Mill identifies himself as a utilitarian, in the tradition of his father and Jeremy Bentham, but departs from and modifies their doctrines in many ways. One of his most radical revisions is the distinction between higher and lower pleasures, which I attempt to make sense of here. What follows is merely an attempt at interpretation; I endeavour to show that my reading can be supported by Mill's texts, but concede that other remarks may seem to contradict the reading offered here. Ultimately, the truth may be that Mill never perfectly reconciled his Benthamite and non-Benthamite influences into a fully consistent system.Footnote ¹

I. TERMINOLOGY

I take utilitarianism to be that form of consequentialism that aims to promote (usually, but not necessarily, to maximize) happiness. So defined, utilitarianisms form a subset of consequentialist theories, but there is room for variation not only between, for example, act-, rule- and motive-utilitarianisms but also different conceptions of happiness or well-being. (By ‘happiness’ I intend a place-holder, like the Greek eudaimonia, which is equivalent to well-being and not biased towards hedonistic interpretations.)

The three most prominent theories of well-being, each itself admitting numerous variations, are (i) hedonistic theories, (ii) desire-satisfaction theories and (iii) objective-list (perfectionist) theories. Thus it is possible to be, for example, a hedonistic utilitarian – like Bentham – or a utilitarian subscribing to a desire-satisfaction view, as suggested by Ayer,Footnote ² or a perfectionist about individual well-being. To say that Mill is a utilitarian therefore leaves open his understanding of pleasure and happiness.

II. HEDONISM AND PLEASURE

Mill explicitly associates himself with Bentham's hedonism, declaring that ‘By happiness is intended pleasure, and the absence of pain’.Footnote ³ I argue that this is merely verbal agreement, for Mill actually had a very different understanding of pleasure from Bentham's, even before introducing his famous distinction between higher and lower pleasures.

For Bentham, the principle of utility or greatest happiness meant promoting the balance of pleasures over pains. Bentham understood pleasures and pains as mental states or, as he puts it, ‘interesting perceptions’Footnote ⁴ which are distinct from their causes.Footnote ⁵ Thus it is, for example, that he distinguishes four sources of pleasure – physical, political, moral and religiousFootnote ⁶ – and notes that fecundity and purity (two elements of his Felicific Calculus) ‘are in strictness scarcely to be deemed properties of the pleasure or the pain itself . . . [but] properties only of the act, or other event, by which such pleasure or pain has been produced’.Footnote ⁷ It is easy to see how assessing actions by the pleasure and pain produced is evaluating them by their consequences and why Bentham famously held that, when the value of pleasure produced is the same, pushpin is as good as poetry.Footnote ⁸

This is Bentham's understanding of pleasure, but the term ‘hedonism’ comes from the Greek hedone Footnote ⁹ and, in the Greeks, we find a different idea of pleasure – not a mental state that is consequent upon action but the pleasurable action itself. For instance, in Glaucon's typology of goods in Book II of Plato's Republic he lists, as examples of things good in themselves, ‘joy and harmless pleasures’,Footnote ¹⁰ meaning that pleasurable activities, such as reading, are seen as intrinsically good, rather than merely instrumentally productive of pleasure. Similarly, in Aristotle, we learn that eudaimonia or happiness consists in virtuous or excellent activity and ‘pleasures . . . are activities, and an end [in themselves]’.Footnote ¹¹

Both senses of ‘pleasure’ survive in English: we can say either ‘punting gives me pleasure’ or ‘punting is one of my pleasures’.Footnote ¹² The former construes pleasure as Bentham did, as a mental state consequence of the activity, while the latter identifies pleasure with the activity itself. If Mill adhered strictly to his Benthamite upbringing, then we may expect him to have shared Bentham's mental state conception of pleasures; but we already know that Mill broke from the Benthamite hedonism he had inherited and the fact that he was clearly influenced by his classical Greek education makes it plausible that he could have meant the latter.Footnote ¹³ The next section concerns what Mill may have meant by pleasure.

III. DID MILL UNDERSTAND PLEASURE AS A MENTAL STATE OR ACTIVITY?

Having noted the same ambiguity, Roger Crisp tentatively concludes that Mill intended by ‘pleasure’ the pleasurable experience, or mental state, of punting, as opposed to the pleasurable activity (or ‘pleasure source’) itself. I grant that there is textual support for this reading, most notably, as Crisp points out, Mill's tendency to contrast pleasures to pains.Footnote ¹⁴ Crisp contends that ‘you may say that punting is one of your pleasures, but not that housework is one of your pains’Footnote ¹⁵ and, since ‘pains’ only covers the mental state but not the activity or experience itself, he concludes that ‘pleasure’ is presumably used in the same way. Given Mill's ambiguity, I can be no more confident in my interpretation than Crisp, but I am inclined to read Mill the other way. As we can say either that punting is a pleasure or that it gives us pleasure, so we can say (as Crisp notes) that housework is a pain or causes us pain. That we do not tend to say ‘housework is one of my pains’ may be no more than a curiosity of the English language – I would certainly understand a foreigner who said it and, perhaps, not even consider his unusual expression wrong.

It is far from clear that Mill meant to refer only to mental states, as opposed to pleasurable activities, and other readers seem to favour the activity interpretation.Footnote ¹⁶ Immediately after subscribing himself to the view that happiness consists in pleasure and the absence of pain, Mill cautioned that ‘much more needs to be said; in particular, what things it includes in the ideas of pain and pleasure’,Footnote ¹⁷ thereby warning his reader that he may be about to break from the Benthamite position he had seemingly endorsed. Mill adds that all desirable things ‘are desirable either for the pleasure inherent in themselves, or as means to the promotion of pleasure and the prevention of pain’.Footnote ¹⁸ This distinguishes things that are desirable in themselves, because of the pleasure inherent in them, from those that are merely instrumental to the promotion of pleasure. The latter category is familiar and might include, for example, education which, though not intrinsically enjoyable, allows us later to enjoy the pleasures of poetry. The implication, however, is that some activities may be desirable other than instrumentally – so punting, unlike education, may be desirable because it is itself a pleasure. If one conceives of pleasure as a mental state, then all activities would be desirable only instrumentally; but then it would be odd to say that pleasure is desirable because of the pleasure inherent in it. It seems the best way to interpret this passage is to assume Mill holds certain activities intrinsically desirable because they are pleasures (i.e. for the pleasure inherent in them, as opposed to the mental state produced by them).

This interpretation seems further supported by what Mill says in his ‘proof’, where he remarks that:

Here, Mill speaks of music as a pleasure, rather than merely a cause of pleasurable experiences. Moreover, it seems more plausible to think that various different activities or experiences, each desirable in themselves, may unite to constitute a happy life, than to say this of pleasurable mental states, which it may be more natural to suppose homogeneous.Footnote ²⁰ The same analysis could be applied to virtue, although Mill actually says only that the ‘consciousness of it is a pleasure’Footnote ²¹ (which not only suggests a mental state conception of pleasure but also seems unlikely to satisfy his opponents who insisted that virtue itself was a good).

I believe that this interpretation of pleasures, as describing pleasurable activities, rather than mere mental states, better makes sense of Mill's understanding of pleasure and happiness as a whole, as will, I hope, become clear through the remainder of this article. I think, for example, that we can better understand Mill's distinction between higher and lower pleasures and remarks about various pleasures if ‘pleasures’ refers to different activities, rather than merely mental states.Footnote ²² Moreover, this interpretation is plausible because it is true to Mill's Greek influences and charitable because – as I will argue below – it appears to overcome some common objections to hedonism (although not ones that Mill himself considered). None of these reasons offer conclusive evidence for my interpretation, but it is at least possibly what Mill had in mind, if he meant anything consistently. I hope that, if the following remarks make sense of Mill's thought consistently with this reading, that offers further support for it; but the below arguments do not depend on any particular understanding of pleasures.

IV. HIGHER AND LOWER PLEASURES INTRODUCED

Mill's most famous departure from Bentham is his qualitative distinction between pleasures. Bentham held that all activities are to be assessed by the quantity of pleasure produced, a factor of their intensity and duration, and thus, when the quantity of pleasure is the same, pushpin is as good as poetry – the source of the pleasure making no difference to its value. In fact, Bentham was no great fan of poetry,Footnote ²³ whereas Mill – who regarded its appreciation as one of the key factors in his recovery from depressionFootnote ²⁴ – was and wanted to defend it as more valuable than the mere bodily sensations or pleasures enjoyed by children and lower animals and, thereby, show that hedonistic utilitarianism was not merely a ‘doctrine worthy only of swine’Footnote ²⁵ but capable of incorporating the ‘finer things’ in life.Footnote ²⁶ Mill's solution to these problems was that we may prefer a lesser amount of the pleasure of poetry to a greater amount of pushpin-pleasure because the former is superior in kind or quality, i.e. a ‘higher pleasure’.

The first thing to stress is that Mill does not say there are two kinds of pleasure, ‘higher’ and ‘lower’.Footnote ²⁷ What he says is that one pleasure may be superior in quality to another and that we prefer pleasures that involve our higher faculties. This does not imply any sharp dividing line between those pleasures that employ higher faculties and those that do not – there can be a continuum of pleasures, according to a continuum either of faculties or of differences in the extent to which our higher faculties are involved in any activity. Thus, rather than thinking of higher and lower as denoting two kinds of pleasures, it is more useful to think of them as comparative terms, like taller or shorter. (An important difference is that there is only one way in which one thing may be taller than another, whereas there may be different ways for one pleasure to be higher than another – employing different higher faculties. Nonetheless, the point here is that we cannot, strictly, speak of pleasures as ‘higher’ or ‘lower’ in isolation; we always need another to compare to.) For any two persons, we can usually say that one is taller than the other (or that they are about equal) and, though we can loosely categorize people as simply ‘tall’ or ‘short’, we can always say that a tall person is shorter than an even taller person. So it is, I contend, with pleasures. Chess is higher than draughts (checkers), which in turn is higher than pushpin; or poetry may be called a higher pleasure, but philosophy still higher. Many questions remain about this doctrine, including whether it is compatible with hedonism (an issue addressed below). More immediately, however, we want to know what makes one pleasure higher than another and how it is that we know; the following section tackles these questions in reverse order.

V. COMPETENT JUDGES

On the epistemological question, Mill appeals to the preferences of competent judges:

I believe it is fruitful to compare this to what Hume says about aesthetic matters in his essay ‘Of the Standard of Taste’. There Hume, a forerunner to Mill in both the utilitarian and empiricist traditions, observes that, despite variety of tastes:

Hume therefore sets out to find ‘a rule, by which the various sentiments of men may be reconciled; at least, a decision, afforded, confirming one sentiment, and condemning another’.Footnote ³⁰ Hume holds that:

And:

This is why we face such diversity of opinion, so recognition of true beauty (or its causes) comes about only over timeFootnote ³³ or from competent critics. As Hume remarks on the latter:

While Mill says little to elaborate on his idea of competent judges, it is reasonable to assume he had something similar in mind – they must be ‘equally acquainted with, and equally capable of appreciating and enjoying, both’Footnote ³⁵ of the pleasures and unprejudiced, for example, by ‘any feeling of moral obligation’.Footnote ³⁶

It should be noted that Mill's criterion is not one of what economists call ‘revealed preference’. The mere fact that we sometimes choose one pleasure over another does not suffice to show that it is higher or, since we sometimes choose poetry over pushpin and sometimes pushpin over poetry, the relation ‘higher than’ would be symmetrical! What matters is a ‘decided preference’Footnote ³⁷ or judgement, not a choice made from ‘infirmity of character’,Footnote ³⁸ which may be for an acknowledged lesser good. Thus Mill can accept that even competent judges, when they are tired of poetry, may turn to pushpin. Indeed, it is necessary for one to be a competent judge that one has ample experience of both pleasures to compare.

Both Hume's and Mill's judges play only an epistemic or evidential role.Footnote ³⁹ It is by their verdict that we can know one pleasure higher than another, but it is not their verdict that makes it so. The appropriate model is what Rawls calls an ‘imperfect procedure’, such as a jury trial, in which there is an independently right answer that the judges try to identify.Footnote ⁴⁰ For Hume, what makes one piece of art better than another is that it is better fitted to produce pleasure in the human mind. For Mill, something similar is true. He supposes it is simply ‘an unquestionable fact that those who are equally acquainted with, and equally capable of appreciating and enjoying, both [pleasures], do give a most marked preference to the manner of existence which employs their higher faculties’.Footnote ⁴¹ This comes very close to what Rawls calls the Aristotelian Principle, which states that ‘other things being equal, human beings enjoy the exercise of their realized capacities (their innate or trained abilities), and this enjoyment increases the more the capacity is realized, or the greater its complexity’.Footnote ⁴² For Rawls, this is simply a natural fact of human psychology, confirmed by observation, and so it is for Mill, though he connects it to ‘a sense of dignity’.Footnote ⁴³ If this is what makes one pleasure higher than another, then it is possible that even competent judges can be wrong – something Mill explicitly allows for, when he says we must accept a majority if they disagree.Footnote ⁴⁴ It is possible that even the majority of such judges could be wrong; Mill does not say that they are necessarily right, merely that ‘there can be no appeal’Footnote ⁴⁵ – as it is in the highest court.

VI. IS MILL STILL A HEDONIST?

It is now clear, I hope, what Mill meant by higher and lower pleasures, but not whether he could consistently maintain such position while remaining a hedonist. Of course, Mill will not count as a hedonist, on my reading, if we restrict hedonism to the view that only mental states can be of intrinsic value.Footnote ⁴⁶ Given that the English ‘pleasures’ may naturally refer to activities, rather than mental states, I see no reason for such a restriction. In any case, my concern here is not whether Mill's general conception of pleasure is genuinely hedonistic, but whether he can consistently distinguish higher and lower pleasures without appeal to some other value.

Many critics attacked Mill on this point, starting with the earliest receptions of Mill's distinction. Bradley, for instance, remarked:

While Carritt asserted that:

And:

It should be noted that there have been more sympathetic commentators, who have pointed out that pleasures may differ, just as colours differ in shade.Footnote ⁵⁰ My aim in this section is to show that there is indeed room for one to care only about pleasures, but still distinguish between them according to quality.

It will be helpful to begin with an analogy. Consider what I call a Bacchant, i.e. someone who cares only about wine. It is important to be aware that this person cares about wine in itself and not consequent pleasure, so is undeterred by, for example, the prospect of a hangover. Such a person cares about the quantity of wine – that is, they always want more wine rather than less, ceteris paribus – but they also care about its quality. (I assume that their tastes track an objective feature of the wine, which I think is more analogous to Mill's view, but this is not necessary for my present purposes – ‘quality’ can be understood as referring to subjective preference.) Although, other things being equal, they always prefer more wine to less, if we offer them a choice between a bottle of inferior wine and a glass of superior wine, it is possible that they will prefer the glass of superior wine. This does not seem strange and, as Mill observes, ‘It would be absurd that while, in estimating all other things, quality is considered as well as quantity, the estimation of pleasures should be supposed to depend on quantity alone.’Footnote ⁵¹ It is worth noting that even Bentham was happy to speak of both quality and quantity in relation to knowledge and punishment.Footnote ⁵²

Let us now consider the famous ‘Haydn and the oyster’ example.Footnote ⁵³ In this somewhat fanciful case, an angel offers you the choice between the life of the composer Haydn or that of an oyster, capable of no more than the basest pleasures, but will allow you to live as an oyster for as long as you like. Since Haydn will live only seventy-seven years, and thus experience only a finite amount of pleasure, if you care only about quantity of pleasure, then at some point the life of the oyster – which accumulates pleasure at a much slower rate – will eventually seem preferable. Note that it is no solution to say we prefer the life with the highest average, rather than total, for that faces a reverse problem – it would imply that we would prefer to be Haydn for a second than an almost-equally gifted composer who lives for one hundred years.

To illustrate the problem with wine, suppose that Haydn's glass is filled quickly (mirroring the intensity of pleasure in his life), while wine drips very slowly into the oyster's – if you pour the oyster wine over a much longer duration, it will eventually come to have a greater quantity. However, if we suppose Haydn not only gets poured wine more quickly, but gets poured better wine, then it may be rational to prefer Haydn's glass, even if the quantity is less. So it is with pleasure – if Haydn gets a superior quality of pleasure, then it may be rational – even for someone who cares only about pleasure – to prefer that smaller quantity of higher pleasure to a larger quantity (in terms of intensity and duration) of inferior pleasure. Just as one can be a Bacchant while caring about quality as well as quantity of wine, so one can still be a hedonist while caring about quality as well as quantity of pleasure. As Mill says, ‘It is quite compatible with the principle of utility [and hedonism, which he does not clearly distinguish] to recognise the fact, that some kinds of pleasure are more desirable and more valuable than others.’Footnote ⁵⁴

It should be clear that quality is a genuinely different scale than quantity and not simply to be reduced to the latter,Footnote ⁵⁵ even in infinite amounts.Footnote ⁵⁶ It may, of course, be thought that higher pleasures will generally be more intense or productive of future pleasures. One might, for example, have many good extrinsic reasons to prefer poetry to pushpin – for instance, because it can be enjoyed alone and one is less likely to tire of it. Mill notes that previous utilitarian writers have successfully established the superiority of mental over bodily pleasures on grounds of safety, permanence, etc.,Footnote ⁵⁷ but he aims to offer a more principled defence, abstracting from these circumstantial advantages (much as Plato strips justice of its circumstantial advantages – such as reputation – in the Republic). If the advantages of higher pleasures lay simply in such matters as their permanence or future effects, then one would have no reason to prefer poetry to pushpin the night before one's execution, if the quantity of pleasure was the same. Mill, however, would say that poetry is intrinsically preferable because, whatever the amount of pleasure involved, it is a better-quality pleasure.Footnote ⁵⁸

On this reading, quantity and quality are two independent properties of pleasures that must be traded off (as I show below) when choosing between pleasures. Scarre objects to Donner's similar view, pointing out that we don't think a fine claret better than a mediocre one because it possesses more of some good-making property ‘quality’.Footnote ⁵⁹ Quality is not, however, some basic good-making property. Rather, it is a conclusion of our evaluative judgements; when we judge one thing's natural properties make it a better instance of its kind, according to the appropriate standards, we attribute superiority in quality. Thus, one wine is not better than another because it possesses some peculiar property ‘quality’, but calling it higher quality is shorthand for saying that it has other properties that would make us prefer it, even in smaller quantities. Similarly, one pleasure is higher than another not because it possesses some general property ‘quality’ but because it better contributes to a eudaimonistic conception of happiness, and thus we attribute higher quality to it. This could be called a ‘buck-passing’ account of quality.Footnote ⁶⁰

Mill's qualitative distinction between pleasures solves problems of the Haydn and the oyster sort, and I shall argue below that it also solves at least one other well-known difficulty for hedonism, but that does not imply that it is not genuinely a form of hedonism. Nor, of course, is it to say that all the distinctive problems with Mill's own version of hedonism have been – or can be – solved. In particular, it remains to be seen whether we can distinguish intensity and quality and how we can balance between them.

VII. BALANCING HIGHER AND LOWER PLEASURES

Mill defends his appeal to competent judges by noting that even those who do not distinguish higher and lower pleasures will need, ultimately, to make similar appeals:

If this were so, then it would be difficult or impossible to tell whether competent judges had preferred one pleasure because they thought it simply more intense (greater in quantity) or superior in kind (qualitatively higher). With wine, we can easily observe quantity, so if someone chooses a smaller quantity we must suppose it is because she thinks it a better wine. With pleasures that others enjoy, we can only observe their duration, and thus have no good idea of either total quantity (which depends also on intensity) or quality. It may seem, therefore, that Mill has no way to distinguish his quality criterion from simple intensity; however, perhaps intensity is not something that needs to be judged by others – maybe each person can be taken as an infallible judge of the intensity of his or her own pleasure – while judgements of quality depend on the cultivation of higher faculties, so people may be mistaken. Put another way: I cannot be mistaken about what I like, but I can be about what is actually better for me.

In any case, the question still arises how to balance higher and lower pleasures. This problem for Mill is, in some respects, similar to the controversy over ‘dominant end’ and ‘inclusive end’ interpretations of Aristotle's eudaimonia.Footnote ⁶² The question is whether higher and lower pleasures can be traded off against each other or we always want more of the highest good, such that it exhibits lexical dominanceFootnote ⁶³ over the lower. This means that the highest good is to be maximized before the lower comes into play, as a tie-breaker between activities that are equal at first. Rawls's example of lexical ordering is words in a dictionary, but another might be football league tables – positions are determined by points scored and then goal difference, and points lexically dominate goal difference, since the latter only ever breaks ties and can never overcome a difference in points.

Some construe Mill's doctrine lexically; that is, as saying that any amount of higher pleasure is always to be preferred to any amount of lesser pleasure.Footnote ⁶⁴ He does indeed say that ‘It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied’,Footnote ⁶⁵ which lends credence to such an interpretation. Mill's doctrine is that the pig or fool is content merely because he does not know his imperfections or the higher things that the intelligent man desires, but this mere subjective contentment is not to be confused with true happiness, which involves the exercise and realization of one's higher faculties.Footnote ⁶⁶ If this was so, however, it might lead to somewhat bizarre conclusions, such as that the ideal life involves putting aside not only bodily pleasures – at least, so far as humanly possible – but even poetry in preference to maximizing one's philosophical fulfilment. This would seem not only counter-intuitive to us but also to conflict with Mill's liberal commitments to diversity and experiments in living.Footnote ⁶⁷

It is not obvious that Mill had such lexical dominance in mind. The plausibility of such a reading is, I think, weakened by the recognition that higher and lower pleasures are ordered along a scale of quality, rather than being two (or more) distinct kinds of pleasure. Moreover, what Mill actually says is that:

Whether such a discontinuity is possible has been the focus of much discussion;Footnote ⁶⁹ my aim is not to defend its truth, but merely to offer the most plausible and consistent interpretation of Mill – which requires only that some pleasures may be like this, and not that all higher pleasures are incommensurably superior to lower ones. Though saying that lower pleasures are of ‘small account’ is consistent with their lexical domination (as goal difference is of small account compared to points scored in football leagues), Mill does not say that this is always the case or, indeed, that it is ever so. I think the attention that has been given to cases concerning infinite amountsFootnote ⁷⁰ is misplaced, since Mill only says ‘any quantity of the other pleasure which their nature is capable of’,Footnote ⁷¹ and finite human beings are obviously not capable of infinite amounts of pleasure. All Mill actually requires is that the pleasure of reading poetry would always outweigh any amount of pushpin-pleasure one was capable of, given the natural limits of human lifespan and attention. This does not commit him to saying that the poetry-pleasure would outweigh an infinite amount of pushpin-pleasure, were that possible. One may still find it implausible that five minutes of reading Shakespeare's sonnets could really be better than any amount of pleasure that one could get from a whole lifetime of playing pushpin (though this will presumably be limited, as diminishing returns set it), but this is Mill's view – it is better to enjoy some realization of one's higher faculties than to live like a contented pig or child.Footnote ⁷²

Mill's statement about higher pleasures trumping lower ones is a hypothetical, merely allowing for the possibility that one pleasure is so superior to another as to render quantity irrelevant. He never says that all differences in quality are so great as to render quantity irrelevant. It is therefore no embarrassment to his view that, as Ryberg notes, we also have preferences that do not exhibit this discontinuity.Footnote ⁷³ Mill's allowance that great differences in quality may trump any difference in quantity has seemingly misled many commentators into supposing that all differences in quality do so, thereby producing a lexical hierarchy of pleasures,Footnote ⁷⁴ but this is plainly not Mill's intention. Moreover, since he motivates the qualitative distinction by analogy to other cases, we should remember that lexical dominance is not the usual pattern. Perhaps we may prefer any (small) quantity of a fine pre-phylloxera claret to any (large) amount of cheap plonk, but ordinarily there will come a point where we prefer more of a lesser wine to any given amount of a better one, as is evident if we compare a thimble-full of the good wine to a bottle of wine that is only slightly worse in quality.

VIII. ADVANTAGES OF MILL'S ACCOUNT

I have already shown one advantage of Mill's qualitative distinction, namely that it can distinguish between poetry and pushpin and thus resolve ‘Haydn and the oyster’-style problems. I want to suggest that Mill's understanding of utility is also immune to one other well-known objection to hedonism, namely Nozick's experience machine.Footnote ⁷⁵ Nozick asks us to imagine that ‘super-duper neuroscientists’ can plug us in to a virtual reality machine so perfect we can have any experiences we want – from writing a great novel to scoring the winning touchdown in the Superbowl – with the only drawback being that none of these experiences actually happen. The mental state hedonist is presumably committed to saying it would be better for you to plug into the experience machine, provided you could be suitably assured that it would continue to produce experiences at least as pleasurable as those you would expect from real life. Nozick argues that our intuitive reluctance to plug into such a machine shows that there is something else besides our subjective experiences that matters to us – we really care, for example, about how the world actually is.

Mill has, I think, at least two responses to such an objection. Firstly, if he understands ‘pleasure’ to include an activity and not only a mental state, then he can reject the experience machine from the start. It may give you the illusory, subjective experience of punting, but if the pleasure is (or includes) the activity, rather than just the mental state, it cannot give you the pleasure of punting. This seems rather austere, if only because, however unattractive the experience machine may seem all things considered, I believe there is something to be said for it. Even if ‘pleasure’ is understood to include the activity or source, however, it need not be particularly ‘active’ in the ordinary sense of that word – watching television or reading a book is an activity, and so being plugged into the experience machine also counts as a kind of pleasurable activity, but a very different one from actually punting. It is enough for Mill to say that, while being plugged in to the experience machine constitutes a pleasurable experience, it is not the same as that of punting.

Second, even if Mill did understand pleasure as simply a mental state, and so something that could in principle be provided by either a veridical experience or the experience machine, he could say that these experiences differ in kind. Recall that what makes one pleasure higher than another is its exercise and realization of higher, human faculties. It is reasonable to suppose that there are higher faculties that we exercise only in real life and would not develop in an experience machine. Moreover, the way we know one pleasure to be higher than another is by appeal to competent judges. While the ‘decided preference’ criterion is not satisfied by a mere intuitive repulsion to the experience machine, and there are in fact no judges acquainted with both reality and the experience machine, it is also reasonable to suppose that, if we had chance to try an experience machine, we might still exhibit a ‘decided preference’ for the pleasures of real activities, thus giving us grounds to believe them higher.Footnote ⁷⁶ Of course, as we might prefer an inferior wine, if it was not much worse and there was enough of it, there may be real lives so wretched that the experience machine would be preferable, but for most of us reality would be better. That is, to adapt Mill's comparison between Socrates and the fool, it is better to live a real life dissatisfied than an illusory one contented.