Reflections on Mill & Kant – Different but Alike?

In the opening pages of Utilitarianism, Mill actually directly addresses Kant and the categorical imperative:

“I cannot help referring, for illustration, to a systematic treatise by one of the most illustrious of them, the Metaphysics of Ethics by Kant. This remarkable man…lays down a universal first principle as the origin and ground of moral obligation; it is this: “So act that the rule on which though actest would admit of being adopted as a law by all rational beings.” But when he begins to deduce from this precept any of the actual duties of morality, he fails, almost grotesquely to show that there would be any contradiction, any logical (not to say physical) impossiblity, in the adoption by all rational beings of the most outrageously immoral rules of conduct. All he shows is that the consequences of their universal adoption would be such as no one would choose to incur” (Mill 97). 

Mill’s criticism of Kant is that he does not adequately provide provisions for rational beings choosing “the most outrageously immoral rules of conduct” to be their categorical imperative; Kant only demonstrates that rational beings would never choose to adopt such immoral rules because of their consequences. For example, Kant illustrates the consequences of the lying promise – if the maxim of the act of lying, breaking promises when convenient, became universal law, no one would believe each other and promises would become mere vain pretenses (Kant 31). Relatedly, Kant demonstrates that it is morally wrong to commit suicide when “a man is reduced to despair by a series of misfortunes [and] feels sick of life”, because, if the maxim became a universal law of nature, everyone would be susceptible to the pangs of sorrow instead of resistant to them, so that the very same feeling which would destroy life “…acts so as to stimulate the furtherance of life” (Kant 31). 

Having understood Kant through Mill’s eyes, one might presuppose that Kant was concerned with the consequences of actions as morally right just as much as Mill. The case is in fact the opposite. Kant is concerned with the act itself rather than with the consequences that the act brings about. He believes that it is not permissible, under the categorical imperative, to sacrifice the good of the one for the good of the many; Mill writes, contrary to Kant’s law of morality, that utilitarians do not take interest in the agent’s own happiness but that of all concerned. Motive is irrespective of the act; actions which are blamable change utilitarians’ estimations “not certainly of the act, but of the agent” (Mill 110). Nonetheless, utilitarianism is not an appeal to the happiness of the agent, as Aristotle was concerned with the eudaimonia, or flourishing, of character. Utilitarianism is an appeal to the goodness of an act insofar as it produces the greatest good for the greatest number. In this way, we can make a clear distinction between utilitarianism ethics and Kantian ethics: utilitarianism utilizes a quantitative measure of study – the amount of utility produced by an act accords with the act’s moral rightness; whereas, Kantian ethics utilizes a qualitative quantative measure, akin to Aristotle’s notion of a ‘quantum’. Kant does not consider, as Mill does, quality and quantity as separable. Quality is an irreducible whole and quantity is a divisible part; the whole is with respect to its many.That is, Kant does not forget that, when creating a universal maxim, a theory to be applied to a set, people, not ideas,compose this set. He does not abstract mathematics from bodies, as Mill does; rather, he recovers the living character of a set by incorporating his ideas about the moral right with the people they were meant for. He completely rejects the utilitarian method of measuring the happiness of civilization by way of numbers, and redefines the set as a qualitative dimension, one where the entities, which are measured, are connected to the set. 

Consider Kant’s method of teaching. Once stating the universal maxim, he “enumerates some duties, following the usual division of them into duties to ourselves and to others and into perfect and imperfect duties” (30). He seems to use the operative category of part-whole by showing us the ‘parts’ in the matter of various duties and their effects, and thereafter proves that the ‘whole’, his universal maxim, is presupposed by the parts. From a bird’s eye view, he considers the visual field as a whole and the objects within it as its parts. 

However, Kant fails to see the objects as part of a whole horizon, rather he sees them as separable. In this manner, Kant seems to fall into the same trap as Mill, which Taurek staunchly criticizes – namely, that by creating a universal maxim for human beings, we cannot relativize the value of people and their ends. Taurek writes, “Five individuals each losing his life does not add up to anyone’s experiencing a loss five time greater than the loss suffered by any one of the five” (Taurek 306). Taurek’s wholesale criticism is that we cannot treat people as means to an end. Whether that end be happiness, in the case of Mill, or duty, in the case of Kant, I think Taurek’s criticism still rings true, as hauntingly as a knell. Mill appeals to goodness of the whole over the good of the agent. Likewise, Kant appeals to the good of the act over the good of the agent. Both utilitarianism and Kantian ethics prohibit exceptionalism of the subject of the first-order. Kant’s maxim works apodeictically as an a priori principle, because it observes not humans but how humans act. Likewise, Mill’s utilitarian principle can function universally, because it considers humans as separable means to a greater end, that of maximum happiness.

The analogous nature of the ethics of Kant and of Mill prompts thinking about the danger of universal maxims. Is it not dangerous to obliterate the virtue ethicist’s thinking that the flourishing of human character matters? To think that humans are abstractions from the empirical world? Yet, I concede, it is equally dangerous to fully apprehend the virtue ethicist’s thinking of humans as categories of social relation. Kant does not balance the individual and society, giving equal consideration to the desires of both, rather, in a manner akin to utilitarian ethics, he gives weight to considerations of duty over that of the human.