When Two Planets Collide

Mill wants everyone to be happy. He wants all of our aims to be toward the theoretically ultimate end of happiness. To do this, we cultivate our moral conscience, i.e. we learn from parents and others what is wrong and we learn that what is wrong is what goes against the happiness of others. Stealing is wrong not because it is stealing, but because the person we steal from is hurt by our action. Calling someone a name is wrong not because the name is bad, but because that name will cause the person to feel pain. The education one must receive in order to find what is good relies on the strengthening of compassion and the reinforcement of cause and effect. Eventually, we are complete. Whatever our surroundings, our friends, family, teachers, constituents, etc., whatever produced happiness in them produced happiness in us and our guilt is associated with the absence of their happiness. This works and has worked and will continue to work, but it only on a small scale. When someone grows up in Los Angeles, CA and someone else in Tylertown, MS, these people can differ greatly in what makes them happy. When put in a group, would these two people be able to make moral choices? Can either one truly use their reference to satisfy their duty to each other? These people come from completely different utilitarian environments and their clash is a phenomenon that happens every day. Mill believes that utilitarianism is best suited for a unified population and that it promotes the evolution towards unity. Does it? The maturation of one’s utilitarian moral compass focuses on the appropriation of the interests around us. That focus makes it hard to gain any perspective on the interests of someone you never see. If your utility towards one person causes pain for someone you will never know, is utility possible? When these people disagree, how do they deal with it? Whose moral compass needs to be adjusted? How can one measure which utility produces more happiness when each one represents a body of collective experience? Does one person absorb the other and nullify their experience? Or is it an elastic collision where they bounce away from each other, becoming more separated than ever? Is anyone allowed to surrender? Because to do that is to force an alteration of an entire community’s social and thus moral ideology. I believe utilitarianism is an important philosophy in that it produces a mind that is more aware of itself, its surroundings, and the future. However, I believe it also instigates conflict, even war. When two interests are opposite, compromise is only transitory; the two opposite interests still exist and the desire to fulfill one’s duty still lingers. Political battles are waged one the grounds of utility. Civil wars are instigated by the power of rejection.