8/12/2019 Mill's Hedonism Argument

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8/12/2019 Mill's Hedonism Argument

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sets an objective goal towards which we are morally obligated to work towards.

This distinction comes out most clearly in ethical systems which believe that the

intentions behind an action are the most important or even the sole determiner of whether

or not an action is moral. The most obvious example here would be Kant and his belief

that only actions carried out by a free will have moral worth and only when it acts

according to and is motivated by reason is a will truly free. If it were truly the case, as

Mill says, that happiness is the only thing desirable as an end and that we act justly only

when we maximize that end, then the reply of deontologists like Kant would be that this

merely robs us of the autonomy from our heteronomous inclinations required for truemorality and that there are therefore no actual criteria of morality.

There are then good, or at least reasonable, reasons for rejecting Mill's attempts to

conflate the ends of actions with the standards by which those actions are to be judged.

But if we do not conflate these two, then Mill's argument collapses and thus, even if he is

right that happiness is a true end of conduct, this does not mean that it is also therefore a

normative standard by which conduct can be judged.