Critical Assessment #2

In the chapter of The Ethical Life titled "Hedonism," Mill presents, on pg. 22, a
bewildering argument in favor of his belief that happiness is the sole criterion of
morality:
1. If something is a true 'end of conduct,' then that thing is a criterion of morality
2. Happiness is a true end of conduct, rather than merely a means to an end.
3. Therefore, happiness is a criterion of morality.

I believe that the intuition behind this argument is that morality, or 'practical reasoning,'
is reasoning that is concerned with actions and that, because actions are performed for the
sake of ends, therefore morality must concern itself with these ends; furthermore,
because happiness, according to Mill, is the only true end our actions have, the only thing
that we desire intrinsically rather than as a means to something else, therefore morality
must concern itself with happiness and happiness, as our sole intrinsic end, is therefore
the centerpiece of morality and a criterion of moral action.
My objection here will be directed towards Mill's first premise. When Mill
declares that "Happiness has made out its title as one of the ends of conduct [because of
its intrinsic desirability], and consequently one of the criteria of morality" he is asserting,
if his argument is to be logically valid, a premise that seems to confuse the subject of
moral prescriptions, i.e. actions and their ends, with those prescriptions themselves
While it is certainly the case that morality must concern itself with the nature of actions
and therefore the reasons for why actions are performed, it does not at all follow from
this that something which is a true 'end of conduct' must, in addition to being a subject of
moral analysis, must also be a 'criterion of morality' if, by this phrase, Mill means, as I
believe he does, something by which actions are to be morally judged or a criterion that


sets an objective goal towards which we are morally obligated to work towards.
This distinction comes out most clearly in ethical systems which believe that the
intentions behind an action are the most important or even the sole determiner of whether
or not an action is moral. The most obvious example here would be Kant and his belief
that only actions carried out by a free will have moral worth and only when it acts
according to and is motivated by reason is a will truly free. If it were truly the case, as
Mill says, that happiness is the only thing desirable as an end and that we act justly only
when we maximize that end, then the reply of deontologists like Kant would be that this
merely robs us of the autonomy from our heteronomous inclinations required for true
morality and that there are therefore no actual criteria of morality.
There are then good, or at least reasonable, reasons for rejecting Mill's attempts to
conflate the ends of actions with the standards by which those actions are to be judged.
But if we do not conflate these two, then Mill's argument collapses and thus, even if he is
right that happiness is a true end of conduct, this does not mean that it is also therefore a
normative standard by which conduct can be judged.