because we are being forced into doing it.  This would secure free will and allow flourishing as well.

            One way Mill could respond to the situation directly is by claiming that there could always be more than one action that produces the most utility for the most people.  There is no way that we can say that there is definitely only one action that is the best possible action.  There could be two, three, or thousands for all we know that produce the same amount of utility for everyone.  For the sake of argument, lets say we can attribute numbers to utility and that we are following the rules of utilitarianism as set forth by Mill when constructing the following utility table.

            As we can see from this very simple table, there are many options that could produce the same overall utility.    Nothing about utilitarianism says that any of these three scenarios are better than the other two.  Since nobody in any of these situations is being harmed, nothing makes any of these situations morally incorrect.  By seeing that in this simple case there is more than one possible choice (and even in this case there are many more possibilities than the ones listed) that there would then be free will, as you could choose which action you wanted to perform.  One would also imagine that in much more complicated scenarios, ones more likely to be faced in real life, there would be even more possible actions that would produce the same outcome.  Mill could conclude from this that not every situation has only one possible action that would produce the most overall utility, thus we will still have free will and furthermore would not be contradicting utilitarianism.

            As for what I think on the matter of using utilitarianism to justify rights in a society, I would have to say that I am not in favor of it.  Not because I am against securing rights, but because I don’t think utilitarianism is a strong enough ideal to be universalized to base such important things as rights off of.  Here is why.

            My first premise would be that we have no way of knowing what action in any situation would produce the most overall utility.  This seems quite obvious, as we are usually unaware of how our actions affect the world around us, let alone how much rightness and/or wrongness they produce.  Even simple things such as waving to a person as you walk by them could have disastrous consequences.  Perhaps you wave to them hoping they will wave back and both parties will thus gain happy utility, but they stop and wave back in the middle of the street and get hit by a car.  Well, you just committed a very wrong act, as it produced very bad utility (them dying or suffering much pain).  Then again, through this pain, they learn not to stop in the middle of the road, thus preventing any more future pain.  Also, the person who ran into them learns to pay much better attention to the road and does not run into any more people for life.  Maybe this was a right action after all?  I could continue on and on with how each action produces more actions to infinite, but my point is made.  You could in now way know that any of these actions could have happened from a simple action such as waving.  Mill, as I’ve stated, believes that we cannot predict the consequences of our actions as well, and tries to fix this by creating rules to live by.  These rules, hopefully, would bring us closer to the ultimate goal of always doing the best action.  That brings me to my next premise.

            Utilitarianism, when we know the best action, negates free will.  Although many actions may produce the same amount of overall utility, it still restricts people to choosing one of those actions.  If we knew what produced the most utility, we would only be able to do certain actions to be morally right, but what if the action we wanted to do wasn't on the list?  I believe that you sometimes need to do actions even if it will cause others a little bit of pain.  If we take a look back at the table, lets say you were Person A in the third situation and had zero utility.  What if every single moment of your life was a big zero utility?  According to utilitarianism, as long as you weren’t dropped into the negatives, it would be perfectly acceptable to allow you to just be a zero your whole life.  Conversely, I believe it would be perfectly acceptable for this person to move up the utility ladder, even if for just one action that produced some utility loss for others.  Otherwise it would be ok to just live a "zero" life, just floating through existence with no ups or down, which doesn’t seem very flourishing.  Bringing this back around to the point I was making, sometimes I think it would be ok to do an action that did not produce the most utility for everyone involved.  Humans need to have free will, otherwise living would be quite pointless, even if it maximized utility.  Even if there was no war and no poverty, would the world be worth living if you were a zombie being forced to do whatever was the best for everyone?  I don’t think it would be.

            We cannot follow utilitarianism very well as it stands now since we do not know the best actions, and if we did know the best actions utilitarianism would negate free will.  Because of the following two premises, I conclude that utilitarianism is not something we can universalize, and furthermore cannot be used to establish important things such as rights.  Personally, I do not think that utilitarianism is that bad of an idea, since I think it is good to do actions that promote flourishing of others as well as oneself.  Utilitarianism universalized though, as in doing the action that produces the most utility in every single circumstance, is what I have a problem with.  Furthermore, securing any rights in my life (life, liberty, property) off of the problem-filled utilitarianism ideal seems anything but secure for me.

Author's Note - I'd just like to comment that I have left out the proper citations as the majority of the article is my work and for easier reading, but if you do indeed plan on using any information here, please drop me an email before you do.  This way we can avoid any weird legal issues.