John Stuart Mill's Utilitarianism

This paper will consider John Stuart Mill's basic ethical principle, as expressed in his Utilitarianism, that sets up a relationship between pleasure, happiness, right, and wrong. It will contrast his views with those ascribed to Callicles and to Socrates in Plato's dialogue Gorgias, and it will consider which of these three ethical theories might provide the best standard for managerial excellence in the business domain. It will offer an example of an excellent managerial decision based on that standard.

In Chapter Two of his Utilitarianism, Mill offers the following definition:

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 (448).

He then goes on to state that the theory of life on which this theory of morality is grounded holds that pleasure, and freedom from pain, are the only things desirable as ends; and all desirable things are desirable either for the pleasure inherent in themselves, or as means to the promotion of pleasure and the prevention of pain.

Mill says that many have attacked this pleasure principle on the same grounds as the Epicureans were attacked, as being a doctrine good only for swine. The Epicureans, he says, have always answered that it is such accusers w

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certainly interested in. None of this can be gone into here, but it is important to be aware that the general trend in Western intellectual history is for topics that were once considered to be in the province of philosophy to be steadily taken over and peeled away as independent areas of science and social science. The views of both Callicles and Socrates as presented by Plato contrast with that of Mill, but not in the same way. Callicles (Gorgias 492a-c) presents a philosophy of hedonism and power, and feels that those who preach moderation are weaklings who would also indulge themselves if they could. Callicles says, "We mold the best and strongest among ourselves, catching them young like lion cubs, and by spells and incantations we make slaves of them, saying that they must be content with equality" (483e). However, a man who is strong enough "shake off all these controls, burst his fetters, and break loose. And trampling upon . . . all our unnatural conventions, he rises up and reveals himself our master who was once our slave, and there shines forth nature's true justice" (484b). There is some justice in Callicles' view, from a modern viewpoint. Someone whose conscience or superego is so hypertrophied that it is stran

Category: Philosophy - J