My fellow Ethics seminarian Greg Schneider wrote a smart response to one of my questions about ethics and the commons that ties together the Bollier and Mill essays. It does a nice job of incorporating the notion of intellectual pleasure with the ethical problem of obligation to the commons. He doesn't blog, so I asked him if he'd like to post it up here - both because it should be shared and because I selfishly want to file it with the rest of my notes on this topic. So without further ado, here is Greg:
Apply the basic precepts of happiness in Mill's Utilitarianism to the academic commons
To get at how a theory that posits happiness as "pleasure and the absence of pain" can help us understand the information commons we must first explore Mill's definition a bit further. After all, the information commons doesn't seem all that pleasurable at first glance (well, it's pleasurable if you think of it THAT way, but come on, focus, we've got theory to discuss!).
Mill's Definition of Utilitarianism: "The creed which accepts as the foundation of morals, Utility, or the Greatest Happiness principle, holds that actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness. By happiness is intended pleasure, and the absence of pain; by unhappiness, pain, and the privation of pleasure" (448 in my edition).
But Mill goes out of his way in the second chapter of this short book to debunk the cliche arguments against his theory. Here we begin to see a subtle development of his notion of happiness. Indeed, one of Mill's oft quoted phrases states that "it is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied" (449). For Mill, happiness is not hedonism (as it could be argued it was for Bentham), and he takes pains to show this. There are differences in kinds of pleasure, Mill argues, and we can say that human pleasures are of an entirely different sort than the baser beasts. "Human beings have faculties more elevated than the animal appetites, and when once made conscious of them, do not regard anything as happiness which does not include their gratification" (448). While this statement seems to include the love/hate power of addiction, and it also shows that humans have access to a higher quality of pleasure. Mill doesn't just want to count pleasure points (like some kind of fad diet), he wants to factor in the quality of this pleasure as well.
These qualitatively greater pleasures of the mind are the ones which provide the link to the information commons. The information commons refers to the creative space where intellectual property (music, art, film, advertising, poetry, novels, etc.), in effect digital everything, is created and disseminated. As digital technologies, which free information from physical recalcitrances that made mass dissemination more difficult, come into conflict with traditional market forces, the legal system has been harnessed to control and limit the development and dissemination of these works. Through the extension of copyright law and attendant legal arguments over fair use, Bollier worries that this space is being usurped by corporations and corporate power politics. All this, he argues, shuts down creativity by limiting creative fair use of artistic works for the sake of the corporate bottom line.
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