Page 20 - Contemporary Cultural Theory

THE CULTURAL CONTRADICTIONS OF UTILITARIANISM

to abandon, at least in theory and perhaps even in practice, any notion
of standards, so as to proceed to a thoroughgoing, consistently utilitarian
cultural theory. Such is exactly the position taken by Bentham, in
deliberate defiance of Hume, when he insists that people are entitled
to want whatever it is that they want: “push-pin is of equal value
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with…poetry”. But for all its logical consistency, Benthamism never
actually becomes in any sense hegemonic within utilitarianism.
John Stuart Mill would later attempt to save utilitarianism from
the more or less explicit “philistinism” of Benthamism, and from the
charge that it is a “doctrine worthy only of swine” with the argument
that: “It is better to be… Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied”. 29
Like Hume, Mill appeals to the notion that only some individuals are
properly fit to judge in such matters. But, unlike Hume, he attempts
to ground this “unfitness” in the presence or absence of prior experience:
if the fool is of a different opinion, this is because fools “only know
their own side of the question. The other party to the comparison
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knows both sides”. The problem here, as any English teacher can
attest, is that there are those who have indeed read both, and who
nonetheless prefer to Milton, if not Ogilby, then some contemporary
equivalent. Prior experience per se is not, then, sufficient: ultimately,
proper judgement can be made between two pleasures only “by those
who are competently acquainted with both”. Thus Mill’s solution
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comes exactly to replicate that of Hume.
Commendable though Mill’s implied preference for poetry over
push-pin must seem to those who would value poetry (or philosophy),
it remains nonetheless intellectually incoherent: on strictly utilitarian
grounds it can never be better to be dissatisfied than satisfied. Qualitative
definitions of experiential value, such as that with which Mill
experiments here, are quite fundamentally incompatible with the
utilitarian schema’s own initial starting point in the so-called “felicific
calculus” (or calculation of happiness): the utility maximization
principle remains workable only so long as happiness is understood
as providing a single, quantitative measure of human well-being. Such
strictly Benthamite utilitarianisms implicitly endorse the reduction of
cultural values to the level of the marketable commodity (for the fact
that the commodity is marketable, and saleable, makes it measurable
in terms of the universal standard which is money). But if this is the
logical terminus of any consistent cultural utilitarianism, it is not one
easily arrived at by an individual intellectual, or collective intelligentsia,

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