Kill John Stuart Mill.
Originally published 6/4/24 (mild revisions to the opening paragraph)
This is my response(?) to John Stewart Mill's Utilitarianism. To preface, I am not formally educated in philosophy, or even near, but I thought this to be an egregiously bad read, not just from a prose standpoint, but a logical one too. I found many premises to be fundamentally flawed, and I found other things didn't sit right with me subjectively. Maybe I just didn't get it, apologies if I sound like a bumbling baboon, but that's enough foreplay. Look at what Mill has me doing, excessively rambling, what a terrible influence he is.
In order to critique it, I will briefly explain utilitarianism to my understanding. Essentially, it is a moral system in which choices are based on what Mill believes to be the guiding purpose for all decisions, gain in happiness (or to decrease unhappiness). In the case of this text, specifically aggregate happiness, as this is to be applied on a wide scale for the betterment of society. Now, I do not disagree with the notion that decisions are guided by the pursuit of happiness (in many cases, of course there are exceptions), but the way in which it is applied here is what I do disagree with.
Mill tries to make this moral compass two things that it should not be: 1.) objective and 2.) logical/mathematic. In utilitarianism, actions are evaluated and justified based on this formula for aggregate happiness. So it is this system itself that decides moral right and wrong, it is not pointing out where right and wrong lie, but rather it is establishing it. This is the first issue. This system is made by man, an irrational creature with a subjective experience, and it is based on the happiness of man, the very same happiness that is also subjective and varies depending on the person. It is founded on things that contradict the core of his ideology, happiness is not something that is objective or logical.
Utilitarianism cannot exist without a separate moral compass, because there are circumstances that I think most people would find to be abhorrent that utilitarianism justifies. For example, take an isolated village. Let us say these people have different values than our society. The whole society finds pleasure, or happiness, in suffering. Every year, they elect one family to be brutally tortured. This brings happiness to the whole village at the expense of the happiness of a family of lets say five. Would this not increase aggregate happiness? The answer is that it would, therefore, it is morally good to torture that family of five. There are real world situations where this is applicable, as well, its not a pure hypothetical. A group of ten sadists can kidnap a homeless guy off the street and do the same. If this man has no family or friends to grieve for his pain, then the ten criminals will gain happiness at the expense of the one man. This too, would then be moral. If a utilitarian were to say that it wouldn't, because doing anything to expressly harm our fellow man or violate their rights or something of the sort, that alone contradicts the system of utilitarianism because it is pulling values from a moral code separate from the doctrine of utilitarianism. As in, there exists another source from which to derive morality, making utilitarianism worthless.
And this is exactly what Mill tries to do. He tries to say that some things are evident because of instinct, and include justice (among other things but frankly it went in one ear and out the other) in utilitarianism to attempt to nullify hypotheticals such as the ones that I presented, but that logic doesn't track. Instinct is not a valid pillar to support your ideas because instinct is based on our development as a species, and ties into the subjectivity of our nature and the human experience. It is not an objective truth that can support an objective and logical system. The same goes for justice. Justice is a concept, not a universal rule, that only works in other systems, either man-made or divine. Justice does not exist outside of the law or outside of things like divine/karmic retribution. These two cannot be objectively or logically grounded as a fundamental support for utilitarianism. Without those external systems in which justice is founded, who is to say that justice is even an inherent good thing? And in those systems, those are created by things other than utilitarianism, so it would be a logical system operating in a man-made illogical. Alternatively, such a system could be founded based on utilitarianism, but it would also be paradoxical as there would not be a pre-existing idea of justice to validate the tenants of utilitarianism. A logical system attempted to be founded on invalid logic. Not to mention that utilitarianism cannot be founded on any currently existing notion of justice as it is a highly contested topic that greatly varies depending on each system that employs it.
Another issue is how does one even quantify happiness? It is a non-physical, subjective emotion. Are scientists going to have to measure serotonin in everyone involved in a decision to determine if it was moral? Real effective. And that still doesn't change the fact that what grants happiness to someone varies from person to person as well, as we all have different values and priorities. There are also issues of focusing on the aggregate happiness, because realistically, the average person is uneducated and will likely have the wrong priorities for the betterment of society, so there would be clashes between bringing happiness to people in the present or in the future. For example, if we were to decide that society would be better off without fossil fuels because that would curb pollution and global warming, which is a good thing for society (and other life forms if we even care about those, in utilitarianism), yet that would inconvenience people and make many in the now unhappy. So would it be a good decision or a bad one? Enabling the continued use of fossil fuels would damage the aggregate happiness in the long run.
Lastly, I have a simple philosophical gripe with utilitarianism. Lets suppose that it had no other flaws and was adopted on a societal scale. Its inherent objective and logical nature is problematic as it is being practiced by humans. If every last man was utilitarian, then it stands to reason that their decisions would all be based on logic. I believe this would defile the human experience and make us operate as glorified computers running on a utilitarian code. Decisions would be made because they are objectively and logically good, not because we want to make them. If a boy was a utilitarian, and he went to visit his dying grandmother in the hospital, it would be because it was the right thing to do because it would increase happiness. The decision would not be made because the boy loves his grandmother. Trying to apply objectivity and logic to justify all our actions would obscure the true meaning behind the making of those decisions. Everyone would just make decisions scrambling for the happiness points that make the world go round. I would posit that that would have dire consequences on us as a species and on the individual, but its just conjecture and fourteen year old utilitarian goons would throw the slippery slope fallacy at me (this isn't imperative to my argument anyways so I will refrain from being academically dishonest)
In conclusion, I am a far superior philosopher to Mill and this post should be famous, mayhaps studied in schools.