Lecture II: Mill’s Opponents: Kant, Whewell, Intuitionism and
Moral Sense Theories
Last week’s lecture claimed that U is a work of propaganda as well as an important
piece of moral philosophy. It was aimed at an ‘ordinary reader,’ and published in The
Fortnighly Review in three instalments before appearing as a book. It has to be read
with Mill’s opponents in mind; and not only his opponents, but the ordinary sceptical
person who wonders whether a theory of ethics is either worth having or – worse still
– likely to undermine morality rather than assist it. Victorian moral philosophy was
not ‘academic;’ in Mill, it was bound up with the fight to rescue Oxford and
Cambridge and intellectual life more generally from the grip of the Anglican church
and to roll back the forces of conservatism wherever they appeared.
Mill’s argument for a hedonistic theory of value
All action is for the sake of some goal; Mill agreed with Aristotle at least that far. Any
goal is something that we value; one question is whether all value is ‘subjective’ –
whether we call something valuable only in virtue of what we want (in a very broad
sense of want) – or whether value is ‘objective’ – whether objects, events, behaviour,
states of affairs have objective qualities that are valuable no matter what we feel about
them. Hobbes was fiercely subjectivist when he said ‘whatsoever a man desireth, that
it is that he for his part calleth good.’ There is, on this view, no condition of being
good independently of being called good. There is an obvious question of how there
could be such a practice as calling good unless people had some concept of what it
was like to be good. We shall return to this, but notice the existence of so-called
‘error’ theories that say praising and choosing are primary, and we project (falsely)
our approval onto things and then believe the things themselves have ‘odd’ qualities.
Solidly objectivist theories say goodness is a property of the entities it seems to be a
property of; Moore’s Principia Ethica gives an account of such a theory. Mill’s view
was that moral goodness is part of more general goodness, that is, that a theory of
value is a theory of the value of everything valuable. And he thought that what held
all value together was its relation to happiness; and that happiness is best analysed in
terms of pleasure. So, Mill sides with Hobbes to the degree that Mill insists that value
attaches firmly to our wants and wishes, but Mill is less insistent on the variety of
things that people can want. There are, as we shall see next week, endless problems
with trying to assimilate all desires to a desire for happiness (and Mill does not
exactly do that) and further problems assimilating happiness to pleasure (which Mill
1
does do, but perhaps not as simply as that suggests.) This makes Mill a
consequentialist – nasty medicine is justified by its good effects on us; and it makes
his ethics teleological, which is to say dependent on the ends being pursued, and only
derivatively on the motives which lead us to pursue them. So, consequences are what
count, and they count in virtue of being productive of happiness or the reverse.
Morality must have a purpose
Mill’s opponents held that ethics had no ‘external’ goal. Mill thought the reverse. The
crucial thought is that morality constrains our behaviour; it therefore needs
justification by showing what the point is of these constraints. (Nasty medicine has
good effects...a nice cold drink is good because it is just that: nice.) A hedonistic
theory of value takes getting what we want as obviously a good thing; restraints are
prima facie a bad thing; there has to be a point to them, and if there is, it has to be
explained in terms derived from that hedonistic theory of value. It does not follow that
we only do what we ought because we understand the consequences; when we are
sufficiently moral, we do as we ought because we want to do it. Either story is
unKantian.
The Art of Life and morality’s place within it
Mill’s view was that just as the sciences explained what does happen, what he called
‘the Art of Life’ explained what should happen; this distinction is Mill’s version of
the familiar ‘is-ought’ distinction, otherwise the distinction between description and
prescription. The whole Art of Life contains much more than morality – at a basic
level, for instance, medicine is the healing art and embodies the prescriptions for a
healthy existence and the cure of disease etc. Architecture is the art of building, and
so generally on. What structures an art as opposed to a science is that it is geared
towards attaining a goal – health, commodious and attractive buildings and so on. The
art of life has three main branches for Mill: prudence, morality and aesthetics. In
effect, prudence is about taking care of oneself, morality about taking care of the
general good, and aesthetics is about seeking out those goals whose pursuit displays
and enhances an excellence of character that makes life what it might be. The last
lecture says a bit about aesthetics in this sense; now all we need to remember is that it
is not about fine art.
The anti-utilitarians – Kant and Whewell and duty for duty’s sake
2
Now we come to the enemy. Kant, in fact, is not wholly the enemy, though Mill is
insistent that Kant’s emphasis on regulating our conduct by rational maxims only
makes sense if those maxims are aimed at fostering utility. Whewell is really the
enemy, but Whewell was a terrific philosopher of science, and not much of a moral
philosopher, so Kant is a better contrast. But Whewell was the Master of Trinity, and
an intellectual ornament of the Church of England, and therefore an irresistible
political target. Whewell argued that ethics could not have an ‘external’ standard;
what was right was right for some reason intrinsic to it being whatever it was – right
character, or right action. The argument was based on intuition: we know whether
something is right or when when we fully understood what sort of an action (or
character) we are contemplating. The idea is – much as in Moore – that we just see its
rightness. Whewell was a rationalist of sorts in the philosophy of science, and thought
that we could see how the universe worked when all extraneous clutter was cleared
from our minds; by analogy, we intuit rightness and wrongness by becoming clear
about actions. Mill’s objection to all such theories is that they mistake habit for truth:
what we think we ‘see’ is only the inability to imagine something different. Mill did
not mean that we are as likely to be mistaken as not, only that the sensation of being
right is not enough. Indeed, Mill thought that we were almost always right, and that
people’s judgments were usually right even when their reasons were very odd. The
more interesting contrast is with Kant. Kant argued that morality was dictated by
reason, and therefore issued in universally binding rules that took the form of
categorical imperatives. Oddly, although nobody notices, Mill held the view that the
language of art was the imperative; morality as an element of the art of life must issue
in imperatives; and since morality is not about how to get what we want for ourselves
– which is the province of prudence – its imperatives are not hypothetical (‘if you
want x, do y’) and must be categorical (‘don’t rob, don’t steal, keep your promises,
tell the truth’). So, it’s not that on which Mill objects to Kant. It’s Kant’s test for
which maxims to accept. Kant argues – in the Groundwork – that the test is noncontradiction. So, ‘tell the truth’ passes the test, since we can all tell the truth; ‘tell
lies’ fails because if we all lie, the possibility of deception evaporates – lying is
parasitic on truth-telling. Other maxims don’t do as well; ‘kill yourself’ is fine – it’s
true that once we’ve done it, there’s nobody left to follow it, but so what? You can’t
get a rule against suicide out of non-contradiction alone. Nor does Kant’s treatment of
standard awkward cases carry conviction; ought we to tell the truth to the homicidal
maniac who arrives at the door asking the whereabouts of his intended victim?
Obviously not. But then the simplicity of the maxims vanishes, and Mill’s constant
3
refrain that the only real test of a maxim is utilitarian begins to bite. There are other
ways round this point, but the thrust of Mill’s case is what we now need to
understand.
What’s wrong with intuitionist and moral sense theories
Mill inherited Bentham’s distaste for what he called ‘ipse dixitism,’ the reliance on
someone’s say-so. His view was that both intuitionism – the view that under the right
conditions we ‘see’ the moral quality of whatever it might be – and moral sense
theories – the view that a special and specific sense picks up the moral quality of
whatever it might be – suffer the same vice: they are not amenable to an external test
of the rightness of the judgment. As an empiricist, Mill did not wish to invent ‘senses’
to explain our moral judgments, since he thought everything the believers in a moral
sense appeal to can be explained in other ways; and intuitionism was deplorable
because it offered nu route to improve our moral judgments; the belief that our own
deep convictions certify their own rightness was a bar to progress. That put Mill on
Bentham’s side, even though we shall see how much he disagreed with Bentham next
week.
4