It will be observed that Mill adds “absence of pain” to “pleasure” in his first statement, though not in his second. There is, in this, a confusion, with which, however, we need not deal. I shall talk of “pleasure” alone, for the sake of conciseness; but all my arguments will apply a fortiori to “absence of pain”: it is easy to make the necessary substitutions.
Mill holds, then, that “happiness is desirable, and the only thing desirable,11 as an end; all other things being only desirable as means to that end” (p. 52). Happiness he has already defined as “pleasure, and the absence of pain” (p. 10); he does not pretend that this is more than an arbitrary verbal definition; and, as such, I have not a word to say against it. His principle, then, is “pleasure is the only thing desirable,” if I may be allowed, when I say “pleasure,” to include in that word (so far as necessary) absence of pain. And now what are his reasons for holding that principle to be true? He has already told us (p. 6) that “Questions of ultimate ends are not amenable to direct proof. Whatever can be proved to be good, must be so by being shown to be a means to something admitted to be good without proof.” With this, I perfectly agree: indeed the chief object of my first chapter was to show that this is so. Anything which is good as an end must be admitted to be good without proof. We are agreed so far. Mill even uses the same examples which I used in my second chapter. “How,” he says, “is it possible to prove that health is good?” “What proof is it possible to give that pleasure is good?” Well, in Chapter IV, in which he deals with the proof of his Utilitarian principle, Mill repeats the above statement in these words: “It has already,” he says, “been remarked, that questions of ultimate ends do not admit of proof, in the ordinary acceptation of the term” (p. 52). “Questions about ends,” he goes on in this same passage, “are, in other words, questions what things are desirable.” I am quoting these repetitions, because they make it plain what otherwise might have been doubted, that Mill is using the words “desirable” or “desirable as an end” as absolutely and precisely equivalent to the words “good as an end.” We are, then, now to hear, what reasons he advances for this doctrine that pleasure alone is good as an end.
40. “Questions about ends,” he says (pp. 52–3), “are, in other words, questions what things are desirable. The utilitarian doctrine is, that happiness is desirable, and the only thing desirable, as an end; all other things being only desirable as means to that end. What ought to be required of this doctrine—what conditions is it requisite that the doctrine should fulfil—to make good its claim to be believed?
“The only proof capable of being given that a thing is visible, is that people actually see it. The only proof that a sound is audible, is that people hear it; and so of the other sources of our experience. In like manner, I apprehend, the sole evidence it is possible to produce that anything is desirable, is that people do actually desire it. If the end which the utilitarian doctrine proposes to itself were not, in theory and in practice, acknowledged to be an end, nothing could ever convince any person that it was so. No reason can be given why the general happiness is desirable, except that each person, so far as he believes it to be attainable, desires his own happiness. This, however, being the fact, we have not only all the proof which the case admits of, but all which it is possible to require, that happiness is a good: that each person’s happiness is a good to that person, and the general happiness, therefore, a good to the aggregate of all persons. Happiness has made out its title as one of the ends of conduct, and consequently one of the criteria of morality.”
There, that is enough. That is my first point. Mill has made as naive and artless a use of the naturalistic fallacy as anybody could desire. “Good,” he tells us, means “desirable,” and you can only find out what is desirable by seeking to find out what is actually desired. This is, of course, only one step towards the proof of Hedonism; for it may be, as Mill goes on to say, that other things beside pleasure are desired. Whether or not pleasure is the only thing desired is, as Mill himself admits (p. 58), a psychological question, to which we shall presently proceed. The important step for Ethics is this one just taken, the step which pretends to prove that “good” means “desired.” Well, the fallacy in this step is so obvious, that it is quite wonderful how Mill failed to see it. The fact is that “desirable” does not mean “able to be desired” as “visible” means “able to be seen.” The desirable means simply what ought to be desired or deserves to be desired; just as the detestable means not what can be but what ought to be detested and the damnable what deserves to be
