1 The Sympathetic Interpretations

The most sophisticated defence of the Non-Hedonist Interpretation has been offered by David Brink.^{Footnote 12} Brink claims that Mill implicitly rejects Universal and Monistic Value Hedonism but does so consistently because he never definitively commits himself to them.^{Footnote 13} According to this account, Mill uses the word ‘pleasure’ to refer to “subjective pleasures,” conceived as “pleasurable mental states,” and “objective pleasures,” conceived as “non-mental items, such as actions, activities, and pursuits” which can cause ‘subjective pleasures.’^{Footnote 14} It is claimed that, since Mill attributes intrinsic value to ‘objective pleasures,’ and they consist of a plurality of non-hedonic goods, he is actually a Value Pluralist rather than a Monistic Value Hedonist. Moreover, since Mill deems ‘subjective pleasures’ to either have no value at all, or a value that is conditional upon their relation to ‘objective pleasures,’ he also rejects Universal Value Hedonism.^{Footnote 15} In consequence, Mill is merely ‘nominally hedonist,’ in the sense that he refers to anything of intrinsic value as a ‘pleasure.’

For its part, the Non-Maximizing Interpretation maintains that, while there is an element of truth to Brink’s claim that Mill posits non-hedonic goods, this element is insufficient to render Mill a Non-Hedonist (as Brink claims), or to render his axiology incoherent (as Bradley claims).^{Footnote 16} This position is founded on the claim that the form of Mill’s Qualitative Hedonism only commits him to Monistic Value Hedonism insofar as it entails:

It then maintains that the form of Mill’s Qualitative Hedonism only commits him to Value Pluralism insofar as it entails the falsehood of:

There is no necessary contradiction between Value Hedonism in the first sense, and Value Pluralism in the second, as the latter can take pleasurableness to be one of the of value-makers.^{Footnote 18} In consequence, this form of Qualitative Hedonism can avoid the Incoherence Objection. Moreover, in taking references to the ‘quality’ of pleasures to pick out their non-hedonic attributes, it is in no danger of refutation by the Redundancy Objection because it denies that an increase in quality is equivalent to an increase in pleasantness. As thus construed, Mill’s is a Non-Maximizing Hedonism as it allows for the possibility that the less pleasant of two pleasures is the more valuable in virtue of its possession of superior non-hedonic value-making properties.

The Maximizing Interpretation can also be formulated using the terminology of ‘value-bearers’ and ‘value-makers.’^{Footnote 19} However, before doing so, it will be helpful to formulate Bentham’s position as thus construed. Bentham’s Monistic Value Hedonism is stronger than that which advocates of the Non-Maximizing Interpretation attribute to Mill. While the Non-Maximizing Interpretation restricts Mill’s Monistic Value Hedonism to the domain of value-bearers,^{Footnote 20} it is clear that Bentham also treats pleasurableness as the only value-maker.^{Footnote 21} This means that Bentham is committed to:

According to Bentham, the volume of a value-bearing pleasure has two dimensions, intensity and duration, the mathematical product of which Mill assigns the technical label ‘quantity’ (e.g., X: 210-211).^{Footnote 23} Bentham also implicitly presupposes the truth of the following:

In other words, he assumes that, since value-bearing pleasures have two quantitative dimensions, their pleasurableness is reducible to, qua identical with, their quantity, and hence pleasure and pleasurableness are one and the same. The conjunction of Hedonic Maker Maximalism and the Identity Thesis then implies:

This raises two questions. Firstly, if Mill’s Value Hedonism were a Maximizing Hedonism, how would it differ from that of Bentham? Secondly, would these differences mean that Mill’s Hedonism succumbs to Bradley’s dilemma?

According to Bradley, if the Maximalist Interpretation is correct, and increases in the quality of a pleasure amount to more pleasurableness, Mill’s conception of ‘quality’ must simply reduce to ‘quantity.’^{Footnote 25} Fortunately for the Mill of the Maximizing Interpretation, Bradley simply begs the question by assuming that the ‘quantity’ of a pleasure and its ‘pleasurableness’ are one and the same thing. While Mill would be committed to this view if he accepted Bentham’s Hedonic Bearer Maximalism outlined above, he actually rejects it, as in the following passage from his diary on March 23, 1854:

This means that Mill is also committed to rejecting Bentham’s Identity Thesis on the grounds that, while pleasures have two value-bearing quantitative dimensions, their value is affected by a further qualitative value-making dimension. While the Non-Maximizing Interpretation takes this to show that he is also committed to rejecting Hedonic Maker Maximalism, this is only the case if the quality of a pleasure cannot constitute an independent value-maker qua constituting an independent pleasurableness-maker. In other words, if increases in quality can entail increases in pleasurableness, without entailing a greater quantity of pleasure, Mill can maintain that the higher quality of one pleasure with respect to another can render the former more pleasurable despite the latter coming in a larger quantity (intensity multiplied by duration).^{Footnote 27}

Of course, Bradley denies that any sense can be given to the claim that ‘more pleasurableness’ does not entail ‘a greater quantity of pleasure,’ as he thinks that if ‘more’ is non-quantitative—in the sense of not cashing out into an increase in the number of units of intensity or duration—it is meaningless.^{Footnote 28} However, as Wendy Donner notes, Mill explicitly rejects this claim in his System of Logic.^{Footnote 29} There Mill divides “things that can be named” into feelings (or states of consciousness), substances, and attributes (VII: 51-64), and divides attributes into quality, quantity, and relation (VII: 65-73). In these terms, Bradley’s claim implies that the relation ‘x is more Φ than y’ can only be satisfied when Φ picks out a quantitative attribute rather than a qualitative attribute because Φ must make references to degrees or units on a mathematical scale. However, this would imply that the aesthetic claim that ‘x is more beautiful than y’ is only intelligible insofar as it is reducible to ‘x has more quantifiable beauty units than y.’^{Footnote 30} Since it is unlikely that Bradley commits to such an odd view in the case of aesthetic judgments, it is unclear why he does, or anyone should, accept it in the realm of hedonic judgments. In consequence, Bradley provides insufficient reason to accept the claim that one pleasure cannot be more pleasurable than another in virtue of its higher quality without this entailing that the former has greater intensity and/or duration. This means, in turn, that advocates of the Non-Maximizing Interpretation cannot use Bradley’s Redundancy Objection against the Maximizing Interpretation in order to show the superiority of their position.

2 Mill’s Identification with Hedonism in The Protagoras

Having set out the three contending sympathetic interpretations, we can now turn to the question of whether, and if so, how, Mill’s writings on Plato provide evidence that favours one over the others. In the Notes, Mill describes The Protagoras as the dialogue in which Socrates:

More specifically, Socrates commits to an axiology according to which:

Here Mill uses the terms ‘evil’ and ‘bad’ interchangeably. Today we are likely to associate evil with either wrongdoing or malevolence of character. However, it is clear that Mill doesn’t take Socrates to believe that pains as such can be referred to as ‘evil’ in this sense.^{Footnote 31} In consequence, for the sake of clarity, it will be best to refer to ‘badness’ rather than ‘evil,’ so as to avoid the unintended connotations of the latter term. We can then say that the first line of the passage commits Socrates to both Monistic and Universal Value Hedonism as they were understood in the Introduction. Moreover, the second part of the passage commits Socrates to a version of Maximizing Hedonism that accepts the (Benthamite) Identity Thesis. After all, since value-makers are ends with reference to which things can be said to be good or bad, the passage implies that if there were any value-makers besides pleasure, pleasure would not be the only value-bearer, thus rendering the bearing of value a precondition of making value.

Of course, one could doubt that Mill believes, or intends, for there to be anything as subtle as the distinction between value-bearers and value-makers at work in the passage, and hence doubt that he sees Socrates’ as a Maximizing Hedonism. Nevertheless, when Protagoras suggests that some pleasures may be ‘evil,’ Socrates replies:

Here Mill’s Socrates acknowledges the conceptual possibility of a divergence between the value of a pleasure, and the value of its pleasantness (as in Non-Maximizing Hedonism and Non-Hedonism), but maintains that those who accept this should at least concede the value of pleasantness and painfulness as such. It is extremely unlikely that the subtlety of this move was lost on the translator.

At any rate, when formulated in the language of ‘bearers’ and ‘makers,’ Socrates’ claim suggests that Protagoras could concede that pleasure is a value-maker while denying that it is the only value-maker (as recommended by Non-Maximizing Hedonism). This would allow him to concede that pleasure is good insofar as it is pleasant but also bad insofar as it is made ‘evil’ by a non-hedonic disvalue-maker. However, Socrates then rejects this position for Maximizing Hedonism, maintaining that “the good and the pleasant are identical” (ibid.), and that “a pleasure is unworthy to overpower a pain, only by being less in amount” (XI: 58-59, my italics).

The fact that Mill continues to identify Socrates’ “Hedonism” with his own “doctrine of Utilitarianism” by the time he wrote Grote (XI: 391, 418; X: 205) creates a dilemma for the Non-Hedonist Interpretation. Either Mill’s appeal to the ‘quality’ of pleasures logically commits him to Non-Hedonism, or it does not. If it does, which is what you would expect most advocates of the Non-Hedonist Interpretation to claim, his continued avowal of Hedonism means that Bradley is right to claim that Mill’s position is necessarily incoherent. Conversely, if Mill’s references to ‘quality’ do not logically commit him to Non-Hedonism, it will not simply be more plausible to take him at his hedonist word, but also more charitable qua saving him from (this specific threat of) incoherence. Of course, Brink could potentially reply that Mill’s identification with the Hedonism of the Protagorean Socrates is merely a reflection of his commitment to refer to ‘objective’ non-hedonic goods as ‘pleasures.’ However, this would overlook the fact that the Hedonism in question is a Maximizing Hedonism, and hence takes the value of a ‘pleasure’ to correspond to its ‘subjective’ pleasantness (XI: 418).^{Footnote 32}

The preceding suggests that the most promising way to defend the Non-Hedonist Interpretation would be to maintain that Mill’s avowal of Hedonism is insincere. There is more than one possible way of defending this claim, but the most availed upon has come to be known as the ‘Filial Piety Argument.’^{Footnote 33} This maintains that, while Mill rejects certain claims made by his father (in this case, Hedonism), he does not wish to acknowledge this, as it would amount to an implicit public criticism.^{Footnote 34} One reason that this might seem convincing is that it is a plausible explanation of Mill’s decision to publish his critical Remarks on Bentham [Remarks] anonymously in 1833.^{Footnote 35} However, it is not plausible to extend the Filial Piety Argument to late works, such as Grote, as Mill is willing to criticize his father publicly in his commentary on Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind [Analysis] in 1869 (e.g., XXXI: 102-103), as well as in his posthumous Autobiography (e.g., I: 165-166). In consequence, the Filial Piety Argument is of little help in explaining away the evidence that Mill remained a Hedonist despite rejecting some of the claims of Bentham and the Protagorean Socrates.

For its part, Mill’s commentary on The Protagoras is much less problematic for the Non-Maximizing Interpretation. One reason for this is that Socrates’ Hedonism is a Quantitative Hedonism qua implying that a comparison of the “degree” of two pleasures is sufficient for their comparative evaluation (XI: 59). In consequence, since we know that Mill comes to reject Socrates’ position in this respect (X: 211), advocates of the Non-Maximizing Interpretation can argue that he could also have rejected it in other respects, including its Maximizing Hedonism. Indeed, if the preceding interpretive claims are correct, its advocates might even wish to argue that the axiological distinctions in The Protagoras helped to convince Mill to abandon Maximizing Hedonism along with Quantitative Hedonism. However, Mill’s commentaries on Plato become much more problematic for the Non-Maximizing Interpretation when he turns to discuss the position of the Gorgian Socrates.

3 Mill on the Non-Hedonism of Plato and the Gorgian Socrates

In the Notes, Mill says that, in attributing Hedonism to the Protagorean Socrates, he is not thereby attributing Hedonism to Plato, as “the general tone of Plato’s speculations” seem:

Similarly, in Grote, Mill also distinguishes Hedonism from the position of the Gorgian Socrates:

These passages allow us to infer that, whatever other interpretive indeterminacies may exist, the Hedonism that Mill attributes to himself, by declaring at least some overlap between his own axiological position and that of Protagoras (XI: 391), must be distinct from the positions he attributes to Plato and the Gorgian Socrates. In consequence, the closer the positions of Plato and the Gorgian Socrates come to either Non-Hedonism or Non-Maximizing Hedonism, the greater the probability that the corresponding interpretations are false.^{Footnote 37}

In this respect, (XI: 61) seems to be incompatible with Brink’s Non-Hedonism Interpretation, as the “pleasures” to which it refers are clearly ‘subjective,’ and Brink’s Mill allows for ‘objective’ pleasures to be valuable independently of ‘subjective’ pleasure. One possible response here is that, in distancing himself from the view that other “qualities of mind” bear value, Mill is not distancing himself from the view that there are mind-transcendent ‘objective’ pleasures which bear value. However, this would have the strange implication that, while it is natural to read Mill as taking his disagreement with Plato to consist of a disagreement over which “qualities of mind” have intrinsic value, his real target is Plato’s belief that “qualities of mind” can have any intrinsic value at all (consider XV: 838-839). That is, Brink’s Mill would have to claim that, where Plato replaces Value Hedonism’s ‘subjective’ focus on pleasurable mental states with a ‘subjective’ focus on non-hedonic qualities of mind, what Plato should have done is shift to a more ‘objective’ focus on non-mental items.

For its part, the Non-Maximizing Interpretation is equally troubled by (XI: 418) as it is read naturally as dealing with the value-makers which “constitute anything a good.” There the Gorgian Socrates is implied to be a Non-Hedonist, not merely because he denies that there are goods other than pleasure, but because he denies that “Good” is “synonymous with Pleasurable” (my emphasis, see also XI: 129). This supports the Maximizing Interpretation, as if Mill takes Hedonism to entail that “Good” is synonymous with “Pleasurable,” he must also take it to entail that something cannot be made better (or ‘more good’) without being made more pleasurable.

Of course, as noted in Section 2, some might doubt whether Mill sees the significance of the distinction between ‘pleasure,’ conceived as a value-bearer, and ‘pleasurableness,’ conceived as a value-maker, and hence deny that he is implicitly rejecting anything as specific as Non-Maximizing Hedonism here.^{Footnote 38} However, it would be self-defeating for an advocate of the Non-Maximizing Interpretation to make this argument. After all, Mill has an explicit and consciously developed distinction between the ‘quantity’ and ‘quality’ of pleasure by the time of Grote, and this passage thereof is explicitly directed at axiological discussion. In consequence, to deny that Mill is aware of the possibility of pleasures being made valuable by something other than their pleasurableness is tantamount to denying that he thinks that references to the ‘quality’ of pleasures are reference to their non-hedonic value-makers. In short, then, (XI: 418) is incompatible with the Non-Maximizing Interpretation, as either Mill is aware that it distances him from Non-Maximizing Hedonism, or his lack of awareness renders it implausible to attribute the position to him. In contrast, the Maximizing Interpretation is not challenged by the possibility that Mill is slightly casual with his use of hedonic terms.^{Footnote 39} After all, if he takes both the qualitative and the quantitative dimensions of pleasures to contribute to their pleasantness, he can afford to switch casually between referring to the value of a pleasure and the value of its pleasurableness (or pleasantness), as they will ultimately amount to the same thing.

4 Calliclean Hedonism in The Gorgias

We can see that the problems for the Non-Hedonist and Non-Maximizing Interpretations are deepened by the exchange between the Socrates and Callicles of The Gorgias (Section 5) by examining the logical contours thereof. Callicles sets out to defend the claim that:

He also exemplifies this with the claim that:

When prompted to specify what the “better” should have more of, and having denied that temperance is a virtue in their case, Callicles claims that they should pursue their pleasures without restraint (XI: 125-127). He is thereby, and apparently somewhat unwittingly, drawn into defending Hedonism as such, even though it would seem to have been far more congenial for him to have defended a perfectionist position.^{Footnote 40} Nevertheless, the scene is thus set for Socrates to attempt to show that:

The contextual backdrop of Callicles’ defence of Hedonism can leave those who deny that it is entailed by Natural Justice somewhat dissatisfied.^{Footnote 41} However, the discussion that ensues is free of any implication that Hedonism entails Natural Justice. In consequence, any hostility that Mill feels towards the latter cannot explain his claim that the Gorgian Socrates deals in “fallacies” (XI: 416), and offers few arguments that Callicles “might not easily have parried … had the author endowed them with dialectical skill equal to his own” (XI: 149).^{Footnote 42}

This raises the question of the respects in which Mill feels Plato renders Callicles’ Hedonism inadequate. Any objections that Mill has to the form of Callicles’ Hedonism may easily be obscured by his objections to its substance, which is say, the specific kind of pleasures that Callicles is drawn into recommending, and his proposed method for attaining them. Evidence of such substantial disagreement can be found in the following passages:

Here Callicles’ recommendation to cultivate unbridled appetites transcends Mill’s opposition to asceticism, and contradicts his belief that prudence has “Stoical elements” (X: 211, 215, 218). Moreover, in acceding to Socrates’ suggestion that the satisfaction of animal appetites can be sufficient for ‘happiness,’ Callicles also contradicts Mill’s view that this label should be reserved for a long-term positive balance of pleasure over pain generated with the aid of a variety of distinctively human pleasures (X: 212-216, VIII: 952).^{Footnote 43}

While it would be possible to make further comparisons on matters of substance, they can be set aside here as they are less significant for our purposes than the evidence of formal disagreement that emerges from the exchange. Socrates’ first move is to show that “Good is not synonymous with Enjoyment, of whatever kind,” as if this were true, certain “shameful consequences” “would follow” (XI: 128). Some of these “shameful consequences” are only derivable in conjunction with Callicles’ failure to discriminate between different kinds of appetite. For instance, Socrates reasons as follows:

However, given Callicles’ identification of the ‘better’ with the intelligent (and the brave), the most important ‘shameful consequence’ for the refutation consists of the consequent of a conditional which we can refer to as:

This mirrors what Mill refers to as the ‘doctrine of swine’ objection in Utilitarianism, according to which Hedonism entails that if swine and human beings experienced the same pleasures, it would be no better to be one than the other (X: 210).^{Footnote 45} Moreover, just as Mill responds by claiming that pleasures vary in quality, and illustrates this by comparing those of the “intelligent human being” and the “fool” (X: 211), Callicles responds by qualifying his Hedonism with the claim that “some pleasures” “are better, and others worse” (XI: 131). We will return to dwell on what these parallels imply for the debate between the sympathetic interpretations in Section 5. For now, we need to focus on drawing out the rationale for Callicles’ proto-Millian distinction.

In principle there are two possibilities. Firstly, the appeal could be designed to enable Callicles to show that the conditional, SCT, is false (Falsification). This approach would involve conceding that the fool and the intelligent person could have equally pleasurable experiences; denying that it follows from this that they would be equally well off, or that they would have lives of equal intrinsic value; and demonstrating that this denial is compatible with some kind of Hedonism. Secondly, and alternatively, the appeal could be designed to refute SCT’s antecedent (Nullification). This would involve denying that foolishness is generally as pleasurable as intelligence, and seeking thereby to nullify the ‘shamefulness’ of SCT’s consequences by rendering them counterfactual.

However, Callicles’ choice of approach is constrained by the fact that he has already assented to the antecedent of SCT, and thereby inadvertently committed himself to Falsification:

Moreover, Callicles has assented to Socrates’ claim that Hedonists who believe that “a person who is pleased, has Good present in him” must also accept that someone who has a pleasurable life is “a good man” (X: 130). In doing so, he has assented to the claim that an adequate answer to the question ‘what makes a life intrinsically valuable?’ must also be an adequate answer to the question ‘what makes a life worthy of ethical esteem?’

This enables Socrates to attempt to show that Callicles cannot evaluate two people with equally pleasurable lives differently without rejecting Universal Hedonism:

Here we see Socrates appealing to a further non-hedonic good, which he refers to as the ‘beneficial,’ upon the basis of which Mill deems him to be a Non-Hedonist (Section 3). At first sight, it is unclear why Callicles assents to (i), as the prior claim, that two experiences can be equally pleasurable and yet not equally valuable, is compatible with them both having some positive value (and hence compatible with Universal Value Hedonism).^{Footnote 46} However, once Callicles accepts that welfare and merit are to be evaluated by the same criteria, he must accept that if a fool merits negative evaluation as a person, his pleasures don’t simply have little intrinsic value but are actually intrinsically disvaluable (contra Universal Hedonism).

The Gorgian Socrates’ final move, and coup de grâce, is to argue that, since Callicles rejects Universal Value Hedonism, he must also reject Monistic Value Hedonism:

Socrates’ conclusion here is too strong.^{Footnote 47} He is entitled to claim that if some pleasures are bad, and pleasures should be pursued only on the condition that they are good, pleasure as such cannot be an unconditional value-maker. After all, if some pleasures are bad, pleasure could only be a value-maker when it is taken in another good that is both a value-bearer and a value-maker. However, while this would show that Hedonic Bearer Monism is false, it would not show that pleasure taken in other goods is of purely instrumental value in the way that the passage above implies.

5 Nullification, Shameful Consequences, and the Doctrine of Swine

We can now turn to the significance of this exchange for the interpretive debate at hand. With respect to the Non-Hedonist Interpretation, Mill’s claim that Socrates offers “few” arguments that Callicles “might not easily have parried” (XI: 149) creates a dilemma. Does the “few” here include Socrates’ refutation of Monistic Value Hedonism by way of the claim that pleasures can be evaluated with reference to other goods? If the “few” is inclusive, Mill claims that the refutation is not easily parried. But then how does the Non-Hedonist Interpretation justify the transition to the claim that Mill believes it is impossible to parry it at all? Conversely, if the “few” is exclusive, Mill claims that Socrates’ refutation is easily parried. But then on what grounds would Mill have rejected Value Hedonism other than the “parriable” one?

Such concerns mean that the Non-Maximizing Interpretation may appear to be better placed to explain the dialogical exchange. By accepting that Mill is a Value Hedonist, the Non-Maximizing Interpretation makes it less of a mystery why he would make statements that suggest that Socrates’ refutation thereof was fallacious. Its advocates may also claim that Mill’s acknowledgement that not all of Socrates claims are parried easily reflects his acknowledgement of the subtlety of his own counter-position—that Socrates has refuted Hedonic Maker Monism as opposed to Hedonic Bearer Monism. Moreover, they might even think that this opens the door to the detection of a degree of sympathy for the form of Callicles’ position on Mill’s part, which is best explained by their interpretation.^{Footnote 48} After all, they could suggest, perhaps Mill sees what Socrates doesn’t, namely, that Callicles is perfectly entitled to claim that one value-bearing pleasure can be intrinsically ‘better’ than another that is equally pleasant, in virtue of being made more ‘beneficial’ by its non-hedonic ‘benefit makers’ (XI: 418). On this view, Mill could have come to grasp Callicles’ entitlement to claim that it is better to be an intelligent person dissatisfied than a fool satisfied, despite the fact that dissatisfaction is less pleasant than satisfaction, because whatever pleasures the former allows are made more valuable by their non-hedonic attributes (X: 212).

However, the considerations of Section 3 imply that advocates of the Non-Maximizing Interpretation cannot actually take Mill to acknowledge the subtlety of his alleged Non-Maximizing Hedonism here without self-contradiction. Moreover, the evidence suggests that Mill is much less favourable to the form of the Hedonism that Callicles appears to be groping for than the Non-Maximizing Interpretation might lead us to expect ex ante. The reason for this is that, while Callicles tries to refute SCT through Falsification, as one could as a Non-Maximizing Hedonist, Mill tries to refute the ‘doctrine of swine’ objection through Nullification, as one must as a Maximizing Hedonist.

When setting out his approach, Mill claims that Nullification is necessary, as if its “supposition [antecedent] were true, the charge could not be gainsaid” (X: 210). This gives the Maximizing Interpretation an explanatory advantage, as if Mill believes that the intrinsic value of a life corresponds to its pleasantness, it will make sense for him to believe that one can only deny that intelligent people and fools tend to have lives of equal value by denying that their lives tend to be equally pleasant. However, it would not follow that, since dissatisfaction as such is more painful than satisfaction, he is not entitled to claim that it is “better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied” (X: 212).^{Footnote 49} After all, he can also maintain that dissatisfaction is compatible with, and may even be a necessary price to be paid for, pleasures of such a higher quality that their pleasantness makes it worth enduring the painfulness of dissatisfaction (ibid.).

Of course, advocates of the Non-Maximizing Interpretation may respond by attempting to break the analogy between SCT and the ‘doctrine of swine.’ In order to do so, they might point out that, while SCT is framed in terms of value-making ‘pleasantness,’ Mill speaks of the value-bearing ‘pleasure’ when comparing the pleasures of human beings and swine. If the Non-Maximizing Interpretation were correct, this shift in terminology could be designed to allow pleasures to be made more valuable by their human “sources” without necessarily being made more pleasant (X: 210).

However, if it suits the Non-Maximizing Interpretation to deny that the pleasure-pleasurable distinction has any significance to the Mill of Grote—in order to deny that he deliberately distances himself from the position it attributes to him—it cannot consistently maintain that it has this significance for him in Utilitarianism.^{Footnote 50} In consequence, the more consistent position is to take Mill to maintain that the sources of pleasure matter because some sources produce much more pleasant pleasures than others. Indeed, this is how Mill uses the phrase in a much less ambiguous passage of Theism, in which “the mere play of the faculties” is distinguished from other sources of pleasure in virtue of “being a never-ending source of pleasure” (X: 458, my emphasis). If we think about SCT in this light, Mill’s alternative to the Calliclean response is that, since intelligence is a much richer source of pleasure than foolishness, Hedonism doesn’t equate their value, as the “manner of existence” predicated on the former will tend to be much more pleasant in practice (X: 211).

6 The Many Lives Hypothesis

The preceding argument has attempted to show that, when it comes to accounting for and explaining the textual evidence in the Notes and Grote, the Maximizing Interpretation has an advantage over its sympathetic competitors. However, some may doubt that the Maximizing Interpretation provides a complete account of Mill’s response to the ‘doctrine of swine’ objection. In consequence, this section of the paper will supplement the core argument with some speculative suggestions as to what a complete explanation might look like.

One reason to doubt that the Maximizing Interpretation can provide a complete explanation of Mill’s response to the ‘doctrine of swine’ objection stems from Mill’s claim that his Epicurean predecessors also reject its antecedent, and thereby that of SCT, when they assign:

If Mill is saying that they could vindicate their claims without even an implicit appeal to qualitative differences between pleasures, this implies the existence of cases in which Nullification can succeed with a purely quantitative conception of pleasure. For instance, if activities that cultivate one’s intellectual capacities (such as poetry) tend to be a more durable, efficient, and intense source of pleasure construed in purely quantitative terms than those that lack an intellectual component (such as push-pin), a life devoted to poetry will tend to be more pleasant than a life devoted to push-pin (X: 113).^{Footnote 51} This implies that, while a commitment to Maximizing Hedonism would generate a commitment to Nullification, it would not automatically generate a commitment to achieve this through the adoption of Qualitative Hedonism. In consequence, if Nullification does not necessitate the adoption of Qualitative Hedonism, is not the Maximizing Interpretation’s explanatory power at least partly illusory?

One reason to think not lies in the way that Mill highlights the limitations of Quantitative Hedonism when he acknowledges that:

For ease of reference, we can refer to the thesis that pleasures of the “intellect, of the feelings and imagination” can only be shown to be superior to those of “mere sensation” with reference to such “circumstantial advantages” as ‘Circumstantialism.’ Mill’s view seems to be that (1) Circumstantialism is sufficient to preclude Quantitative Hedonism from generating Nullification in some but not all salient cases of SCT; and (2) the transition to Qualitative Hedonism is necessary in order to refute Circumstantialism, and hence the remaining cases of SCT. If this is correct, an interpretation of Mill’s Qualitative Hedonism must speculate as to the nature of these problem cases, as Mill’s texts are merely suggestive.

According to what can be referred to as the ‘Many Lives Hypothesis’ (MLH), Mill takes Quantitative Hedonism’s biggest problem to consist of cases in which the value of a life of comparatively high value is outweighed by the aggregate value of a number of lives of comparatively low value. To see how Mill could have formulated this hypothesis under the influence of Plato, recall that Callicles’ initial claim is not simply that a single intelligent person tends to have a more valuable life than a single non-intelligent person, but that the life of “one intelligent person is superior to a thousand who are not intelligent” (XI: 125, my italics).^{Footnote 52} According to MLH, Mill wants to be able to make analogous comparisons of the value of lives, but to do so in Value Hedonist terms, and hence without the politico-philosophical implications of Callicles’ Natural Justice.

On this view, the key problem with Quantitative Hedonism is that, while diminishing marginal utility may preclude simple activities from producing large quantities of pleasure within a single life, it will not prevent a large aggregate quantity of pleasure being produced by many such lives. For example, to use Callicles’ case, the intrinsic utility in the life of an intelligent person, X₁, could be greater than the intrinsic utility in the life of a non-intelligent person, Y₁, without being greater than the aggregate intrinsic utility in the lives of a thousand such people, Y_1-1000, all of whom take pleasure in the simple activity.^{Footnote 53} According to MLH, then, Mill adopts Qualitative Hedonism in order to be able to block this particular kind of ‘shameful consequence.’ While MLH as such is compatible with both the Maximizing and Non-Maximizing Interpretations, MLH does more to support the former, by enabling to it draw a complete explanatory chain from Mill’s perceived need to deal with SCT, to a perceived need for Nullification, to a perceived need for Qualitative Hedonism.

To demonstrate this, we must consider how Qualitative Hedonism can deal with ‘many lives’ cases. While Dale Miller does not endorse MLH, one way in which an appeal to ‘quality’ could help in this regard can be derived from his suggestion that, “[s]peaking very loosely,” Mill’s position is that:

Call this the ‘Arithmetic Interpretation,’ according to which the value of a pleasurable experience is given by the product of two factors representing its quantity and quality respectively. The Arithmetic Interpretation ensures the possibility that the pleasure, P₁, of an intelligent person, could have a greater total value than another, P₂, aggregated from the lives of 1,000 fools, even though the quantity of P₂ is larger than that of P₁. The only proviso would be that (i) P₁ also has a greater quality factor than P₂, and (ii) the difference between their quality factors is larger than the difference between their quantity factors.

An alternative way in which the appeal to ‘quality’ could help to resolve ‘many lives’ cases is given by the Lexical Interpretation, the most prominent defenders of (distinct variants) of which are Roger Crisp and Jonathan Riley.^{Footnote 55} According to the Lexical Interpretation, the value of a pleasure of a (comparatively) high quality lexically outranks the value of a pleasure of a (comparatively) low quality, in such a way that any quantity of the former, however small, is more valuable than any quantity of the latter, however large (see X: 211). While Crisp and Riley combine the Lexical Interpretation with the Maximizing Interpretation (Lexical Maximization), and Miller combines his Arithmetic Thesis with the Non-Maximizing Interpretation (Arithmetic Non-Maximization), there would be no logical incoherence in an Arithmetic Maximizing Interpretation, or a Lexical Non-Maximizing Interpretation.^{Footnote 56} In other words, the Lexical and Arithmetic Interpretations can both take the value represented by ‘quality’ to correspond to either hedonic or non-hedonic value-makers.

Nevertheless, the truth of the Lexical Interpretation would actually further reduce the probability of the truth of the Non-Maximizing Interpretation. The reason for this is that, where the Arithmetic Non-Maximizing Interpretation simply fails to explain Mill’s adoption of Nullification, the Lexical Non-Maximizing Interpretation would make it even more mysterious. After all, if it is the non-hedonic value-makers that do all of the heavy lifting in Mill’s Qualitative Hedonism, why would Mill care whether it rules out the possibility that the life of an intelligent person is no more pleasant than that of the fool? Given the Lexical Non-Maximizing Interpretation, the value of such pleasantness borders on axiological irrelevance, as it is completely trumped by the value of the non-hedonic value makers.

One reason this matters is that the considerations that favour the MLH are also likely to favour the Lexical over the Arithmetic Interpretation. After all, while an Arithmetic Qualitative Hedonism can rule out some of the potentially ‘shameful’ ‘many lives’ cases, its attribution of a finite cardinal value to the quality factor of a pleasure means that it cannot rule out all of them.^{Footnote 57} That is, while it may do a better job than Quantitative Hedonism when it comes to confronting Circumstantialism, it also fails to completely refute it. More technically, a Non-Lexical Qualitative Hedonism implies that, even if the high value pleasures of (say) the intelligent person have a quality factor that is large enough to ensure that her life is better than that of (say) 1,000 fools, there will still be some finite number of fools, n _f, for which this is untrue.^{Footnote 58}

Of course, some might deny that this is an interpretive problem in Mill’s case, as even if his axiology is fairly elitist, it is almost certainly less elitist than that of Callicles. In other words, Mill might not be concerned if his axiology allows for the existence of n _f, especially if the non-intelligent are capable of other kinds of higher pleasures. However, even if we accept this, it is much harder to imagine Mill accepting the existence of a number of swine, n _s, whose aggregate lower pleasure in “mere sensation” is more valuable than the higher pleasures Socrates takes in his “intellect,” “moral sentiments,” “feelings and imagination” (X: 211). In consequence, while this paper can remain agnostic with respect to the truth of the Lexical Interpretation, it is nevertheless striking that (1) the ways in which Callicles would have had to adapt his Hedonism in order to deny the existence of n _f are isomorphic to those in which Mill would have had to adapt Bentham’s Quantitative Hedonism in order to deny the existence of n _s; and (2) in taking Mill to have been moved by such worries, we can complete the explanation of his adoption of Qualitative Hedonism.