Mill and Edwards on the Higher Pleasures

Abstract

In his recent book, Pleasures and Pains: A Theory of Qualitative Hedonism, Rem B. Edwards develops a distinction between kinds of pleasure which he claims can be used, among other things, to explicate further John Stuart Mill's distinction between the higher and lower pleasures. I confess that I am more interested in Mill than in Edwards, and at this point more interested in what Mill's distinction was than in whether it can be defended. I will trust, rather than defend, that revealing more adequately Mill's views on the subject serves more than mere historical curiosity. I should like to make three main points about Edwards' proposed distinction between higher and lower pleasures in relation to Mill: (i) Edwards' distinction is not Mill's distinction, (2) Mill explicates his own distinction to a greater degree than Edwards realizes, i.e. beyond the mere description of higher pleasures as mental or non-sensory and lower pleasures as physical or sensory, and (3) Mill provides a rationale for his distinction in a way that Edwards does not provide one for his. Edwards observes that Mill has not carefully distinguished the higher from the lower pleasures in a way which enables us to understand how to classify various examples which may arise. MVIill does, of course, distinguish them as mental or non-sensory and physical or sensory, respectively, but this, Edwards charges, is not sufficiently explained.1 I shall below discuss not only the explanation Mill does give of this distinction but also its rationale: Mill has, I feel, done more to clarify this problem than Edwards has noticed. Part of Edwards' purpose is to improve on, by further elucidating, the distinction in a way of which he thinks Mill would have approved. This is the task at which I think he has failed, but failed in a way which brings out how haphazardly philosophers in general have examined the basis for this distinction which is so crucial to Mill's philosophy.