The philosophy of Utilitarianism, often expressed as ‘the greatest happiness for the greatest number’, is relevant here, too.īut what if the greatest happiness for the majority depended, not merely on a minority being unhappy, but on a minority actively being kept in a perpetual state of misery? What if that were the condition on which everyone else’s happiness and success depended? Would that be morally acceptable, or would it not, rather, strike us as morally repugnant? Here, James is reflecting on the idealised perfect societies of writers of fiction – mostly socialists, such as Edward Bellamy (whose Looking Backward, 2000-1887 was a huge bestseller upon its publication in the US in 1888) and William Morris (who wrote a socialist utopia novel, News from Nowhere, in 1890). Fourier’s and Bellamy’s and Morris’s utopias should all be outdone, and millions kept permanently happy on the one simple condition that a certain lost soul on the far-off edge of things should lead a life of lonely torture, what except a sceptical and independent sort of emotion can it be which would make us immediately feel, even though an impulse arose within us to clutch at the happiness so offered, how hideous a thing would be its enjoyment when deliberately accepted as the fruit of such a bargain? Or if the hypothesis were offered us of a world in which Messrs.
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