Walter Schaller
580 California St., Suite 400
San Francisco, CA, 94104
PUNISHMENT AND THE UTILITARIAN CRITERION OF RIGHT AND WRONG
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Abstract
In seeking to explain Mill's moral theory, recent "revisionist" interpeters have focused upon his remarks about punishment in Chapter Five of UTILITARIANISM. In particular, they have called attention 1 to Mill's assertion that "the real turning point of the distinction between morality and simple expediency" consists in the fact that a morally wrong action is one for which people ought somehow to be punished, either by an external sanction (law or public opinion) or by an internal sanction ("the reproaches of his own conscience"). 2
References (11)
- William Lyons, EMOTIONS (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), pp. 70-98. Cf. David Richards: "it does not seem that any special sensation or kinesthetic feeling is either necessary or sufficient for the existence of any class of feelings, as distinct from any other" (A THEORY OF REASONS FOR ACTION, p. 253). Amelie Rorty makes the same point concerning regret: "Although regret is often roughly identified by a certain feeling, posture, and facial expression . . . the feeling is not sufficient for genuine regret, or its proper identification. To qualify as a feeling of regret, the feeling must have certain sorts of intentional objects, be accompanied by certain sorts of thoughts. If some bizarre accident of digestion produced just the sort of wave of stabs and pangs, just that hangdog expression, vacant sadness of the eyes that are the marks of regret, one would not call the attitude regretful. . . . The feeling must be associated with a causal story that connects it to its proper intentional object, in order to quality as regret" ("Agent Regret," in EXPLAINING EMOTIONS, ed. Amelie O. Rorty. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980, p. 497.
- Gabriele Taylor writes: "Over a wide range of emotions . . . beliefs are constitutive of the emotional experience in question. . . . First, one (or more) of the beliefs makes the emotional experience what it is, it identifies it as, for example, anger, and so differentiates it from other states, such as jealousy or envy" (PRIDE, SHAME, AND GUILT, p. 3). Cf. Amelie Rorty: "Although it is often difficult to distinguish regretful feelings from closely allied feeling tones--shame, guilt, remorse, self-recrimination--they are distinguished by their related characteristic thoughts" ("Agent Regret," p. 498).
- I am assuming that at least some imprudent actions are not also immoral. Individuals who engage in mountain-climbing without a safety rope, or who blindly dash across a freeway at rush hour, or who eat wild mushrooms and berries picked at random, are not, in my view, violating any moral rules, however imprudent their actions may be. If they are injured, they may deeply regret their carelessness, but guilt feelings would be out of place.
- only moral rules and below which are all and only nonmoral rules.
- H.L.A. Hart argues that one distinguishing characteristic of moral rules is that they are believed to be of "great importance"; many legal rules, in contrast, "occupy a relatively low place in the scale of serious importance" (THE CONCEPT OF LAW. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961, p. 169).
- Gabriele Taylor writes: "The person who feels remorse sees himself as a responsible moral agent, and so sees whatever wrong he has done as an action (or omission) of his about the consequences of which he ought, if possible, to do something" (PRIDE, SHAME, AND GUILT, p. 107). Richard Brandt regards remorse as "a direct and `natural' response . . . to regarding oneself as the cause of injury to a sentient creature one does not want injured and with whom one empathizes and who perhaps is responding with resentment to the injury" (A THEORY OF THE GOOD AND THE RIGHT, p. 175).
- Copp, p. 85.
- "Remarks on Bentham's Philosophy," COLLECTED WORKS ON JOHN STUART MILL, Vol. X, p. 13.
- "Freedom of the Will," in AN EXAMINATION OF SIR WILLIAM HAMILTON'S PHILOSOPHY, ed. J.M. Robson, COLLECTED WORKS OF JOHN STUART MILL, Vol. IX, p. 451.
- Chapter III, paragraph 4. And when later in that same paragraph Mill mentions remorse, he says that that feeling results from actions which violate "our standard of right."
- THE LATER LETTERS OF JOHN STUART MILL 1849-1873, ed. Francis E. Mineka and Dwight N. Lindley, COLLECTED WORKS OF JOHN STUART MILL, Vol. XV, p. 649.