 John Stuart Mill argued that this, that this pleasure and pain, that's what's important when we're dealing with morality. He argued for what he called the greatest happiness principle. The greatest set up in his principle states that actions are right to the extent that they promote happiness and wrong to the extent that they promote the reverse of happiness. They call this theory utilitarianism. So before we really jump into utilitarianism, it's important to remember here that Mill's significant contribution to morality is not necessarily hedonism. I mean we've seen hedonism before and hedonism basically is the idea that what's important morally or what's the value morally speaking is pleasure or happiness. We've seen hedonism with Epicurus and even Aristotle to an extent, sort of, when Aristotle talks about happiness. Here, it seems like Mill is even borrowing from Epicurus and Aristotle. He uses the language of ends from Aristotle and pleasure from Epicurus. He even defends Epicurus against some critics. Now Mill's, you know, while Mill does appeal to hedonism, that's not his main contribution. That's not where he's doing something new or different here. Now what he's doing new or different here is consequentialism. What Mill claims that has moral worth is happiness or pleasure. He's going to hedonism on this route. He is doing consequentialism and consequentialism has something to say about what can be evaluated morally speaking. Not moral worth but what can be evaluated. What sorts of things are good and bad. So, we can contrast this to Aristotle's virtue ethics. A virtue ethics says that what can be evaluated morally speaking is the character of a person. Whether a person is honest or has integrity or is vicious or a liar, you know, those are bad character and good character. Consequentialism does something different. What consequentialism says is that what is evaluated morally speaking is the act. It's the act. Okay, so what does this mean? It means, you know, Mill says, look, what matters morally is the consequences of actions. What happens as a result of actions. Okay, now you can have a very honest person. You can have a person with great integrity, but if they walk around causing pain all day, that's bad. It doesn't matter if they're honest. It doesn't matter if they have integrity. If they routinely cause people anxiety, if they cause pain, if they cause misery, those actions are bad. It doesn't matter what the character of the person is. Consequentialism can be contrasted to virtue ethics, but virtue ethics and consequentialism are not the only ways to evaluate. Not the only ways to morally evaluate. Okay, so virtue ethics will evaluate. They'll say what can be morally evaluated is the character of a person. Consequentialism says it's the actions. Another way to go is called deontic views of morality. Now, deontic views will say what's morally evaluable is whether the person followed the rules. So under this view, there are absolute moral rules which describe how people should behave. If you follow the rules, you're doing something good. If you break the rules, you're doing something bad. But for Mill, this doesn't matter. You can follow all the rules and still cause pain. Yeah, you can follow the rules and cause happiness. Okay, sure, that's possible, but you can follow the rules and still cause pain. You can cause the greatest overall happiness to drop, and that's bad for Mill. So his view is not a deontic view, per se. I mean, you're following a set of rules. Rather, that the consequences of the action must promote greatest overall happiness. It's the action, not the character. It's the consequences, not the rules that matter. So you could be a liar and a cheat. You could be a thief and you can be, you know, a scoundrel. But if you're promoting the greatest overall happiness, for Mill, that's all that matters. Now, as I said, Mill is offering a kind of hedonism. Now, his hedonism is not just, you know, based debauchery, right? He's pretty clear when he defines happiness. He says happiness is pleasure and the absence of pain. Now, his version of pleasure is a lot like Epicurus. And he borrows some from Epicurus here. He defends Epicurus. Pleasure is not just merely, you know, the garden of carnal delights, right? It's not just, you know, partying all night and going to the all-you-can-eat buffet. And, you know, you can imagine, right? All these versions here. Now, Mill is careful to avoid this. He menses no words. He says that there are higher pleasures and there are lower pleasures. And the higher pleasures are the ones that are worth pursuing, not the lower pleasures. And in his phrase, it is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied. Better to be a Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. So there's a sense in which Mill is following Epicurus here. But he also kind of deviates from Epicurus as well. You remember, Epicurus argues, he has his version of hedonism. He argues for basically a very simple life and a life of contemplation. And Epicurus' reasons for this is that, you know, if you follow a life of contemplation, there's no pain incurred by, you know, no pain incurred as what you'd find following the other kind of carnal pleasures. So, if you went on a night of drinking, yeah, there'd be a lot of fun, but you'd have a hangover the next day. Even those pleasures are not necessarily incur a hangover, right? Just, you know, rich chocolatey desserts, right? If you have those rich chocolatey desserts, Epicurus says, well, there's still pain involved because when you don't have the dessert, you miss it. And that's a pain. So, you know, Epicurus says, you should follow these higher pleasures, or what Mil would call the higher pleasures, because they don't incur any additional pain. Now, Mil is doing something slightly different than Epicurus in distinguishing between the higher pleasures and the lower pleasures. Now, for Mil, the lower pleasures are lower, well, because they're lower, right? You might even think of the lower pleasures as being lower than anything below the head. So, these pleasures are carnal, they're visceral, they're emotional. They're lower because it's what animals enjoy, it's what pigs like, but not human beings. So, desserts, drinking, you know, staying out all night, your average night in Las Vegas, right? These are lower pleasures. Those appeal to things that are lower than human beings. So, we have lower pleasures, but then we also have higher pleasures. Higher pleasures like intellectual contemplation, mathematics, science, history. We have art, beauty, refined music, classical music. Even the food's allowed, right? So long as it's, you know, the higher culinary delights, which takes a lot of skill and effort to make, that's simply a big Mac. These are the higher pleasures because, well, Mil argues that they're higher because people who experience both, the ones that go for the hard night in Las Vegas and then, you know, come home and spend a quiet evening in the libraries and reading philosophy and history, if you experience both, you'd prefer the library over Las Vegas. Those who have experienced both eventually drift over to the higher pleasures, the more sophisticated pleasures, the ones that require intellect, not emotion, the ones that require, you know, refinement, not just your guts. So, we got this distinction in the higher pleasures and the lower pleasures. Now here, you know, since Mil is kind of appealing to this idea that people who experience both would go to the higher pleasures, I think what Mil is doing here, he's drifted a bit away from Epicurus. I mean, that much is clear, he's drifted a bit away from Epicurus. And at this point, I think he's doing Aristotle. And I say these pleasures are higher, not because the lower pleasures are important, right? Sure, every once in a while you go for a night in Las Vegas, okay? And that's not a terrible thing, but, you know, you keep drifting back to the higher pleasures. So here, I think, excuse me, I think Mil is leaving Epicurus and drifting more towards Aristotle. These are higher pleasures because of the kinds of things we are. We're human beings, not pigs. We're supposed to be socrates, not fools. We've got the two different kinds of pleasure for Mil, but we haven't really looked at the greatest overall happiness principle. Now, Mil is clear about whose happiness is important. Everyone's. No one gets special treatment. No one's happiness is more important than anybody else's. This is about as unbiased as one can get. It's not, nobody has any particular rights. Nobody has any duties above anybody else, nothing like that, right? What matters is the greatest overall happiness. It's not any particular person, any particular person's happiness that matters, right? But happiness itself that matters. We have to raise the level of happiness, and in doing that, we're doing something good. The greatest happiness principle has implications for your actions. So, you might think that with utilitarianism you're either permitted or obligated to promote your greatest happiness. No, that's closer to egoism. Egoism would state that you can promote your happiness over others. Utilitarianism doesn't even state that you have to promote the happiness of other people's over your own. No, that's not it either, right? Sometimes you promote your happiness over others, sometimes other people's happiness over your own. What matters is raising the overall happiness. So, when you are taking your actions into consideration, it's not just yourself, it's not just other people. It's everybody involved. So the greatest overall happiness principle requires us to promote the happiness of all the people involved. Well, human beings aren't the only ones that can experience happiness in the middle sense. Remember, middle defines happiness as pleasure or the absence of pain. And human beings have two different kinds of happiness, and that's true. But we have the higher pleasures than the lower pleasures. But we're not the only creatures that can experience the lower pleasures. Plenty of other creatures out there can experience, you know, good food in a sense, right? You know, can experience eating food, and they can experience the exhilaration of running, or being free out in the field, and flying high in the sky, everything like that. And these creatures can also experience pain. So, for Mill, and for lots of utilitarianism, lots of people are going to argue this, when we're talking about pleasure and pain. Human beings are not the only people, not the only creatures that can experience pleasure and pain. So, according to the greatest happiness principle, remember, no individual person's happiness matters more than anybody else's. And we should also, since we've got more creatures than human beings that can experience pleasure and pain, it's actually expanded. No individual creature's happiness. No individual creature's pleasure or pain is more important than anybody else's. So, when you're considering your actions, you know, the consequences of the actions, you have to consider not only how you're affecting human beings, but all these other creatures out there that can be made miserable by what you do.