Graduation Year

2024

Date of Submission

4-2021

Document Type

Campus Only Senior Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelor of Arts

Department

Philosophy

Reader 1

Alex Rajczi

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Terms of Use for work posted in Scholarship@Claremont.

Abstract

Theories of hedonism developed by Jeremy Bentham and others view maximizing the quantity of pleasure as the only source of good in life. Under these frameworks, pleasures can only be valued quantitatively based on how much pleasure they confer. In John Stuart Mill’s famous work Utilitarianism, he develops a different conception of hedonism that evaluates pleasures based on their quality as well as quantity. This framework gives rise to the notion of "higher and lower pleasures," the idea that some pleasures are intrinsically better than others. Mill's approach has generated significant controversy, drawing criticism from a list of philosophers. One famous criticism, articulated by E.F Carritt in his Ethical and Political Thinking, posits that Mill cannot value pleasures based on their different qualities without violating the central assumption of hedonism: that the only source of value is pleasure. In this paper, I reconstruct an attack on Mill's hedonism inspired by Carritt's argument, and develop Mill's potential responses to this attack. This analysis includes an investigation into Mill’s philosophy of mind that illuminates his definitions of pleasurable experiences and properties, which are important for his theory. Using this foundation and drawing on the work of Wendy Donner, I find that Mill can successfully respond to his critics by arguing for quality as a good-making property. I then contextualize Mill's approach to philosophy of mind, evaluate the feasibility of his framework, and discuss how we can apply the concept of higher and lower pleasures in our own lives.

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