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

John Stuart hoagie and the Ends of SportABSTRACT While his witness preference may have been for an savoury book over an raise ballgame, John Stuart lurks distinction in Utilitarianism between high and lower pleasures offers a useful framework for thinking about coeval sport. This first became apparent while teaching Utilitarianism to undergraduates, whose interest is often piqued by using Mills distinction to rank popular sports much(prenominal) as baseball, football and basketball. This paper explores more seriously the relevance of Mills distinction for thinking about sport, focusing specifically on his claims about intellectual complexity and aesthetic value. It finds that while the distinction of high and lower pleasures does support a hierarchy among sports, it remains problematic to conjure up that any sport could in fact constitute a documented higher(prenominal) pleasure. Mill originally offered the distinction between higher and lower pleasures as a way of defendi ng utilitarianism against critics who found it degrading. Because utilitarianism defines moral worth solely as the net production of pleasure over pain, critics supercharged 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 brio as having no end higher than the pursuit of pleasure was sure as shooting 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 serviceman 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 piece beings have faculties more elevated than the animal appetites, and when once made assured of them, do not regard anything as happiness which does not implicate their gratification.(2)True human happines s thus requires at least more or less exposure to activities that gratify the higher faculties of the human mind. And though the pleasure of such(prenominal) 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 ones hunger, thirst, or sexual desire. Thus, unlike Bentham, who thought that the pleasure obtained from reading one dandy poem could be equaled by playing many games of pushpin, Mills distinction is soft 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.