Utilitarianism

John Stuart Mill’s short defence of the principle that actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness remains the classic statement of utilitarian ethics, and the one most argued with.

Mill’s difficulty is that the principle, stated baldly, invites the charge that it is a doctrine fit only for swine, and much of the book is spent answering it. He distinguishes higher pleasures from lower and rests the distinction on the judgement of those who have known both; he takes up the objections that utilitarianism is godless, that it leaves no time to calculate, and that it cannot account for justice — the last of which occupies the whole of the fifth chapter.

First published in Fraser’s Magazine in 1861 and as a book in 1863, it is given here complete in its five chapters.