 In this video, we're looking at John Stuart Mills' excerpt from utilitarianism. In this piece, he's asking the question of what is the right act, or what is the moral act. We can contrast this with Aristotle, who's asking, you know, what is the right character, or what's the right kind of state that a person should be in. Mills not asking this question, he's rather asking, what should we do? Which is different than who should you be? His main theory is that people ought to follow the greatest happiness principle. And this is that actions are right in proportion to the extent they promote happiness and wrong, that they tend to promote the reverse of happiness. Now that's kind of a mouthful, and in some ways it seems really obvious, which is a lot of what Mills has to say is the justification for his belief. He's like, who doesn't want to be happy? Now to really fully understand the greatest happiness principle, we have to tease out a couple of important parts of the principle. First, his theory is consequentialist. That means that the right act is going to be determined in part by the consequences. Not in part, but completely by the consequences. And the consequences of matter here happen to deal with happiness. So the idea is that you look at several different courses of action before you, you figure out which course of action produces the most happiness, and you take that course of action. It doesn't really matter how you do it. I mean, of course, how you do it could have some impact on the results, but in the end it's the results that matter. Not so much how you go about doing it, or even what kind of person you are. Although Mills has a lot to say about moral motivation. He thinks that you're going to be happier if you have the right motivation. Sure, but in the end, what's going to make the difference is the consequences of the act, but not how you perform the act or even your motivations. So he's saying that the consequences that matter is happiness. Now we've been dealing with happiness a lot over this semester, but for him happiness is pleasure in the absence of pain. And by unhappiness it means pain in the privation of pleasure. Now this just sounded an awful lot like Epicurus. Epicurus, excuse me, Mills definitely took some cues from Epicurus here. But like Epicurus, and he's quick to defend Epicurus in his piece here, like Epicurus, he says that not all pleasures are created equal. There aren't such things as higher pleasures. I mean, these are going to involve the mind, the intellect, the will. These are going to involve making yourself more of what's human. So we could probably see some kind of influences of Aristotle and what he has to say here. He thinks that, you know, sure, he's not going to deny that there are all kinds of pleasures, but it's the higher pleasures that make the difference, right? He doesn't want to turn us into, you know, well, you can let your imagination flow with that one. Kind of contrast it to the higher pleasures would be something like the lower pleasures. These would be simply pleasures of the body. These would be, you know, your typical night in Vegas, right? And the idea here is that you do, you follow sensuality, what Aristotle calls sensuality. You know, so, Mills is not going to deny that this is pleasure, right? He's not going to deny that. But he thinks that there's, you know, it's definitely a difference between higher pleasures and lower pleasures. How do we know which is which? How do we know which is the higher pleasure and which is the lower pleasure? Well, he has this, he has this statement. He said, look, you know, people who are acquainted with both will inevitably choose the higher pleasures. Yeah, sure. Every once in a while, you know, a moment of weakness might dive into the lower pleasures again. But in the end, at the end of the day, the higher pleasures are going to win out. If somebody, you know, sows their wild oats and then they take up reading or they take up, you know, a study of a serious topic or they take up opera or they're going to look to these higher pleasures. You know, you might dabble in McDonald's every once in a while, but then you'll study really good cuisine and, you know, follow really good cuisine. It's always going to happen that eventually you're going to choose the higher road. You're always going to choose the higher pleasures if you're acquainted with both. He thinks this is obvious that we think this is true. It's better to be a human dissatisfied than a pig satisfied. Better to be a Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. He thinks that we do this even if, and he says, it requires more. It requires more to take on the higher pleasures. But once you've had that taste of the higher pleasures, you won't want to go back to anything. It's at least not on a regular basis. Yeah, share your mind, fall into temptation or once in a while and, you know, we might even catch this out these days and get kind of frustrated chasing the higher pleasures, but you can't quite get it. So you go out for a night of fun or something like that. Okay, trying to blow us in steam. But in the end, he says, we would always choose these higher pleasures. Something else that's really important with the greatest happiness principle. It's not the individual that matters. It's not the happiness of the one that's important. It's the greatest happiness overall. Now that doesn't mean everybody's going to be happy. No. And it doesn't mean that, you know, we're all going to have equal happiness. No, that doesn't mean. What he means is that we have to consider the course of action we're going to take. We have to measure the happiness of all the people affected by our actions. And whichever action has the greatest happiness or the greatest number of people, that's the course of action that we should take. He thinks that we should teach this from a very young age, that we should train people to think this way, to think of the collective rather than the individual. So this is an interesting consequence of his view as well. This isn't about you. Your actions are not about you. Your actions are about others. That wraps it up at least for the moment for utilitarianism. We'll take a look at this in more detail in class. So I will see you next time.