Mill's Utilitarianism & Kant's Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals

This is important, again, because, if practiced, it leads to a world in which all valet de chambre beings would feel responsible for their actions not as isolated events further as phenomena intimately connected to the air and incorruptisticity of all other human beings. The thought cannot be modified without weakening its power. Its very radical nature is merely its strength, and to modify it would be to weaken its philosophical and practical opposition on human object lessonity.

However, the doubt must be raised(a) with respect to the basis of such moral landing in the context of light willing. For Kant, the dress to such a question brings paragon into the equation. To Kant, man, left to his possess devices, would create out of his own desires a concept of morality, which would hardly be applicable to the livelong human race. Rather, it would reflect the desires of the individual. In other words, where does the will to be a moral being derive from, if not from the individual. Kant's answer is that our rational ideas about morality flow not from our "feelings," as wedge would have it, but from deity. The following statements can be correspondn as Kant's own argument against utilitarianism, although Mill actually was natural two years after Kant's death:

All prescripts . . . be either empirical or rational. The first kind, drawn from the principle of rapture, are based upon either physical or moral feeling. The second kind, drawn from the principle

Mill himself sets forth a number of arguments against utilitarianism, which he then claims to negate. However, in addressing what can be seen as Kant's basic argument as stated above, Mill fails to directly address that problem. Kant is saying that without the will of God in the equation, men are left to reconcile for themselves---as individuals---what is moral, what is good, what is pleasure, what is happiness. Kant's argument against basing morality on "physical or moral feeling" is that such feeling is subjective. He introduces the will of God into the moral equation in order to connect man's free will to a higher law. Mill does not see the need for such a divine law or will.

However, in defending utilitarianism, he merely rushes aside the original criticism of utilitarianism which argues that, without God, the individual is hampered by universal human shortcomings:

To Kant, it is reason and not feeling which lets us know that God's will is the aim basis for moral behavior. The freedom of the will, as exercised in this reason, is indispensable for morality to have any meaning. If another determines for us what moral behavior is, then we are not moral beings but might as well be automatons. The utilitarian unavoidably places himself as the final arbiter of what is moral (producing the greatest happiness or pleasure) for those lesser beings in receptive of discerning higher levels of pleasure or happiness. To Kant, on the other hand, all individuals are capable of the reason which leads to moral behavior and to God as a basis of such behavior.

Mill considers and then dismisses the significance of God or Christianity as a basis for moral theory. He posits that the Christian argument has it that a "doctrine of ethics" is meant to " yield to us the will of God," and then concludes:

The remainder of the stock arguments against utilitarianism by and large consist in laying to its charge the common infirmities of human nature. . . . We are told that a utilitaria
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