On Mill's Conception of Higher and Lower Pleasures
"Of two pleasures. If there be one to which all or almost all who have experience of both give a decided preference... that is the more desirable pleasure. Now it is an unquestionable fact that those who are equally acquainted with, and equally capable of appreciating and enjoying, both, do give a most marked preference to the manner of existence which employs their higher faculties... It is better to be a human being satisfied than a pig dissatisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied." -John Stuart Mill, "Utilitarianism", ch. 2"De gustibus et coloribus non est disputandum."In John Stuart Mill's treatise, Utilitarianism, the basic philosophical premise of his whole system of ethics is that, in a nut-shell, that which is good is determined by what brings the greatest amount of happiness for the greatest amount of people, or, as Mill put it, the Greatest Happiness Principle, as the basis for determining utility. Among the immediate problems this raises to any analysis is, of course, the difficulty in pinning down a rational, objective framework for determining happiness, which Mill equates early on with pleasure as "the only thing desirable as ends". Mill spots this,
------------------------------------------------------------------------**Bibliography**Bibliography· Gibbs, B. What is it about the higher pleasure that makes it intrinsically more worthy than the lower one? Is it also really true that the panel of competent judges would always rationally select the higher pleasures? Various intellects have advocated lifestyles of relative physical hedonism, and yet no one could call them unacquainted with the pleasures of the higher faculty: voluptuaries like Oscar Wilde, Coleridge, and Byron come to mind, men noted for the quality of their written word who yet voluntarily chose to embrace a lifestyle of physical hedonism, which, some say, enhanced the productive exercise of their higher faculties, such as Coleridge's reportedly opium-induced ode, Xanadu. In his argument, however, the nature of pleasure is divided into merely "higher" and "lower", and the thrust of his argument is that higher pleasures are those derived as a result of exercising one's higher faculties, !compared to the more animal gratifications such as sexual needs or food, and the quality of these higher pleasures is evident as they would be chosen by people with empirical experience of both varieties of pleasure, and the capacity to select between them over the more base ones. Mill does not go into much detail, generally, into any distinction, assuming, it seems, that the difference would be evident to all who read his essay. Even the most basic of animal appetites, sex, has been accorded spiritual and philosophical value in other cultures: there is a whole religious scripture based on the act of sexuality(the Kama Sutra) - and this is no mere text for the titillation of base pleasures, it encompasses issues of spirituality, divinity, the transcendentalism of the soul perceived in a colloquy of fleshly sensations. and distinguishes very early on in the 2nd chapter of Utilitarianism, where he admits that estimation of pleasure needs to take into account quality as well as quantity. And even then, it !remains far from certain that we can derive a consensual empirical framework of what these higher and lower pleasures are, and whether higher pleasures as Mill appears to define them would be the choice for every conceivable circumstance. If the act of sexuality, can be modified and informed and perhaps to some degree motivated by the higher rational faculties, it throws into doubt whether sex itself, in such a context, remains a base animal appetite, or can it, rather, be transmuted somehow into a higher quality of experience? Mill might counter-argue, however, that the one common, elevating factor all of the experiences I have described above involve reason in some way - the capacity of the higher human intellect applied to experience, even baser ones and appreciate the experience above and beyond mere satiation of physical needs, and that it is this higher human intellect that separates between higher and lower pleasures. Mill's framework for determining higher and lower pleasuresWe can see, therefore, the issue of distinction between qualities of pleasure is a somewhat tricky one. In my essay, I will, with particular reference to Mill's essay, "Utilitarianism", and Benjamin Gibbs' various explanations and clarifications of Mill's theory of higher and lower pleasures, seek to elaborate on the views Mill felt on higher and lower pleasures, both on how to distinguish between them, and on the qualitative value he ascribed to each. Mill's utilitarianism, therefore, comes under some considerable consternation if the basis on which we are to determine utility; ie, happiness attained through the acquisition of pleasure and the avoidance of pain, remains subject to such ambiguity. 61, 1986· Mill, John Stuart, 'Utilitarianism'.
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