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John Stuart Mill's Second Objection To Utilitarianism

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John Stuart Mill's Second Objection To Utilitarianism
1. According to Sandel, utilitarianism fails to respect individual right and freedom (Sandel, 2009, p. 37). The issue with utilitarianism is that it will do whatever to maximize utility and anything to prevent pain or suffering (Sandel, 2009, p. 34). An example that was mentioned in the book was throwing Christians to the lions, as you can see it fails to respect the individual rights of the Christians. The lions and the crowd watching are maximizing their pleasure while the Christians are suffering pain. The pleasure of the lion and crowd outweighs the pain and suffering of the Christians. The second objection that Sandel has to utilitarianism is a common currency of value, which breaks everything up in a cost benefit analysis (Sandel, 2009, …show more content…
John Stuart Mill’s notion of “higher pleasures” addresses the second objection to utilitarianism - that it reduces all values to a single scale (Sandel, 2009, p. 52). In the book it was mentioned that Mill tries to show utilitarians that they can distinguish higher pleasures from lower ones. Mill talks about how the higher pleasures are those that produce stronger and longer pleasures (Sandel, 2009, p. 52). It is interesting that Bentham doesn’t recognize qualitative distinction between pleasures, as for him pleasure is pleasure and pain is pain. The main focus for Bentham is that he is interested in the intensity and duration of the pleasure or pain (Sandel, 2009, p. 52).The difference between Bentham and Mill is that Bentham sees all pleasures as equal, while Mill believes you can differentiate between higher pleasures from lower ones by experiencing it (Sandel, 2009, p. 51-52). Mill’s notions was successful in improving Bentham’s utilitarianism because you can experience both the higher and lower pleasures and then determine the desirable one (Sandel, 2009, p. 54). As mentioned in the book Mills tried to save utilitarianism by recasting it as a more humane way. Also morality plays a major role because Mill was concerned about the humanitarian’s views such as individual rights and higher/lower
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