chuggin' along in college

Hallo. actual stuff has happened... taking that language quiz is not the most exciting thing in my life right now :p

Most notably, I've gotten three roles in That Day, the Conservative Man, the Camera Man, and Doctor Ames. I read for Doctor Ames at the audition, so apparently they liked the reading :D
</brag>

!edit--> I just got a call giving me the other role I read for, the Minister. Four roles :p

I also was struck last week by John Stuart Mill's "Utilitarianism" which we've been reading in Ethics. His system of ethics seems to have undergone a formation process similar to that of Karl Marx's Communism. I was so intrigued by this that I wrote a ridiculously long email to my professor. Today she told me that it was essentially valid reasoning, although the larger conclusions drawn at the end require vastly more empirical support.

I used the following files from project gutenberg.

"Utilitarianism:" http://www.gutenberg.org/files/11224/11224-8.txt
"The Communist Manifesto:" http://www.gutenberg.org/files/61/61.txt

I used digital versions because they are easier to search. For quotes from "Utilitarianism," I will cite direct quotes by page number as from the following printing:

Mill, John Stuart. "Utilitarianism." Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing, 1861 (copyright 2001).

I do not have a hard copy of "The Communist Manifesto," so I will not be able to cite direct quotes from it except by reference to the above URL.

To begin, I must make an assertion about Mill's view of happiness. He opens by defining happiness by saying that "[b]y happiness is intended pleasure, and the absence of pain; by unhappiness, pain, and the privation of pleasure" (Mill 7). For Classical Utilitarianism not to slip into pluralism, pleasure and pain must be on a single, united continuum; otherwise, "happiness" is really a placeholder for the distinct conceptions of "pleasure" and "pain."

But it is not necessary to resort to concerns with maintaining a given classification of the ethical system, for there are passages directly from "Utilitarianism" which imply that Mill did consider pain and pleasure to be on a single, united continuum. He states that "Utilitarianism, therefore, could only attain its end by the general cultivation of nobleness of character, even if each individual were only benefited by the nobleness of others, and his own, so far as happiness is concerned, were a sheer deduction from the benefit," which implies that the happiness of the noble individual and that of all other people is additive. Considering the two components of happiness, "pleasure and the absence of pain", and the two components of unhappiness, "pain and the privation of pleasure", this addition would logically have to take place between pleasure and pain, since "absence" and "privation" refer simply to non-presence (Mill 11). But since pleasure and pain can be added, they must lie along the same continuum. This consideration is also consistent with the Benthamite Calculus which would certainly have influenced Mill.

So Mill's original definition is logically equivalent to: "by happiness is intended the presence of positive pleasure and the absence of negative pleasure; by unhappiness, the presence of negative pleasure and the absence of positive pleasure." Notice that this also defines happiness and unhappiness as mutually negative, which is consistent with the morpheme "-un."

This equivalency becomes interesting, however, because in Chapter IV, Mill states that when something is "desired for its own sake it is, however, desired as part of happiness," and furthermore states that "these [things desired for their own sake] are some of its parts" (Mill 37, 38). However, as happiness by definition and inference consists only of negative and positive pleasures, and as, intuitively, it would be the pleasant things that one desires and the unpleasant things that one desires not, this in turn implicitly defines "pleasure" (itself at least as vague as "happiness") with "that which people desire."

So Mill's definition of happiness is also logically equivalent to: "by happiness is intended the presence of what people desire and the absence of what people desire not." In the same paragraph as Mill's original definition of happiness, whereby he establishes the base of his "theory of life," he asserts that "pleasure, and freedom from pain... are the only things desirable as ends" (Mill 7). Following his conception of pleasure, this base of his "theory of life" is "those things which people desire are the only things desirable."

It is tempting to call this a tautology and then dismiss the entire theory of life. To put it into tautological form, it would read "people desire things that people desire." But I think that this fails to capture the entirety of his argument. It seems to me that a proper restatement that makes the meaning explicit is: "People in fact do desire those things which they are able to desire." Given his frequent discussion of tendencies and of taking into account the entirety of humanity, it seems appropriate to add a modifier such as "in the long run":

"In the long run, people in fact do desire those things which they are able to desire."
This is not to be distinguished from the passive-voice construction:
"In the long run, people in fact do desire those things which are able to be desired by people."
The meaning is that common to both constructions.

What strikes me about this basis for his theory of life is that it is purely descriptive. Indeed, in the first chapter, Mill discusses "the tacit influence of a standard not recognised" on non Hedonistic Utilitarian ethical systems, which suggests the seed of descriptive analysis (Mill 3). Along with the presumption that people act on their desires in the most efficient manner known to them, this implicitly proposed law that forms the basis for his "theory of life" basically asserts that, in the aggregate long run, everyone DOES follow Utilitarian standards. However, the work is clearly of a prescriptive nature. It is interesting that Mill should spend so much time emphatically arguing to an aggregate audience to do what they are already doing. It is not even as though those things he held in such high esteem (so high that it occasionally seems that he holds them to have intrinsic value) were decreasing in the middle of the nineteenth century.

This descriptive-to-prescriptive switch does not stand alone. Karl Marx published his infamous "The Communist Manifesto" on February 21, 1848, a mere thirteen years prior to the first publication of Mill's series of three articles that became "Utilitarianism." The first part of "The Communist Manifesto" is essentially an argument on the socio-economic development of western societies which designates "the proletariat alone [as] a really revolutionary class," asserts that the bourgeoisie's "existence is no longer compatible with society," and concludes that the bourgeoisie's "fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable" (Marx). This part has all the form and content of a descriptive historical analysis, albeit rife with emotional invective against capitalists, that makes a falsifiable prediction. Indeed, Marx considered himself to be scientist rather than a philosopher.

However, after arguing that that Communist revolution is "inevitable", Marx proceeds to relate instructions on how, precisely, to bring about the Communist revolution, and finishes off the paper with the well-known "WORKING MEN OF ALL COUNTRIES, UNITE!" Moreover, Marx essentially got himself banned from the entirety of continental Europe trying to bring about an "inevitable" Communist revolution. While this is not quite so drastic, for Marx's assertion does includes such proletariat leaders as he tried to be, it is still in the vein of a philosophy that takes descriptive assertions on how people behave and then demands that they behave in the manner so described.

I think that there are two hypotheses suggested by the above analysis, one of which is more well-supported than is the other. The less well-supported hypothesis is that cultures generally create voices that express and encourage the most dramatic social trends of that culture. These two texts certainly do perform the work of such voices; the nineteenth century saw the rise of both democratic power and general concern for the "common good" in western cultures, and also the beginnings of unionization. Such a hypothesis is particularly interesting in its potential to discuss the rise of sacred bodies of words (be they oral or textual) and thereby the rise of religions. However, this hypothesis is also far larger in scope than is the research that suggests it. Accordingly, the works discussed here can serve only as inspiration and not even inconclusive support.

The more well-supported hypothesis is that there were certain paradigmatic issues, at least around the middle of the nineteenth century, and at least in Europe, that restricted the possible philosophies to those that used naturalistic descriptive premises as their base. This is consistent with the profound influence that technology had on this century; so strong was the influence of effective technology that, towards the end of the 1800s, natural scientists believed that they would soon have the entire basic structure of how the universe worked out.

Any thoughts out there?

-=-raptur-=-