Pursuing the Good-Indirectly

Abstract

Everyone knows thatJohn Stuart Mill was a utilitarian. Likewise, everyone knows that Mill was a libertarian-one who held certain interferences with individual liberty wrong regardless of their contribution to utility. What is controversial among Millian philosophers is how Mill the utilitarian is to be reconciled with Mill the libertarian.' Was Mill at heart a libertarian who hoped to convince nonlibertarians of liberty's utility, a utilitarian who hoped to convince nonutilitarians of utility's high regard for liberty, orjust a confused or Polyannaish value pluralist who failed to see that his ultimate values are frequently antagonistic? John Gray, in Mill on Liberty: A Defence (1983), argues that Mill is both a utilitarian and a libertarian and that Mill is neither confused nor Pollyannaish. According to Gray, Mill is an indirect utilitarianone who believes that, if maximum utility is to be achieved, one must not attempt to maximize utility in every case and as such Mill can plausibly maintain that his liberty principles hold even when their implications are counterutilitarian. In this essay I shall not dispute the accuracy of the position Gray attributes to Mill. Nor shall I be concerned with whether an endorsement of liberty, even in situations where a required act would not maximize utility, can be justified on utilitarian grounds. Finally, although I hold the liberties which concerned Mill to be absolute or near-absolute values, I shall not be concerned with those liberties either. What I shall address is the structure of the argument Gray attributes to Mill, a structure that is commonplace in philosophical treatments of morality and practical reasoning generally. I label the structure, as my title indicates, pursuing the good indirectly. Such a structure may be quite proper, given the way the world and human beings are, but it is undoubtedly quite troublesome.