John Stuart Mill and 133B

Yesterday in class we tried to tell Dr. Borton that it's unethical to assign homework, but he didn't buy it  :(  That's why I need to take Principles of Persuasion before I take too many more other classes  :(

And that's also why we have three more texts to read next week, and so I got started by reading one of them yesterday, and it's the first chapter and the first two sections of the second chapter from John Stuart Mill's Utilitarianism.  And---
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I find myself in an unfamiliar place, namely, in a place where I actually feel grateful for homework, because this particular text is genuinely brilliant.

That said, here's the nit I'll pick in this text:

A.  The text already admits the possibility that the ranking of pleasures can be subjective (it admits this in the indented lines in the first column of p. 6, where it says "... or almost all people ...", and again at the end of p. 7, where it says "... or, if they differ among themselves, the judgement of the majority among them.").

a.  And I should like to add that the text offers no reason why this should be a mere possibility.  For all we can tell from the text, it might very well be a certainty that such a ranking would be subjective.

B.  And, in the event that that ranking of pleasures does indeed turn out to be subjective---that "those who are qualified by knowledge of both (pleasures)" (p. 7) do happen to "differ among themselves"---in that event, there is surely no logical reason to defer to "the judgement of the majority among them".  An opinion does not become right just because it happens to be held by a majority.  Given that I'm speaking to John Stuart Mill, I'm sure I don't need to further belabor this particular point  :)  because he had already discussed "tyranny of the majority" in On Liberty (pub. 1859) (Utilitarianism was published in 1863).

C.  Next, given the two points that have already been made above, there's no logical reason to defer to even a unanimous judgement of "those who are qualified":  By A. above, the contrary judgement, too, was at least possible, and therefore, by B. above, the contrary judgement cannot be ruled out just because of the opinions of "those who are qualified".  A unanimous opinion is merely a special case of a majority opinion.

D.  Having made note of that stalemate, I ask why on earth I (or even we) even need to determine such a ranking in the first place.  If this were, for example, a matter of the election of a government, then any decision, even a wrong decision, would have been preferable to having no decision (since having no decision in the election of a government would result in the civic life of a country first coming to a standstill and finally descending into chaos).  But this is not.  This is a matter in which it might very well be possible that we can all muddle through without ever becoming quite sure which of two contending pleasures is, in a universal sense, more or less desirable than the other, and this is a matter in which we can all very well afford to leave open the possibility that the answer to that question might be different for different people.

E.  But this much I am prepared to believe:  Each being, starting with the pig on p. 5 and going up to the best philosopher Mr. Mill might care to name, may have a personal ranking of pleasures, whether said being be conscious of it or not (here I am imagining the philosopher to be, I hope, making conscious decisions, and I am imagining the pig to be perhaps following its instincts without being conscious about it).

e.  I would even go so far as to conjecture that each being's personal ranking of pleasures might be just as unique as its DNA.
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There.  The second blog post needed to be at least 500 words, and the above is 582 words.  And here's Colour Record No. 133, Side B: