CAS PH 100 Lecture Notes - Lecture 5: Junk Food, Parkour, Experience Machine
4 Apr 2016
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Objection: too demanding, they say it is exacting too much to require that people shall always act from the inducement of promoting the general interests of society. (465) Response 1: but this is to mistake the very meaning of a standard of morals, and confound the rule of action with the motive of it. (465) Imagine two people do the same action, one willingly/gladly and the other dragging his feet. They are equal because they both maximized happiness. You could spend 50k on a car or build a whole homeless shelter: there is always a right answer, even in trivial cases. Mill admits his philosophy isn"t perfect, but other philosophies have this problem too. Mill wants to argue that: happiness is desirable, happiness is the only thing that people seek. It is evident that this cannot be proof in the ordinary and popular meaning of the term. Questions of ultimate ends are not amenable to direct proof. (461)
