The Death of Humanity: and the Case for Life by Richard Weikart

Author:Richard Weikart [Weikart, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781621575627
Publisher: Regnery Publishing
Published: 2016-04-03T21:00:00+00:00

Among Bentham’s most influential disciples was John Stuart Mill, one of the most famous British intellectuals of the nineteenth century. His father, a well-connected economist, became a close friend of Bentham in 1809 and spent a great deal of time with him and his associates, so the young Mill grew up surrounded by Benthamites. In his zeal to become a great Benthamite crusader for reform, Mill formed a circle of like-minded intellectuals in 1822 called the Utilitarian Society. The group was small and short-lived, but it gave a new name to the Benthamite moral philosophy: utilitarianism. In 1826 Mill, whose father had rigorously educated him to accept the principles of science, logic, rationalism, and the omnipotence of the environment in shaping human character and conduct, faced an intellectual crisis. He despaired of ever achieving happiness, recognizing that even if he achieved his goals, he would not be happy. Mill admitted in his autobiography that “my love of mankind . . . had worn itself out,” and he suffered a prolonged period of melancholy.50

Two considerations lifted him out of his depression. First, he came to understand that the way to achieve happiness is not by dwelling on one’s own happiness, but rather by seeking other people’s happiness, or by pursuing some art or other pursuit as an end in itself. Pursuing one’s own happiness would not make one happy. Second, Mill was deeply impressed by reading William Wordsworth’s poetry in 1828. Thereafter he found solace in poetry from the Romantic movement, finding that it touched his emotions in ways that the cold logic of Enlightenment philosophy could not. Mill’s father had not been tender or emotional, and he viewed humans through the lens of science, as the objects of rational inquiry, completely subject to the laws of nature. After 1828 Mill integrated emotion into his philosophy to such an extent that he wrote “cultivation of the feelings became one of the cardinal points of my ethical and philosophical creed.”51

Nonetheless, despite this transition, Mill remained firmly committed to utilitarianism. In 1863 he published his most important statement on moral philosophy, Utilitarianism. Therein Mill defended Bentham’s greatest happiness principle:

The creed which accepts as the foundation of morals, Utility, or the Greatest Happiness Principle, holds that 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 the absence of pain; by unhappiness, pain and the privation of pleasure.52

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