John Stuart Mill and the Ends of Sport :: Philosophy Philosophical Sports Essays

John Stuart Mill and the Ends of Sport ABSTRACT: While his own preference may have been for an engaging book over an exciting ballgame, John Stuart Mill’s distinction in Utilitarianism between higher and lower pleasures offers a useful framework for thinking about contemporary sport. This first became apparent while teaching Utilitarianism to undergraduates, whose interest is often piqued by using Mill’s distinction to rank popular sports such as baseball, football and basketball. This paper explores more seriously the relevance of Mill’s distinction for thinking about sport, focusing specifically on his claims about intellectual complexity and aesthetic value. It finds that while the distinction of higher and lower pleasures does support a hierarchy among sports, it remains problematic to assert that any sport could in fact constitute a genuine higher pleasure. Mill originally offered the distinction between higher and lower pleasures as a way of defending utilitarianism against critics who found it degrading. Because utilitarianism defines moral rightness solely as the net production of pleasure over pain, critics charged that it portrayed human happiness as no different from the contentment of well-fed barnyard animals. To these critics, any moral theory that cast human life as having no end higher than the pursuit of pleasure was surely "a doctrine worthy only of swine".(1) Mill countered that it was actually the critics of utilitarianism who degraded humanity, for they tacitly assumed that humans were capable of nothing more than animalistic pleasures. Mill maintained happiness is indeed a function of pleasure, although humans are capable of higher forms of pleasure than the other animals. Mill writes Human beings have faculties more elevated than the animal appetites, and when once made conscious of them, do not regard anything as happiness which does not include their gratification.(2) True human happiness thus requires at least some exposure to activities that gratify the higher faculties of the human mind. And though the pleasure of such activity requires greater effort and even some pain to realize, Mill considered it intrinsically superior to the relatively passive and animalistic pleasures obtained from satisfying one's hunger, thirst, or sexual desire. Thus, unlike Bentham, who thought that the pleasure obtained from reading one good poem could be equaled through playing many games of pushpin, Mill's distinction is qualitative: a higher pleasure can never be duplicated through the simple aggregation of lower pleasures. Mill posited three distinct sources of higher pleasure: (1) acts involving intellectual complexity (2) acts engaging the aesthetic imagination; and (3) acts engaging the moral sentiments.