Mill defines utilitarianism as the combination of a “theory of life” and a moral claim: only pleasure and freedom from pain are desirable as ends, and the promotion of happiness is the sole goal of moral action. So defined, utilitarianism is open to ad hominem pessimistic objection: a “theory of life” which entails the impossibility of happiness fits poorly with a morality centered on its promotion. The first two challenges Mill confronts in Utilitarianism share this pessimistic structure. Interestingly, however, these (...) challenges paint inverted pictures of the best utilitarian life: one suggests this life is satisfying but ignoble, the other that it is noble but unsatisfying. I explain Mill's treatment of both challenges as genuinely pessimistic interpretations of utilitarianism's “theory of life.” Read through the lens of Mill's engagement with pessimism, these challenges point to distinctive conceptions of dignity and satisfaction that play a significant role in Mill's ethics. (shrink)

It has been argued that, due to our commitment to distributive justice and fairness, we have a moral obligation toward animals to enhance, or “uplift,” them to quasihuman status, so that they, too, can enjoy all the intellectual, social, and cultural goods that humans are capable of enjoying. In this article, I look at the underlying assumption that the life of an animal can never be as good as that of a human, not because of any external circumstances that may (...) be changed, but simply because of the restrictions imposed on him by his animal nature. This assumption is only plausible if there are objective goods that animals have no access to. Yet even if there are objective goods, they are best understood as species-relative, so that each kind of animal has its own set of goods, which are determined by its specific nature. It follows that we have no moral obligation to uplift animals on the grounds that their life is necessarily worse than ours. (shrink)

Few philosophers today embrace quantitative hedonism, which states that a person’s well-being depends only on the amount of her experienced happiness and suffering. Despite recent attempts to rehabilitate it, most philosophers still consider it untenable. The most influential arguments levelled against it by Mill, Moore, Nozick and Kagan purport to demonstrate that well-being must depend on more than only the amount of experienced happiness and suffering. I argue in this paper that quantitative hedonism can rebut these arguments by pointing out (...) a shared systematic flaw in their argumentative structure. In particular, I argue that they are based on thought experiments that invoke either structurally unreliable intuitions or intuitions that are not in tension to the tenets of quantitative hedonism. While this does not rehabilitate the theory by itself, it shows that the classical arguments against quantitative hedonism provide far less evidence against it than commonly thought. (shrink)