It will be observed that Mill adds ‘absence of pain’ to ‘pleasure’ in his first statement, though not in his second. There is, in this, a confusion, with which, however, we need not deal. I shall talk of ‘pleasure’ alone, for the sake of conciseness; but all my arguments will apply à fortiori to ‘absence of pain’: it is easy to make the necessary substitutions.
Mill holds, then, that ‘happiness is desirable, and the only thing desirable[1], as an end; all other things being only desirable as means to that end’ (p. 52). Happiness he has already defined as ‘pleasure, and the absence of pain’ (p. 10); he does not pretend that this is more than an arbitrary verbal definition; and, as such, I have not a word to say against it. His principle, then, is ‘pleasure is the only thing desirable,’ if I may be allowed, when I say ‘pleasure,’ to include in that word (so far as necessary) absence of pain. And now what are his reasons for holding that principle to be true? He has already told us (p. 6) that ‘Questions of ultimate ends are not amenable to direct proof. Whatever can be proved to be good, must be so by being shewn to be a means to something admitted to be good without proof.’ With this, I perfectly agree: indeed the chief object of my first chapter was to shew that this is so. Anything which is good as an end must be admitted to be good without proof. We are agreed so far. Mill even uses the same examples which I used in my second chapter. ‘How,’ he says, ‘is it possible to prove that health is good?’ ‘What proof is it possible to give that pleasure is good?’ Well, in Chapter IV, in which he deals with the proof of his Utilitarian principle, Mill repeats the above statement in these words: ‘It has already,’ he says, ‘been remarked, that questions of ultimate ends do not admit of proof, in the ordinary acceptation of the term’ (p. 52). ‘Questions about ends,’ he goes on in this same passage, ‘are, in other words, questions what things are desirable.’ I am quoting these repetitions, because they make it plain what otherwise might have been doubted, that Mill is using the words ‘desirable’ or ‘desirable as an end’ as absolutely and precisely equivalent to the words ‘good as an end.’ We are,
- ↑ My italics.
