Ten Podcast Episodes on John Stuart Mill's Utilitarianism

 

One text that I teach frequently in my classes is John Stuart Mill's Utilitarianism. Years back, I produced a set of short core concept lecture videos covering the main ideas Mill sets out in that short but important work.  My students have been using them for quite some time, but they are just a fraction of the viewers that have watched those videos in order to better understand the text.

Last year, I added a new set of resources on this text, taking the lecture videos and converting them into podcast episodes in my Sadler's Lectures channel, boosting the sound quality, and editing out all of the longer pauses and filler words.  

Here are those ten podcast episodes on Mill's Utilitarianism.  All told, they run for about 2 1/2 hours:

• Utilitarianism As Basis For Moral Theories
• Qualitatively Higher And Lower Pleasures 
• Why People Do Not Appreciate Higher Pleasures
• Responses To Criticisms Of Utilitarianism 
• The Ideal Judge Of Pleasures
• Utilitarianism, Sanctions, And Duty
• Happiness, Goods, And Virtue
• Five Conceptions Of Justice 
• What Having A Right Means 
• Justice And Utility

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Ten Videos On John Stuart Mill's Utilitarianism

One of the most commonly taught texts in Ethics classes is John Stuart Mill's classic work, Utilitarianism.  I give it a central place in my own classes, generally as a companion text to Jeremy Bentham's founding work for utilitarian moral theory, The Principles of Morals and Legislation.  Together, they provide a great overview of that approach in ethics.

Students do struggle with Mill's work, so some time back, I started creating short Core Concept videos specifically on Utilitarianism.  The first few of these, I actually shot during my class discussions.  Then, a few years ago, I created several additional videos.  I provided the entire set to my students - in both face-to-face and online classes - as a resource to help them through the text.

Since I'm now once again in the classroom - teaching two sections of Ethics for Marquette University this semester - I thought I'd add a few more videos on key ideas of Mill's Utilitarianism.  As it turned out, there were four topic that I thought needed additional discussion.  This brings the total number in to ten - enough to cover all the main ideas of the work.

Here is the full set of videos on John Stuart Mill's Utilitarianism.

• Utilitarianism as the Basis for Other Moral Theories
• Responses to Criticisms of Utilitarianism
• Qualitatively Higher and Lower Pleasures 
• The Ideal Judge of Pleasures
• Why People Do Not Appreciate Higher Pleasures
• Utilitarianism, Sanctions, and Duty
• Happiness, Goods, and Virtue
• Five Conceptions of Justice
• Justice and Utility
• What Having a Right Means

I hope they prove useful for you as you read - or reread - Mill's work.  And if you find it helpful for you, consider passing this post on to other people you think might find it helpful.  If you'd like to support the work I do, making philosophy accessible to the general public, take a look at my Patreon page.

Recent Talk: Jeremy Bentham's Philosophy of Action

Earlier this month, I delivered a talk digging into a set of topics I've been interested in for quite some time -- the Utilitarian philosopher, Jeremy Bentham's philosophy of action -- as part of the Marist College Philosophy and Religious Studies Speaker Series.




I've taught Bentham's Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation for some time in my Ethics classes (you can watch video lectures from those classes, and shorter Core Concept videos here), and I've often been struck by just how much attention he devotes to analysing elements of moral live and action which we don't usually associate with Utilitarian moral theory -- intentions, motives, dispositions, even (in his later works) virtues and vices. I decided it was a topic well worth researching and presenting on, and an opportunity to start reading through some of Bentham's less often perused, more mature works.

 As it turned out, the audience was primarily composed of undergraduate non-majors, so I tailored my examples and discussion to them.  For the very first time in my career, I was surprised that, after the talk, nobody had any questions, including the philosophy faculty who attended -- when I asked them about it later, their unanimous reply was that the presentation was so clear as to preclude any need for questions.

Here are the slides for the presentation.

Should Everyone Get to Vote?

One of my philosophical colleagues, Kevin Timpe, posted a link to a paper and got an interesting (and somewhat tongue-in-cheek) discussion going on Facebook.  The paper is Jason Brennan's "The Right to a Competent Electorate," coming out soon in in International Philosophical Quarterly.   Brennan argues what is guaranteed to be a controversial position, that "the practice of unrestricted, universal suffrage is unjust," and proposes replacing democracy with an "epistocracy" (i.e. a rule by the knowledgeable and competent).

Both the implications and elements of the argument itself are bound to not only raise objections, but actually set people off, push the buttons triggering anger, ire, indignation.  And, that, I think, will be reflective of the very problematic of democracy and voting that the paper touches on, but does not resolve, because those sorts of responses will occur -- even sometimes on the part of educated, well-informed, intellectually virtuous (or at least not vicious) citizens to whom such arguments and proposals would restrict voting or full political participation, for reasons I'll discuss below.


The passage that started the fairly brief Facebook conversation, which got me thinking more about an issue that has been relegated to the back of my mind for some time, runs:

People who exercise power over me—including other voters—should have to do so in a competent and morally reasonable way. Otherwise, as a matter of justice, they ought to be excluded from holding political power, including the power to vote

Crossing The Tracks: Ethics in Business Education

Or, why I enjoy working with the FSU Business faculty on Ethics education.

Today, over in the School of Business and Economics, we held a second workshop emerging from a fairly new, needed, and exciting partnership, the Ethics in Business Education Project (EBEP).  Since I provide the history and initial purposes of  the project on our website (which is still under construction), I'll skip over it here, other than to mention three things:

First, EBEP is a collaborative partnership between philosophers and businesspeople.  Second, the model of collaboration EBEP relies on and embodies involves philosophers, as subject matter experts in Ethics, assisting business faculty to develop high levels of competence and confidence in teaching Ethics and in assessing student learning and development in Ethics. Third, the project arose symbiotically both from needs perceived on the side of the businesspeople and from opportunities grasped on the side of the philosophers.

The first and most pressing specific project we saw the need to tackle was reviewing, then developing a better version of, a scoring rubric used for grading student essays responding to typical ethically problematic cases in Business. Again, the history of that process, including the developmental stages of the rubric, is summarized on the EBEP website, so rather than cover that same ground, I'd rather think and write about why this particular exercise took on importance for a philosopher and for business professors, and what took place between us in today's grading workshop.

There is a stock joking response to any mention of Business Ethics:  "Isn't that an oxymoron?" It reveals a common, longstanding, and doubtless not entirely unmerited perception of businesspeople, even Business faculty, as not knowledgeable about, as uninterested in, and as unmotivated by ethical principles, concerns, values, let alone theories, figures, and texts. 

The reality is that those involved in business have always had some sort of  interest in ethics.  Admittedly, this may well have often taken the form of explicitly worked out ethical stances which academics (particularly in the humanities) and the intelligentsia have found less than congenial.  There certainly have been many cases of businesspeople clearly and deliberately acting unethically.  Plenty have used moral language and concepts as window-dressing for what they wanted and aimed to do anyway.  It may well be that due to the nature of business and business education, there are some environments particularly corrosive to ethical standards and reasoning, more seductive in their temptations. . . .