Listen to This—Then Play Happy Music! (Utilitarianism, Part 2)

In Part 2 of our discussion on John Stuart Mill's Utilitarianism, co-editor Peter Singer returns to discuss the cover design of the Norton Library edition, the formation of an argument about a philosophical thought, and a soundtrack for the book (spoiler: John Lennon's "Imagine" is involved). 

Peter Singer, an Australian philosopher, is currently Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University. He is best known for Animal Liberation, first published in 1975 and widely considered to be the founding statement of the animal rights movement; and for The Life You Can Save, which led him to found the charity of the same name. His other books include Practical Ethics, The Most Good You Can Do, and the two books co-authored with Katarzyna de Lazari- Radek. In 2005, Time magazine named him one of the World’s 100 Most Influential People.

To learn more or purchase a copy of the Norton Library edition of Utilitarianism, go to https://wwnorton.com/books/9780393441161.

Learn more about the Norton Library series at https://wwnorton.com/norton-library.

Have questions or suggestions for the podcast? Email us at nortonlibrary@wwnorton.com or find us on Twitter at @TNL_WWN and Bluesky at @nortonlibrary.bsky.social. 

Transcript

[Music:] 

[Mark:] You are listening to the Norton Library podcast where we explore classic works of literature and philosophy with the leading scholars of the Norton Library, a new series from W.W. Norton that introduces influential texts to a new generation of readers. I'm your host Mark Cirino with Michael von Cannon producing. Today we present the second of our two episodes devoted to Utilitarianism by John Stuart Mill as we interview its co-editor Peter Singer. In part one, we discussed Mill's life and work, the basic tenets of utilitarianism, some of the objections to it, and some of its applications. In this second episode, we learn more about Peter Singer's relationship to Mill and his famous text, how he first encountered it, challenges the idea of utilitarianism might pose new readers, a favorite line, and so much more. Peter Singer is an Australian philosopher that serves as the Ira W. Damp, professor of bioethics at Princeton University. He is the author of animal liberation, the life you can save, along with publications co-authored with Katarzyna de Lazari-Radek. In 2005, TIME named him one of the world's one hundred most influential people. It is so wonderful to have him join us again today. Peter Singer, welcome back to the Norton Library podcast.  

[Peter:] Thank you.  

[Mark:] Why don't we start our second discussion of John Stuart Mill’s Utilitarianism by talking about your extremely handsome Norton Library edition of this book, the cover design — these Norton people always have these ingenious color schemes. What do you have to say about yours?  

[Peter:] Well, I didn't really have any say in the cover, as you say. I think that's a part of the Norton Library system, but I like it. It's plain and simple. There's lots of not exactly white space, but sort of light gray space around it. There's John Stuart Mill's name boldly in a sort of reddish-brown color. And “Utilitarianism” in white. And there's a bar color bar of the reddish-brown towards the bottom. So I think it's a plain and simple cover. And I think it befits the subject.  

[Mark:] So gray and brown don't have any kind of significance to John Stuart Mill that we should extrapolate? 

[Peter:] Not that I know about.  

[Mark:] No, they weren't his two favorite colors, or…  

[Peter:] I don't know that he ever wrote what his favorite colors were. 

[Mark:] He wrote so much and he never—he never addressed that! Well, my conclusion is the Norton Library editors have a motive, and it makes sense even though it might not be readily apparent to us. In any case, it's a very handsome addition. Peter, do you remember when you first read Utilitarianism?  

[Peter:] Oh, I would have read Utilitarianism in my second year of undergraduate university. I did an ethics course and that included utilitarianism, the philosophy. We actually read some of Henry Sidgwick, a philosopher I mentioned in the previous episode. But we also—I also read John Stewart Mill’s Utilitarianism at that time. I would have known a little bit about it because the very first philosophy book that I read when I was still in high school was Bertrand Russell's History of Western Philosophy. So I would have had his summary discussions about Utilitarianism, about Mill, but I hadn't actually read the original work until my second year of university studies.  

[Mark:] Did you respond to it?  

[Peter:] Yes. The teacher —  the lecturer in charge of that course — was actually quite hostile to utilitarianism and presented a different view. He's famous for an example that is one of the counterexamples to utilitarianism. We talked a little bit about the previous episode about how utilitarianism might lead you into situations that most people would think were wrong. So, the teacher, whose name was McCloskey, H. J. McCloskey, asked us to imagine a southern town in the United States during the racist era in which whites dominated blacks and lynch justice was prevailing. So he said, "So imagine that you're in a town and a white woman reports that she's been raped by a black man and, an angry white lynch mob gathers. They round up six blacks, and they are planning to hang them all from a tree that they have used for their lynchings. Now, imagine that that you're the sheriff and you're powerless to stop this mob doing what they want to do because you're just one person and they all were many and they have guns, too. But there is one way in which you could save at least five of the six people they're planning to lynch. You could claim that you have evidence that one of them is in fact the rapist, and then if you are persuasive enough, they will lynch that person and let the other five go and they will be satisfied. Now in fact, you have no such evidence. But a utilitarian, McCloskey claimed, would have to do that, would think that was the right thing to do to frame an innocent person to let the other five go. And McCloskey thought that this was obviously wrong. This would be a violation of the duties of the sheriff to see justice done no matter what, to tell the truth. And he thought that that was a definitive reputation of utilitarianism. I wasn't so sure, even as an undergraduate, and I actually wrote an essay defending the view that, if that really was the only thing that you could do, and there was the choice was either that all six of them get lynched or that only one of those six gets lynched — and remember he would have died anyway —  if you'd done nothing and the other five are free. Perhaps that would be the right thing to do. It's a hypothetical example. Of course, in the real world, you couldn't be certain that those would be the consequences or that what you were doing wouldn't be exposed to the great discredit of the institution of law in that region. But if you could be certain those would be the only consequences, I argued that it might be the right thing to do. So that was, I guess … I wasn't a utilitarian at that stage but I at least thought that my teachers objection to utilitarianism wasn't a knockdown objection, and from then on I went on exploring that and other objections to utilitarianism and eventually convinced myself that there was no knockdown objection and that this really was a reasonable way to decide what is the right thing to do.  

[Mark:] That's such a fascinating example. So, is a utilitarianist to feel bad about framing a member of a lynch mob?  

[Peter:] Yeah. Well, you should feel bad about it. It's explicable that you would be reluctant to do this because you should be brought up, especially if you're an officer of the law, to think that you always ought to do what is right, and what is the truth, and see that justice is done. But now you find yourselves in these extraordinary circumstances, where the consequences will be much worse if you don't frame the innocent person. So it's not that one you know just easily slips into these kinds of things and there are other examples obviously along similar lines. It's not that one just easily slips into them. It's right that we are brought up to be very reluctant to do that, to think that that's wrong. And maybe in fact, you know, because of that we won't be able to do this. We'll just — it'll just be something that's so much against all our inclinations, that we can't actually do it and the consequences will be worse. But that's different from saying that if hypothetically you could do it, would it be wrong to do? And I think the answer to that is no.  

[Mark:] Hamlet says, "I must be cruel to be kind."  

[Peter:] That could be an example. Or here, one might say, "I must be unjust to be kind."  

[Mark:] You also mentioned in the first episode that On Liberty was perhaps even more famous than Utilitarianism by Mill. Did you read that?  

[Peter:] I did read On Liberty. Yes. I think it was in a political philosophy class that I was taking, and I was immediately impressed by that and by the arguments in favor of freedom of thought and discussion and also of individual liberty. Mill puts forward in that, firstly, arguments that we have a strong—that it's very important, for a progressive society to make progress, that there be complete freedom of thought and discussion. And he gives examples of things that other people were horrified by and thought were obviously wrong that now we accept. Criticisms of religion would be an example. Advocacy of same-sex relationships and so on. And he also has another principle that he puts forward in that work which is sometimes called the “harm to others” principle, and that is that the role of the law and of the state should only be to prevent people harming others. When it comes to what one chooses for oneself or with another person who consents, we could add the law has no business in interfering with individual liberty. And that again is important in questions like same-sex relationships, because it’s an argument you can use even for people who are convinced that same-sex relationships are somehow wrong as some religious people might be. You can still say, "Well, they may be wrong, but the law has no business in interfering with consenting adults in their choice of sexual activity."  

[Mark:] Unless they take the word of harm and extend it to that it harms them to know that something like this is even going on.  

[Peter:] Well, that's the doctrine of offense that people will be offended. And that applies to freedom of speech as well, of course. And Mill argues strongly that offense is not a sufficient reason for interfering with individual liberty nor with freedom of thought and discussion. And again, that's a very relevant argument today, where I think arguably we're too sensitive in thinking that something, that somebody might take offense to is a reason for not permitting somebody to say it or not giving them a platform from which they can say it.  

[Mark:] You mentioned in the first episode that Mill wrote Utilitarianism in a way that was quite simple. Your introduction refers to it as accessible. Are there challenges that a new reader to utilitarianism might encounter or do you think it will be smooth sailing?  

[Peter:] Well, someone who has never read works from the 19th century or earlier might still find the prose not as accessible as people would have found it in Mill’s day. Because the Victorians did write differently. They wrote somewhat longer sentences than we used to. And so I have had students who've said that they found it not that easy to read. But for a classic text, I think it is still very readable.  

[Mark:] So, the prose might be a little challenging. Are the ideas in any way impenetrable or do you think he explains it in an accessible way?  

[Peter:] Mill's ideas are not at all impenetrable. They are quite accessible. It's reading Mill and reading Kant, for example, is like day and night. Kant is much more difficult to work out what he's really getting at. You might disagree with some of Mill's views. And you might think that these arguments are not really sound. We already talked in the last episode about the arguments for the higher pleasures always being more pleasurable than the lower pleasures. That's one of them. He also tries to give a proof of utilitarianism, which as a lot of critics think doesn't work as a proof but you know what he's trying to do. It's not difficult to work out what he's trying to argue.  

[Mark:] Peter, that's what I was just going to offer as a kind of a counter example is when I saw him venturing into a proof. I got a flashback to high school geometry, and I started to question what access might—what might be accessible to one person like a philosophy professor might be a little bit more challenging to the rest of us. But it's a short enough chapter, right?  

[Peter:] Yes, the proof is quite short. You know, we discuss it in the book whether it works or not—that's something that students can make up their own mind about, and actually I think one of the great merits of Mills utilitarianism as a teaching tool is that students can think about whether this is right. You know don't have to treat it as, “Oh, Mill was a great philosopher” and I'm only an undergraduate and therefore it must be right. I can't possibly think critically about it. I think that Mill does make some mistakes which undergraduates can perhaps recognize and think well about. Maybe there are—is he right or isn't he right? There are arguments going both ways.  

[Mark:] So it's a useful teaching tool in that sense. So, when you teach this book you use it as an opportunity for critical thinking.  

[Peter:] Yes, that's right, and that's, I think, the most important thing that philosophy can do. I don't want my students to think that what they have to do is to memorize texts and be able to repeat them. The main aim of philosophy should be to develop my students’ critical skills, and I think reading Mill’s Utilitarianism is a valuable way of doing that.  

[Mark:] Was your professor open to your reputation when you wrote the essay?  

[Peter:] He was, fortunately, yes, maybe I wouldn't be a philosopher otherwise today. But yes, he recognized that I put forward a strong argument even if he never agreed with it. And I got a good grade for that paper and for the course as a whole and went on to do philosophy.  

[Mark:] Do you have a favorite line in Utilitarianism? 

[Peter:] Well, I mean, we have an epigraph in the book which I like, and that's why I put it as the—it's basically the statement of the view...  

[Mark:] Could you read it for us Peter?  

[Peter:] Mill wrote, “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.” And I think that's a very admirably clear and simple statement of what utilitarianism is. People can read that and think, well, do I agree with that, or don't I agree with that? And by reading on through the rest of the book, they can look at the arguments for and against. And by looking at our critical notes, they can see what I and my co-editor, Katarzyna de Lazari-Radek, think about these arguments too.  

[Mark:] When this definition is offered and you're presenting this as an epigraph, has anybody ever been able to kind of prick a hole in this definition or question the simplicity of it in any kind of a convincing way that kind of made you wish that Mill had phrased it a different way?  

[Peter:] No, I don't think they've actually objected to the phrasing of it. There is an inherent problem in saying that the right action is the one that produces the most pleasure and reduces pain — and that is, can we really add up these things? Can we quantify them? And obviously in some cases we can, and we do, you know, we think about our experiences as to what is going to produce the most pleasure and the least pain. You know you feel a little bit of a toothache. You think, "Oh, should I go to the dentist?" And I don't really like the dentist. That injection hurts me a bit. And sometimes, you know, it's very uncomfortable having them drilling even if I’m not in pain. But then I think, "Oh, but I'll experience more pain if I don't go cause this toothache will get worse and maybe I'll be away on holiday where I can't get it fixed." So, you know, we are actually saying that the pain I will receive when I go to the dentist is less than the pain I will receive if I don't go to the dentist. And we do the same sorts of things with pleasure. We think about what will — how will I go to enjoy spending my free weekend for instance? Should I go somewhere where I've really enjoyed, hiking through the bush and the exercise and the fresh air and the splendid views, or should I go to some movies...and so we're always actually doing that, and it's true that we can't put exact numbers on it. Nobody is going to say, "Oh, well, hiking through the bush outweighs sitting in a cinema by 5.3%."  

[laughter]  

But you know, but we have to do what we can in this situation.  

[Mark:] But even as a society, if you're talking about exactly what you're saying as a group, can you measure a whole bunch of people being content versus a few people being ecstatically elated? Where is there more happiness? Which side of the scale?  

[Peter:] So these are questions, when you talk about society as a whole, that governments do think about—governments try to develop policies. Consider for example the allocation of health care resources, right? So if you have a national health care scheme where the government is putting money into that, it's going to have to make some of those kinds of decisions whether to put more into reducing risks of premature death, for example — and let's say that's very expensive — you know, in building more intensive care units. You could save some lives, but they're expensive to build and to maintain and to staff. Or you could do relatively simple operations like hip replacement operations, which wouldn't save lives, but someone who is immobile because of an arthritic hip can now walk again and have a more pleasurable life. So, you have to try to reach those decisions. Governments do that all the time. There are healthcare economists who try to look at the difference that this makes to people. They use measures like quality adjusted life years, which, how many extra life years do you add by saving a life and how relevant is the quality of that life and can we take that quality plus duration into a single figure, and they've tried to do that in various ways by surveying how people feel about these conditions. It's complicated, but I think it's necessary, and we're trying really to deliver on that utilitarian approach in many areas including healthcare.  

[Mark:] Peter, we also ask our guests to offer a hot take about their book, something counterintuitive or controversial. Do you have something to say about utilitarianism that goes against the prevailing wisdom?  

[Peter:] Well, about the book, I think I've already said that, you know, I'm not putting forward this book as the greatest thing ever written that gets everything right. I'm putting it forward as a flawed work that is valuable for teaching and for developing students' critical skills. As for utilitarianism as a whole, in some places, and perhaps the United States is one of them, the idea that individual rights must in the end be subordinate to the greatest happiness of people as a whole or to the reduction of suffering of people — and not only people but all sentient beings, um, animals too. That's certainly a controversial view still. But I think that it is defensible and I think that the utilitarianism that Mill is defending is in principle the correct view even if he didn't get everything right about it.  

[Mark:] When he calls this utilitarianism, I'm hearing the word utility. So that there must be some practical application to this philosophy. So is that what gives it its name?  

[Peter:] Yes, I think utilitarianism obviously comes from the idea of something having utility and in modern parlance that may be something that isn't regarded very highly. So, we will talk about for example something as being utilitarian — meaning it's functional but not beautiful perhaps  — and we may think that beauty is important too, and we don't just want things that are functional. So in that sense utility maybe isn't quite the right term because what we're talking about is, as we've been saying, the promotion of happiness and pleasure and the minimization of suffering and pain. That's what utility means for Mill as it did for Bentham.  

[Mark:] But he's not talking about hedonism.  

[Peter:] Yes. This is hedonistic utilitarianism. Hedonism is the Greek word for pleasure, means it's that the consequence that we're talking about are pleasure and the reduction of pain. So it is hedonism. The Greeks talked about hedonism. of course, Epicurus in particular, but they were egoistic hedonists. They talked about your own pleasure and pain and how to how to maximize your own pleasure and minimize your own pain and suffering. The utilitarians talked about this universally, maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain for all sentient beings. And that's a very important difference.  

[Mark:] Obviously these days when you hear about hedonism you're thinking about a rock and roll band and drugs — 

[Peter:] Drugs, sex and rock and roll right. Which Mill would have said are not higher pleasures, so therefore, they're not the greatest pleasures and but there's something in that ... we certainly ... I don't think we get the most pleasure by drugs sex and rock and roll and only those things for the rest of our life. 

[Mark:] This question may make more sense when we have an editor of a novel or a play on. But I am bound by the Norton Library to ask you, is there any other adaptation of Utilitarianism, a different way of receiving this model from Mill?  

[Peter:] Well, there are certainly ways of applying utilitarianism in different ways that—in different situations that you could consider specific applications of some parts of it. So one example might be there was a — I think it was originally written as a play and then became a film called Whose Life Is It Anyway? About somebody who had become a quadriplegic and was confined to bed and didn't want to live that way. And basically it's an argument about whether he should have the right to end his life. He has an argument with the consultant in charge of his medical treatment saying he doesn't want to be kept alive. So, you know, that's an application of it, and I think you could find many other applications in which the issues of utilitarianism are discussed. I actually recently read a novel by a British novelist called Ben Brooks called The Greatest Possible Good. And it's about somebody who tries to do the most good in in a broadly utilitarian fashion. So that's an—in a sense—an adaptation of utilitarianism. 

[Mark:] Excellent. So, the medical example that you gave, it would be a reduction of suffering. That would be Mill’s model.  

[Peter:] That would be Mill's view, and it would also be a question of individual liberty which he wrote about in On Liberty as well. So I think Mill would have defended that right to make that for a person to make that decision, as long as of course they were competent to do so, not merely temporarily depressed by their injury.  

[Mark:] Does utilitarianism inspire any music to you? Do you have a John Stuart Mill playlist?  

[Peter:] Maybe John Lennon singing Imagine might be one utilitarian kind of song, right? Imagine that there's no heaven and no religion too, nothing to fight or die for. That kind of thing. There was also a kind of a happy song. I forget exactly what it was about—being happy. Those kinds of songs, I suppose, might suggest some sort of utilitarian view.  

[Mark:} There's a John Lennon song, Whatever Gets You Through the Night. I mean, wouldn't that, wouldn’t that ... 

[Pater:] Yes, possibly. Possibly, depending on what the long-term consequences of whatever gets you through the night are —  

[Mark:] Yeah. I knew there'd be a catch. There's always a catch at the end. I really appreciated the expansive footnotes that your edition has. It's a very slim addition, but some of the points are expanded in the back unobtrusively, I might add. One of the ones I was hoping you could expand on just a little bit for us is when you mentioned Darwin, and I wonder what the relationship is between Mill and Darwin and how Darwinism came up in utilitarianism.  

[Peter:] Well, I mean, Darwin obviously had a huge impact in Victorian thinking, and it's interesting how sort of made two major thinkers of the time — John Stuart Mill and Karl Marx — were in London at that time and, both aware of Darwin, and the question is how it fits into their views. I think Marx basically dismissed Darwin as it applies to human beings while Marx and Engels accepted Darwinism in terms of non-human animals but didn't think it applied to humans. And I think that was a tragic mistake, because it didn't take account of the way in which human nature is biological, and will not therefore be changed completely simply by changing the economic basis of society as Marx thought it would be. I think Darwin was sort of there and was important maybe in suggesting that the religious conceptions of human origins are false and that it undermines that.  

[Mark:] Can I ask a more specific question on that? One aspect of Darwinism that I wonder if Mill would comment on is—if is there an evolutionary advantage to doing a great deal of good for people that you've never met before, that are across the world, that aren't part of your clan; or is part of Darwinism the instinct to protect the people you like? 

[Peter:] Well, Darwin's—and especially Darwin has—understood today with the influence of evolutionary thinkers like Richard Dawkins would suggest that it's ... more common for people to favor those who they're close to, who are their kin, carry their genes, and perhaps also those with whom they're in mutually beneficial reciprocal relationships rather than to care about strangers. So, I think it's important for utilitarians to say even if that is part of our nature, we should not think that Darwin's theory tells us what is right or wrong. And that's a basic mistake. And Darwin himself recognized that this was a mistake. He actually wrote in a letter that one of the reviews of The Descent of Man had suggested that he had somehow justified people who were taking advantage of others in their own interest — cheats and so on. And Darwin said, you know, but what I'm doing is describing how we got to be where we are. It's — you can't draw these moral implications out of evolution. It's not a purposive moral theory. And I think that that's important, and Mill, I think, understands that utilitarians need to appeal to better side of human nature and to try to encourage and educate people in that direction—can't assume that what is evolved is therefore better.  

[Mark:] The book is utilitarianism by John Stuart Mill edited by Katarzyna de Lazari-Radek and Peter Singer. We've been joined by Peter Singer. Thank you so much for joining us, Peter.  

[Peter:] Thank you. It's been a pleasure talking to you.  

[Mark:] The Norton Library edition of Utilitarianism by John Stuart Mill, edited by Katarzyna de Lazari-Radek and Peter Singer, is available now in paperback and ebook. Check out the links in the description to this episode for ordering options and more information about the Norton Library, including the full catalog of titles.