Posted by RC on January 12, 2009, 8:04 pm, in reply to "90% vs. 10% and utilitarianism"
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Well, I'd say that its hard to make analogies to the value of happiness through the use of a numerical scale. However, Mill has proposed somewhat of a differentiation between certain types of pleasures. He does state that "lower pleasures" are those which are able to be enjoyed by animals (maybe food?), while "higher pleasures" are those which are unique to humans (maybe friendship?). Obviously from this he states that lower pleasures are of much less worth than higher pleasures, but since it seems like a lot of the moral arguments today only involve higher pleasures it is still hard to differentiate the degree to which one is better than the other. There are also some contingencies based upon the length of time the pleasure is had, but does anyone else know of any other way that Mill has proposed to gauge the weight of pleasures within their respective category (higher and lower)?
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