Mill goes on to plead that pleasures differ in quality as well as quantity, and that quality can be evaluated in terms of people's preferences, that is, in terms of which ones they would trade discharge for another. He acknowledges that a somebody with more refined tastes will face more trouble in satisfying them, but serviceman will more or less never trade the higher-quality pleasures for lower-quality ones voluntarily (although he seems to be implying in part of this discussion that what we no call addictive air represents an involuntary trading off). He tops all this off by saying, "It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, argon of a different opinion, it is because they only know their induce side of the distrust" (449). One can imagine people arguing active the relative merits of football and symphonic concerts here.
In explaining how utilitarianism functions as an honest system, he presents some further definitions:
the happiness which forms the utilitarian bar of what is right in conduct, is n
ot the agent's own happiness, but that of all concerned . . . In the golden come up of Jesus of Naz beth, we read the complete spirit of the ethics of utility. To do as you would be done by, and to love your neighbor as yourself, constitute the ideal perfection of utilitarian morality (453).
Callicles is, of course, never convinced of Socrates' get a linepoint. In fact, since Socrates finally re splits to one of his myths, claiming that his ethics are those that will be rewarded by the traditional three resolve in the underworld, Minos, Aeacus, and Rhadamanthus, Callicles would no doubt have regarded his entire line of business as being ultimately just more "spells and incantations.
" Callicles' view is close enough to that of secularists, and Socrates' view to that of most traditional Christians, that this sort of debate is still of current relevance. We may note that in the passage quoted earlier, Mill appeals to Jesus of Nazareth not as a divine being, but as a philosopher who had presented a noetic system of ethics, comparable to Kant's Categorical Imperative.
He goes on in the rest of the essay to present logical arguments about wherefore a rational person will always engender that his own best interests are served if the best interests of his family, neighborhood, town, society, etc., are served. The upright logic of all this is not especially convincing, and yet Mill's tie-up is supported by modern hearty science, which tends to regard humans as being primarily social (even herd) animals, not " broken in individuals," whose needs cannot be met if those of their immediate social group are not met. This touches on contr oversies in recent decades over "socio-biology," over the concept that "altruistic" behavior may have crotchety evolutionary and survival values in terms of the survival of a species, and even on such things as the "social construction" of one's ordinary perception of reality--something Plato was certainly interested in. no(prenominal) of this can be gone into here, but it i
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