The Historical Reception of Mill’s Proof of the Principle of Utility

Abstract

This chapter provides an exegetical and critical survey of the reception of Mill’s proof of the principle of utility in the scholarly community. The point is to take stock of all the relevant objections, most notably the longstanding charges of fallacious reasoning, thus identifying exactly what is at stake without attempting to clear the proof of any errors, which is a task reserved for subsequent chapters. The general agreement among the critics consulted here is that Mill commits the logical fallacies of equivocation and composition in addition to exhibiting signs of a conceptual confusion later classified as the naturalistic fallacy, the supposed mistake of identifying the good with natural phenomena and explaining goodness in naturalistic terms. These charges emerge from a cluster of seminal reactions by highly influential scholars shaping the secondary literature on the subject, including, in chronological order, John Grote in An Examination of the Utilitarian Philosophy (1870), Henry Sidgwick in The Methods of Ethics (1874–1907), Francis Herbert Bradley in Ethical Studies (1876/1927), William Ritchie Sorley in The Ethics of Naturalism (1885/1904), John Dewey in Outlines of a Critical Theory of Ethics (1891), John Dewey and James Hayden Tufts in Ethics (1908/1932), John Stuart Mackenzie in A Manual of Ethics (1893–1929), and George Edward Moore in Principia Ethica (1903).