Matt Wagner
In class today we talked about John
Stuart Mill, who provides us with the philosophy of Utilitarianism, which is
based on the greatest-happiness principle. The greatest-happiness principle is
that people must act in a way that brings the most amount of happiness to the
most amounts of people, within reason. So therefore all actions should be done
with your own pleasure, and everybody else’s in mind. If you do something
selfish and it brings pleasure to you, but it hurts a lot of other people, it’s
not the moral thing to do because its bringing down the collective amount of
pleasure. Another important part of Mill’s philosophy is that there are
different levels of pleasure and he believes that there are “higher” and “lower”
levels of pleasure.
One of my
questions for everyone now is if the goal is supposed to bring pleasure to the
most amount of people, what if your in a situation where you can do something
for yourself and make you happy, or make yourself unhappy to make others happy?
What would Mill say to do in that situation? Because though your supposed to
make the collective group happy, your also striving for your own happiness.
Another
question is on what determines the higher pleasures. If something brings pleasure to somebody but
not to another and they determine it to be a “lower” or “higher” pleasure, how
is that figured out? If it brings pleasure to one person and not to the other,
how is it determined to be a “higher”? I feel like if somebody enjoys playing
xbox and that’s what brings them pleasure, they should be able to do that and
their goal is to be happy, so if they are happy with that then that should be
ok. Mill says that its better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool
satisfied, but why would that be better? Wouldn’t a person rather be happy and
live a happy life than a smart, intellectual,
but sad life. I think that I’d rather live a happy and fulfilling life
than do something that doesn’t bring me happiness. What do all of you guys think?
According to Mill living a happy fulfilling life would be totally alright so long as it doesn't detriment the larger groups happiness such as our friend the crazy axe murderer, if what brings him happiness was to go around and murder people it would not benefit the greater populace. So mill's philosophy also includes not what brings pleasure but what also keeps away the most displeasure from the greater populace. So therefore playing Xbox has no real effect on the greater populace other than keeping one person complacent so they cannot harm the greater populace so it would go well within mill's ideals.
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