If I am asked, what I mean by difference of quality in pleasures, or what makes one pleasure more valuable than another, merely as a pleasure, except its being greater in amount, there is but one possible answer. Of two pleasures, if there be one to which all or almost all who have experience of both give a decided preference, irrespective of any feeling of moral obligation to prefer it, that is the more desirable pleasure. If one of the two is, by those who are competently acquainted with both, placed so far above the other that they prefer it, even though knowing it to be attended with a greater amount of discontent, and would not resign it for any quantity of the other pleasure which their nature is capable of, we are justified in ascribing to the preferred enjoyment a superiority in quality, so far outweighing quantity as to render it, in comparison, of small account. [Utilitarianism, Chapter 2]
Might we not be, in making this concession to grades of pleasures, opening the door to still higher grades of pleasure than those Mill enumerates, whose rarification beggars description as pleasure? For instance, “a pleasure” in metaphysical objects, so deep that no sensory apparatus is necessary to its experience (if not actually an impediment), but yet still as “high” above the capacity of Mill’s “common herd” of men as the most humbly endowed human being is from swine?
A being of higher faculties requires more to make him happy, is capable probably of more acute suffering, and certainly accessible to it at more points, than one of an inferior type; but in spite of these liabilities, he can never really wish to sink into what he feels to be a lower grade of existence.
Perhaps this is exactly how the deontologist feels at heart about sinking to the philosophical sensibility of the utilitarian.
But I do not believe that those who undergo this very common change, voluntarily choose the lower description of pleasures in preference to the higher. I believe that before they devote themselves exclusively to the one, they have already become incapable of the other. Capacity for the nobler feelings is in most natures a very tender plant, easily killed, not only by hostile influences, but by mere want of sustenance; and in the majority of young persons it speedily dies away if the occupations to which their position in life has devoted them, and the society into which it has thrown them, are not favourable to keeping that higher capacity in exercise. Men lose their high aspirations as they lose their intellectual tastes, because they have not time or opportunity for indulging them; and they addict themselves to inferior pleasures, not because they deliberately prefer them, but because they are either the only ones to which they have access, or the only ones which they are any longer capable of enjoying.
May not our deontologist be in the same relation vis-Ã -vis the utilitarian as one still capable of “higher” motivation than “mere” pleasure or happiness for their moral behavior is to the spent-youth, gone-to-seed, middle-aged slacker?