This paper examines John Stuart Mill's utilitarian philosophy, with particular focus on his concept of justice as developed in Chapter 5 of Utilitarianism. The paper traces Mill's argument that justice is not grounded in abstract or transcendent moral sentiment but in social utility, and that certain narrow individual rights must be protected even within a utilitarian framework. The second part broadens the analysis by contrasting Mill's moderate utilitarianism with Peter Singer's more radical utilitarian ethics, demonstrating the flexibility of utilitarian theory and its varied compatibility with democratic ideals, individual rights, and global moral obligations.
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John Stuart Mill was one of the leading liberal thinkers of the nineteenth century. His philosophy of utilitarianism attempted to improve upon Jeremy Bentham's concept that achieving the moral outcome of the "greatest good for the greatest number" of people was the highest aspiration a government could achieve. For utilitarian thinkers like Bentham and Mill, the ultimate purpose of government was to promote pleasure and to minimize pain. Extracting pain from lawful citizens was only justified when the amount of pleasure the painful action generated was greater than the pain needed to achieve that pleasure. This was a highly scientific view of moral calculation, and one of the criticisms of the utilitarian philosophy was that it offered no abstract concept of justice applicable in all situations, but merely moral "bean counting."
Mill acknowledged that the concept of justice was an old one. However, simply because many human beings believed in a transcendent concept of justice greater than the needs of the majority did not mean that such a sentiment was necessarily valid: "It is one thing to believe that we have natural feelings of justice, and another to acknowledge them as an ultimate criterion of conduct" (Mill 1). Mill suggests that the internal moral compass of justice we feel is grounded more in natural emotions and inclinations, given the wide variety of definitions of justice and injustice found across the world. On one hand, it is considered unjust to deprive someone of his or her liberty by law — but on the other hand, it is also considered unjust to condemn or free someone because of an unjust law. Other concepts of injustice include failing to give someone what they deserve, the violation of an oath, and showing bias rather than dispensing justice equally (Mill 2–3).
Social sentiment rather than logic links these concepts together, according to Mill. There are also different concepts of justice — the justice of law and the justice of custom — where social rather than legal censure is the punishment. Ultimately, true "justice implies something which it is not only right to do, and wrong not to do, but which some individual person can claim from us as his moral right. No one has a moral right to our generosity or beneficence, because we are not morally bound to practice those virtues towards any given individual" (Mill 6). Mill makes a rights-derived argument and suggests that most of the resistance to the idea of "the greatest good for the greatest number" comes from conventional moralizing rather than from logical argument. Rights do exist and there is a higher ideal of justice — but these rights are narrow, and when they do not apply, utilitarianism must step in.
Similarly, according to Mill, the demand for punishment derives from a moral compulsion either to punish someone who has committed an outrage against a fellow human being, or to act in self-defense. This impulse, Mill suggests, may be natural and even sympathetic, but it is not a concept of justice that is morally superior to utilitarianism. This can be seen in contemporary calls for justice against someone accused of a horrible crime, even when the defendant has not been convicted by the justice system. These impulses are precisely why Mill calls upon the reader to be suspicious of colloquial uses of the word "justice."
What constitutes true justice is, in fact, a form of social utility: "justice remains the appropriate name for certain social utilities which are vastly more important, and therefore more absolute and imperative, than any others are as a class (though not more so than others may be in particular cases); and which, therefore, ought to be, as well as naturally are, guarded by a sentiment not only different in degree, but also in kind; distinguished from the milder feeling which attaches to the mere idea of promoting human pleasure or convenience, at once by the more definite nature of its commands, and by the sterner character of its sanctions" (Mill 15). Justice is inviolate, but policy must be left to utilitarianism and practicality.
"Mill reconciles majority rule with individual rights"
"Singer expands moral obligations to global human welfare"
"Three utilitarian thinkers compared on justice and rights"
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