John stuart mill essays

John stuart mill essays John Stuart Mill was the most famous Utilitarian. What utilitarianism is is the ethical doctrine that an action is right if it promotes the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people. Actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness. By happiness is intended pleasure and absence of pain, by unhappiness pain and privation of pleasure By greatest, Mill means the best, and by happiness he means both intellectual and sensual.However, he feels that we have a certain dignity that makes us tend to prefer intellectual over sensual happiness. Two pleasures may differ in quality, so who decides which is best? Mills answer to this is the decision must rest with those who have experienced both, and those who have experienced both opt for the higher pleasures. Mill believed that we have motivations to abide by the Utilitarian standard of morality. There are two classes of sanctions, or motivations for promoting general happiness. There are external sanctions and internal sanctions. External sanctions arise from our hope of pleasing and fear of displeasing God and other humans. Internal sanctions are motivations inside ourselves to behave in certain ways. Mills refers to this as a subjective feeling in our own minds also commonly referred to as our conscience. He also calls it the ultimate sanction of all moral behavior. Mill believes that this is not innate, but acquired. The principle of utility involves an assessment of only an actions consequences, and not the motives or character traits of the agent performing the action. The principle of utility should be seen as a tool for generating secondary moral principles. For example: dont steal, this in turn promotes general happiness. When in a moral dilemma between two secondary principles for example a moral principle of charity dictates that you should feed a ...