Any serious practical philosopher will probably ask the following three questions during his or her lifetime: ‘Is my argument consistent and cogent?’; ‘How is my theory applicable to the actual issues in this world?’; and ‘Will my theory continue to be, in whole or in part, deemed valid even after my death?’. Bart Schultz's The Happiness Philosophers vibrantly depicts the acts, lives, thoughts, passions and even frailties of four such serious thinkers — William Godwin, Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, and Henry Sidgwick, the great classical utilitarians in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain. No one but Schultz could so meticulously elaborate on the four great thinkers’ writings and lives in remarkable detail in a single book. In fact, this is part of the reason why the present review had to be written by three researchers, Kodama (whose specialism includes the study of Godwin and Bentham), Suzuki (J. S. Mill), and Nakano-Okuno (Sidgwick), who used to constitute the Kyoto utilitarian school in Japan.
Readers of this book will be overwhelmed by the amount of information that Schultz presents. It is rich in citations from diverse sources, including the four thinkers’ major writings, journals, correspondences, their friends’ or family members’ writings, and commentaries by recent researchers. Because some of these quotations are one to two pages long, readers may possibly find it a little difficult to follow the flow of Schultz's original analyses. Through Schultz's complex yet candid portrayals, however, the four thinkers come to life dramatically.
Godwin was one of the first truly secular utilitarians to adopt the greatest happiness principle for emancipating individuals from regulatory burdens largely imposed by governing bodies and conventions, even though an idealistic feature of his utilitarian philosophy may have made him rather vulnerable to his own financial predicaments later in life. Bentham lived the life of a penetrating thinker with extraordinary foresight, who arduously investigated the basic principles of criminal justice, poor relief and education by appealing to ‘the social bases of self-respect’ (p. 93). He also unhesitatingly criticized religious superstitions as well as colonialism and racism and envisioned a future of extraordinarily liberal sexual morality. J. S. Mill, though he deployed such perfectionist notions as the quality of pleasures and human dignity, was basically a consistent empiricist-hedonist utilitarian who, with the intellectual support of Harriet Taylor Mill, extended his thinking to questions of individualistic liberalism, gender equality and ethical socialism. Schultz reveals, however, that Mill had his own failings in his ethnocentric defence of British colonialism and imperialism. Also, Mill may have been the first utilitarian thinker who realized, through his mental crises, the potentially disheartening divergence between personal and general happiness or the fundamental futility of self-sacrifice for the sake of happiness for all. Sidgwick followed Mill, taking up the ‘deepest problem’ (p. 219) of the conflict between self-love and benevolence, which he famously called the dualism of the practical reason. Consequently, he provided forceful, critical analyses of the philosophical foundations of utilitarianism, all the while desperately exploring parapsychology in search of evidence for the convergence of personal and general good in the afterlife. For Sidgwick, the irreconcilability of the dualism of practical reason posed a real threat, especially when viewed in the context of emerging fears about the Yellow Peril and related ‘anxieties about the future of civilization and its possible degeneration’ in his time (pp. 331–2) – omens of what he considered the disastrous victory of uncivilized self-interest over civilized benevolence. For all their theories’ defects and lack of imagination, it is obvious that all four thinkers strove to make them consistent and cogent and tried hard to align their actions with their words, hoping to contribute solutions to the actual ethical, social and political issues facing the world around them.
Illuminating as it may be, this book is to be read with caution and a couple of reservations. First, as Schultz himself admits, his study is ‘more of a sketchbook and less a detailed portrait’ (p. 6). Hence, it falls short of fully covering the four thinkers’ works and their influence. For example, some readers may want to know more about the perfectionist aspect of Godwin's utilitarianism and the contemporary evaluation of it. What specific ideological influences Godwin had on later activists and theorists is also unclear. The book contains plenty of description of Godwin's influence on his daughter (Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein) and her spouse (Percy Bysshe Shelley), but little literary evidence is provided to show what pivotal role Godwin played in the development of ideas in Robert Owen or Aaron Burr (p. 44; see also Prologue). As for Bentham, despite Schultz's claim that he cannot be separated from the Romantic movement (p. 55), the chapter on Bentham does not give us a clear idea of when and how that movement affected Bentham's life and thoughts. The term ‘romance’ only appears in this chapter when Bentham recounts that Fénelon's Telemachus was the foundation-stone of his character (p. 73), but romance here seems to mean simply an adventurous hero spirit. Bentham may have had the aesthetic sensitivity to enjoy books, flowers and music (p. 74) and he may have had some ‘romantic’ love life with occasional heartbreaks (p. 80), but these were not specifically influences of the Romantic movement. The chapter on J. S. Mill would have been more thorough if it had discussed also Mill's An Examination of Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy (1865) and Considerations on Representative Government (1861), especially given Schultz's keen interest in explicating Mill's stance on the self, personal identity and colonialism (see pp. 145, 192f.).
Second, readers should keep in mind that this book's seemingly neutral biographical portraits do contain Schultz's own interpretation and evaluation of the four thinkers’ versions of utilitarianism. For example, Schultz assumes that Bentham was a great advocate of animal welfare, but Bentham's assessment of the moral standing of non-human animals is not entirely clear from the episodes Schultz cites from Memoirs (p. 75). Contrary to our expectation that Bentham must have been an animal welfarist who opposed meat consumption, a close reading of Memoirs will show that Bentham actually ate meat, and especially liked beef. In developing his plans for the Frigidarium and the Panopticon, Bentham refers to the storage and uses of fish and animal meat, so he did not seem to oppose meat consumption by people in general. One may well wonder why Schultz underplays Bentham's ambivalence about animal welfare, while so passionately disclosing the dark sides of Mill's colonialism and Sidgwick's racism. Moreover, one might wish that Shultz had explored more deeply why Mill defended colonialism. Was his support of colonialism rooted in his elitist value theory, in the theoretical defects in his utilitarian principle, or in his insufficient understanding of the situations, emotions or abilities of people in other ethnic groups?
As for Sidgwick, readers might ask why this book contains few criticisms of Sidgwick's intuitionistic cognitivism (pp. 247–58) – the view that certain objective moral truths can be apprehended by our philosophical intuitions. It would be reasonable to question how such a priori knowledge of moral truths is possible, but Schultz does not reply to such doubts, whereas he critically examines Mill's naturalism (pp. 143–8). This may reflect Schultz's own take on metaethics. Additionally, Schultz apparently equates Sidgwick's axiom of rational benevolence with the utilitarian principle when he refers to ‘the utilitarian principle(s) of rational benevolence’ (pp. 250–1, emphasis added). This seems to be a manifest misinterpretation. It is unlikely that Sidgwick, who openly opposed appealing to tautological truths, viewed the rational basis of utilitarianism as a utilitarian principle, if that is what Schultz understands when Sidgwick states that ‘the axiom of Rational Benevolence is . . . required as a rational basis for the Utilitarian system’ (Methods, book 3, ch. 13). The axiom of benevolence is distinct from the utilitarian principle in that the former is formulated in terms of ‘good’ whereas the notion of happiness or pleasure is integral to the latter. Sidgwick clearly defines utilitarianism as universalistic hedonism throughout The Methods (Methods, pp. 8, 412, among others). Sidgwick's own notion of rational benevolence basically stipulates that the good of all individuals be treated impartially and has nothing explicitly to do with maximization. How Sidgwick's axioms of benevolence, hedonism and metaethical analysis of ‘good’ work together in generating his principle of utilitarianism is delineated in a book written by one of the present reviewers (Nakano-Okuno, Sidgwick and Contemporary Utilitarianism, 2011).
Third, if Schultz wanted to expel the caricature of utilitarianism, he should have been aware that it could be misleading to explain, at the outset of the book, that the central claim of utilitarianism was ‘the greatest happiness, or pleasure, of the greatest number’ (p. x), when only Bentham deployed this phrase. It is commonly accepted that Bentham himself later omitted the last four words and reformulated the utilitarian principle simply as the greatest happiness principle (see Louis Werner, Journal of the History of Philosophy 11 (1973), pp. 237–51). Indeed, some of Bentham's contemporaries were mindful of the fact that utilitarianism, formulated with these last four words, can be misunderstood as a kind of majority rule, and believed therefore that the phrase ‘of the greatest number’ should be excluded from the definition of the utilitarian principle (The Westminster Review 11 (1829), pp. 254–68). Godwin and Mill formulated their standard of right conduct simply as a principle of promoting the greatest pleasure or happiness for all, and Sidgwick stated, in the Preface to the second edition of The Methods of Ethics, that he had also decided to avoid using these last four words from then on.
Fourth and finally, one should not read this book simply as a historical reflection on past thinkers. If one reads this book as explaining how a particular version of utilitarianism was shaped through its advocates’ particular life experiences, then that could diminish the appeal of utilitarianism as a universal theory applicable to any people everywhere at any time. The Happiness Philosophers should be read as an attempt to explicate how the core doctrine of classical utilitarianism was articulated differently by four different personalities from the end of the eighteenth century through the nineteenth century.
Notwithstanding the foregoing critical comments, The Happiness Philosophers is undoubtedly an excellent source book for all students of modern practical philosophy. It can be best used as a supplementary textbook for advanced courses in utilitarian philosophy or in the history of ideas. But it is also valuable for anyone interested in classical utilitarianism and its major advocates. All will be pleasantly surprised to read what Schultz offers.
