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Internal Sanctions in Mill's Moral Psychology

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 January 2009

Dale E. Miller
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Abstract

Mill's discussion of ‘the internal sanction’ in chapter III of Utilitarianism does not do justice to his understanding of internal sanctions; it omits some important points and obscures others. I offer an account of this portion of his moral psychology of motivation which brings out its subtleties and complexities. I show that he recognizes the importance of internal sanctions as sources of motives to develop and perfect our characters, as well as of motives to do our duty, and I examine in some detail the various ways in which these sanctions give rise to motivating desires and aversions.

Type
Research Article
Information
Utilitas , Volume 10 , Issue 1 , March 1998 , pp. 68 - 82
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1998

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References

1 ‘Bentham’, Essays on Ethics, Religion and Society, ed. Robson, John M., Toronto, 1969Google Scholar, Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, x. 98.

2 Utilitarianism, CW, x. 228.

3 Letter to Ward, William George, The Later Letters, ed. Mineka, Francis E. and Lindley, Dwight N., Toronto, 1972, CW, xv. 649Google Scholar.

4 Autobiography, ed. Robson, John M. and Stillinger, Jack, Toronto, 1981, CW, i. 141, 143Google Scholar.

5 Utilitarianism, CW, x. 231–3.

6 Letter to Ward, CW, xv. 649–50.

7 An Examination of Sir Walter Hamilton's Philosophy, ed. Robson, J. M., Toronto, 1979, CW, ix. 455Google Scholar.

8 Utilitarianism, CW, x. 231–2.

9 The Sources of Normativity, Cambridge, 1996, p. 81Google Scholar.

10 Ibid., p. 80.

11 An Examination of Sir Walter Hamilton's Philosophy, CW, ix. 453.

12 Letter to Ward, CW, xv. 650.

13 Utilitarianism, CW, x. 228 (emphasis added).

14 Korsgaard is interested in whether Mill can answer her ‘normative question’; she concludes that he cannot, and I suspect that even if she would now agree that the proof is more potent than she previously recognized she would not revise this conclusion. What is Korsgaard's normative question, and have I in fact shown Mill can answer it? She phrases the question differently throughout her book, but suggests that ‘Should we allow ourselves to be moved by such motives as may be provided for morality (either by nature or by training)?’ is the most apposite way to put it to Mill (Korsgaard, , Sources, pp. 81–2)Google Scholar. This is not sufficient, however, for Mill does not accept its Kantian presupposition that we can choose between our motives (see An Examination of Sir Walter Hamilton's Philosophy, CW, ix. 452–3). ‘Should we approve of experiencing the feeling of duty when we neglect our duty, as this is specified by utilitarianism, and of having motives that are connected to our experience of this feeling?’ is hardly elegant, but seems to put Korsgaard's query in a form Mill could accept. Korsgaard contends that Mill cannot answer the normative question (I presume that she would say that he cannot answer my formulation of the question any more than he can answer her own) because it ‘must be answered in a way that addresses the agent who asks it’ (p. 86), whoever that agent is. In her lectures she saya that Mill cannot give an answer that addresses nonutilitarian agents, because the proof is impotent to convince these agents to practice utilitarianism. I hope to have shown that in fact it can address many non-utilitarians, but I have to concede that it is unlikely to address all of them and thus that Mill cannot answer the question to Korsgaard's satisfaction.

15 He might also take it to include habitual willings; he is inconsistent on this score. He strongly implies that habitual willings are motives in the Logic (A System of Logic Ratiocinative and Inductive, ed. Robson, John M., 2 vols., Toronto, 1973, CW, viii. 842–3Google Scholar). But in Utilitarianism he explicitly distinguishes between habits and motives, writing that ‘[m]any … things, which men originally did from a motive of some sort, they continue to do from habit’ (Utilitarianism, CW, x. 238). His use of ‘motive’ is inconsistent in this respect even within a single work, his book on Hamilton, (An Examination of Sir Walter Hamilton's Philosophy, CW, ix. 452–3, 468)Google Scholar. It may be, as John Skorupski suggested when commenting upon an earlier version of this paper, that the passages where Mill distinguishes between habitual willings and motives can be put down to polemicizing against free-will theorists or slack drafting. But it may also be that at times he is mindful of the fact that, while desires and aversions figure into deliberation, habits of the will pre-empt it, and that he intentionally restricts the term ‘motive’ to those influences on the will which we take account of when we deliberate.

16 An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, ed. Burns, J. H. and Hart, H. L. A., Oxford, 1996Google Scholar (Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham), p. 98 (emphasis added).

17 A System of Logic, CW, viii. 842.

18 ‘Remarks on Bentham's Philosophy’, CW, x. 12.

19 Utilitarianism, CW, x. 229 (emphasis added).

20 Ibid., p. 228.

21 Principia Ethica, Cambridge, 1903, 69–70Google Scholar.

22 Happiness, Justice, and Freedom, Berkeley, 1984, pp. 13ffGoogle Scholar. Also ‘Mill's Concept of Happiness’, Interpretation, vii (1978), 97ffGoogle Scholar.

23 The claim that Mill believes we may desire things other than pleasure (and the absence of pain) may be objected to as follows: ‘But doesn't he say that the only thing that we can desire as a final end is happiness, and doesn't he define happiness as pleasure and the absence of pain?’ The answer to each question is, ‘Yes’; a more complete answer to the second is, ‘Unfortunately, yes.’ As Berger says, there is an ‘important unclarity’ in Mill's account of happiness; his language is ‘unguarded’ (Happiness, Justice and Freedom, p. 35). ‘By happiness is intended pleasure, and the absence of pain’ is pithy, but does not really capture Mill's understanding of the relation between pleasure and happiness. Something along the lines of, ‘By happiness is intended both pleasure and those things which one is caused to desire by the pleasure of contemplating them, along with the absence of pain and of those things to which one is caused to be averse by the pain of contemplating them’, would be more accurate, albeit less catchy. When Mill considers the relation between pleasure and desire in chapter IV of Utilitarianism he is, throughout much of his discussion, remarkably unclear about whether he thinks that people desire only those things from which they anticipate pleasure or whether it is possible that they might also desire things which they find it pleasurable to contemplate (i.e. whether the pleasure of the contemplation might cause desires for the things themselves). He writes: ‘[D]esiring a thing and finding it pleasant, aversion to it and thinking of it as painful, are phenomena entirely inseparable, or rather two parts of the same phenomenon; in strictness of language, two different modes of naming the same psychological fact: that to think of an object as desirable (unless for the sake of its consequences), and to think of it as pleasant, are one and the same thing; and that to desire anything, except in proportion as the idea of it is pleasant, is a physical and metaphysical impossibility’ (Utilitarianism, CW, x. 237–8). I find all of the emphasized passages above – the emphases are mine, of course – to be ambiguous on this score. Clarity, when it comes, comes in a somewhat surprising place. In the paragraph following the one I just quoted Mill shifts subjects and begins to discuss the fact that people can become habituated in their willing. He is careful to distinguish cases of desire-motivated willing from those of habitual willing where a person ‘carries out his purposes without any thought of the pleasure he has in contemplating them or expects to derive from their fulfilment’ (ibid., 238, emphasis added). And this, I think, establishes that he believes that we can desire something either because (the contemplation of) the idea of it is pleasant, or because we anticipate pleasure from the thing itself (i.e. from the possession of an object or the performance of an action).

24 John Stuart Mill, London, 1989, p. 297Google Scholar.

25 Mill does not offer any reductive account of this mechanism. Alexander Bain's doctrine of the ‘fixed idea’ – ‘all ideas tend to work themselves out into full actuality’ – might appear to be a potential basis of such an account, but it will not suffice. First, while Bain shows that vivid ideas can give rise to impulses to act, these impulses are neither desires or aversions. Second, the impulses can be caused by painful as well as pleasurable ideas, as when we feel an impulse to leap when standing on the edge of a cliff and contemplating just how horrible it would be to plummet off. See Bain's note in Mill's, James Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind, 2 vols., London, 1878, ii. 384Google Scholar.

26 An Examination of Sir Walter Hamilton's Philosophy, CW, ix. 459.

27 Utilitarianism, CW, x. 246.

28 ‘There is a standard of altruism to which all should be required to come up, and a degree beyond it which is not obligatory, but meritorious.’ Auguste Comte and Positivism, CW, x. 337.

29 ‘This feeling of shame is accounted for by obvious associations …’. ‘Sedgwick's Discourse’, CW, x. 59–60.

30 Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind, CW, ii. 294–5.

31 ‘Self-Respect: Moral, Emotional, Political’, Ethics, cvii (1997), 245.

32 ‘The Utility of Religion’, CW, x. 411.

33 ‘Sedgwick's Discourse’, CW, x. 60.

34 A System of Logic, CW, viii. 842–3.

35 ‘Bentham’, CW, x. 95.

36 ‘Inaugural Address Delivered to the University of St. Andrews’, Essays on Equality, Law and Education, ed. Robson, John M., Toronto, 1984, CW, xxi. 251–6Google Scholar; see also ‘Civilization’, Essays on Politics and Society, ed. Robson, J. M., Toronto, 1977, CW, xviii. 144–5Google Scholar.

37 A point like the one I made in section II about the ‘double association’ that occurs when a moral standard is internalized can presumably be made here as well; in fact, things may be even more complicated. At one and the same time a person might associate pain/pleasure with conformity/non-conformity to (1) a specific conception of the virtuous agent, (2) the generic ideal of having whatever character traits are conducive to doing one's duty as specified by a particular conception of duty, and (3) the even more generic ideal of having whatever character traits are conducive to doing one's duty where the idea of duty in question is the ‘pure’ one.

38 On Liberty, CW, xviii. 279.

39 Utilitarianism, CW, x. 221; see also ‘Inaugural Address Delivered to the University of St. Andrews’, CW, xxi. 225.

40 Ibid., p. 237.

41 ‘Nature’, CW, x. 395.

42 An Examination of Sir Walter Hamilton's Philosophy, CW, ix. 466n.

43 For example: ‘[T]hough our character is formed by circumstances, our own desires can do much to shape those circumstances; and what is really inspiring and ennobling in the doctrine of freewill [sic], is the conviction that we have real power over the formation of our own character; that our will, by influencing some of our circumstances, can modify our future habits or capabilities of willing’ (Autobiography, CW, I. 177). See also An Examination of Sir Walter Hamilton's Philosophy, CW, ix. 465–6.

44 In On Liberty Mill goes so far as to say that a person who has not shaped his own character has no character at all (CW, xviii. 264).

45 An Examination of Sir Walter Hamilton's Philosophy, CW, ix. 466.

46 Auguste Comte and Positivism, CW, x. 339.

47 Mary Cohen, Daniel Crane-Hirsch, Richard Gale, David Gauthier, Brad Hooker, and John Skorupski have all read and commented upon drafts of this paper, and I would like to thank them, as well as the editor of this journal, for their helpful suggestions. I would also like to thank Terrance McConnell, who served as my commentator when I presented a version of this paper at the 1996 Eastern Division Meeting of the American Philosophical Association. Even earlier versions were presented at Wichita State University in September 1996 and in a post-graduate seminar at the University of Reading the next month, and I am indebted to all the students and faculty members present on these occasions for their helpful comments and questions.