Here are some of the things it’s most important to grasp when you’re thinking about this topic. Make sure you understand them fully (use the readings, or ask me, to help you make sense of them if you don’t):

• For the purposes of our philospohical discussions of, Utilitarianism, ‘utility’, ‘welfare’, ‘well-being’, and ‘happiness’ are synonyms. They all refer to what is good for a person, that is, what makes her life go better to the extent that she has it, what she should be concerned with insofar as she is motivated by self-interest. Thus, a desire-satisfaction conception of utility says that what is good for a person, what makes her life go better, is that her desires are satisfied. A hedonistic conecption says that what is good for a person is pleasure. And so on.
• ‘Good’ here does not mean morally good. It does not follow from the fact that something contributes to your well-being that it is morally good for you to have it.
• Here as elsewhere in moral philosophy you should set aside any doubts you might have about ‘imposing’ your view of what’s good on other people. To say that something is good for someone is not to impose anything on them! You might reasonably argue that something cannot be good for someone unless that person herself thinks it’s good too. But that is itself a substantive philosophical view about well-being (which needs defence against opposing views), not a reason to be cautious about engaging in the project of determining what the right account of well-being is.
• It’s important to understand two different senses in which Mill might have done better to talk in terms of an alternative conception of utility. There are two options:
  • It might have been better in the sense that it would have made his view more coherent or plausible as a whole;
  • It might have been better in the sense that it would have been closer to the truth about what a person’s welfare consists in.
  Your essay should show that you understand this. For example, your conclusion might be that although it would have been better in the second sense for Mill to adopt a desire-satisfaction conception of utility, an objective-list conception coheres more with the detail and ambitions of Utilitarianism.
• There is a difference between psychological or motivational hedonism and normative or evaluative hedonism. Psychological hedonism says that people are motivated by pleasure. Normative hedonism says that pleasure (and only pleasure) is good for a person. The philosophically interesting question that we’re concerned with is about normative hedonism.

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Not sure how to go about writing an essay in answer to this question (even after reading the general guide to writing essays here or the guide to writing exam essays in the third video here)?

• Well, to begin with, you might want to think about why Mill opts for a hedonist conception of utility (that is, a conception according to which utility consists in pleasure and the absence of pain). What advantages does it have in itself, and which of those might explain Mill’s own adoption of it? Here you will want to draw both from philosophical discussions of well-being that are not concerned with Mill in particular (such as Parfit’s) and from commentaries on and discussions of Mill in particular (such as Crisp’s). Make a list of the advantages you identify.
• Next, you could think about what problems hedonism poses. Such problems might be good reasons why Mill would have done better to adopt an alternative, as the question suggests. Again, the problems might be problems for Mill himself, given his particular motivations and aims; or the problems might be problems for hedonism in general. For instance, Mill is evidently worried by the objection that utilitarianism is “the philosophy of swine”. That objection may or may not be an objection to hedonism in general, but clearly Mill takes it to be a problem for him. Meanwhile, Nozick’s famous example of the ‘experience machine’ is an objection that targets all normative hedonists, not just utilitarians such as Mill. Again, make a list of the objections for yourself.
• Now, having completed the tasks above, you have a sense of why Mill adopted, and why any utilitarian (indeed, anyone at all) might adopt, a hedonist account of utility; and you also have a sense of why adopting a hedonist account might pose problems for the utilitarian. This allows you to do something called motivating the question—that is, explaining what’s at stake, what’s interesting about it. The introduction to an essay should always motivate the question. You can now write some motivating sentences to include in your introduction now—something along the following lines:

  According to Mill, a person’s well-being consists in pleasure and the absence of pain (Mill 1998: 55). This hedonist account of well-being may be motivated partly by Mill’s wish to present his view as an elaboration of the utilitarian tradition in which utility is so understood, but it also has certain advantages in itself. Among these are its seemingly democratic character, since the different pastimes of the rich and poor alike may be equal as far as the pleasure they give is concerned, and the tractability of measurement and interpersonal comparison necessary for political implementation of utilitarian morality. However, Mill himself worries that hedonism opens utilitarianism up to accusations that it is “a doctrine worthy only of swine” (ibid.), and hedonist accounts of well-being must also address doubts about their ability to make sense of our interest in the veridicality of our experiences and of the welfare value of non-pleasurable parts of life.

  Those sentences can form part of the introductory paragraph of your essay.
• You now have a sense of what the attractions and problems of hedonism are. But your essay is going to need to make a case either for Mill’s sticking with hedonism despite the problems, or for Mill’s opting for an alternative. Either way you’ll need to assess responses to the objections to hedonism (both Mill’s own responses and others), and you’ll need to assess the alternatives to hedonism.
• Start by assessing responses to the objections to hedonism. What does Mill say in response to the objections he addresses? The most prominent of the objections that he addresses is the ‘philosophy of swine’ objection, and his response to it involves appealing to a distinction between ‘higher’ and ‘lower’ pleasures. Drawing both on Mill and on commentaries on Mill, make some notes on the following questions:
  1. what is that distinction (i.e. what makes a higher pleasure higher, and what makes a lower pleasure lower)? (Don’t confuse the question what the distinction consists in with the question how do we know whether a pleasure is a higher or lower pleasure.)
  2. Supposing that the distinction is coherent and compelling (i.e. that we can adequately distinguish higher and lower pleasures, and that we should), can the ‘philosophy of swine’ objection be satisfactorily addressed by appealing to it?
  3. Is the the distinction as Mill elaborates it coherent and compelling?
  4. If it’s not, can it be revised, fixed up to make it coherent and compelling? How?
• Now think about the alternatives to hedonism—specifically, the objective list theory (sometimes understood as perfectionism, or as part of a theory of well-being known as perfectionism) and desire-satisfaction theory. For each one in turn, read texts on th reading list and, as you do so, make notes addressing the following questions:
  1. What does the view say well-being consists in? (Again, don’t confuse the (metaphysical) question what the view says well-being consists in with the (epistemological) question how we know what well-being consists in.)
  2. What are the view’s attractions? (For instance, one key attraction of the objective list theory that it allows to accommodate the great diversity in things that seem to contribute to a person’s life going well.)
  3. What are the main objections to the view? (For instance, one key objection to the objective list theory that it seems insensitive to whether or not a person cares about the item said to be good for her.)
  4. What can be said in response to the main objections? How compelling do you find these responses? Do they prompt any further objections? How compelling are responses to those further objections?
• If you’ve taken the steps above, you are now in a position to describe: (a) the motivations and attractions of hedonism and of Mill’s endorsement of hedonism specifically; (b) some important objections to hedonism; (c) possible responses to the objections; (d) alternatives to hedonism; (e) attractions and motivations of those alternatives; (f) some important objections to the alternatives; and (g) possible responses to those objections
• As you’ve been arriving at this point, you should also have been making judgments as to the power or compellingness of the attractions, motivations, objections, and responses you’ve been identifying. An essay needs to make these judgments in order to make its case for its answer to the question. Merely reporting what others judge is not enough—it doesn’t tell the reader what to think about those judgments. Moreover, the essay needs to make these judgments in order for its arguments to be yours—not in the sense that they are original, but in the sense that you own them (which is compatible with your disowning them after further reflection!).

  To say that an objection is compelling is to say that it can’t be ignored or dismissed; the view to which it is an objection will have to be amended or further elaborated in response to the objection if the view is to be plausible—that is, likely to be true or sound. (To say that an objection is fatal is to say that the view to which it is an objection cannot supply a satisfactory response to it, and so must be rejected.) To say that an attraction is compelling is to say that any view that doesn’t have that attraction is missing something pretty important.

  How should you determine how compelling an attraction, motivation, objection, or response is? Philosophy is reason-giving conversation, so think of yourself as trying to give reasons to an interlocutor (your reader) with the aim of convincing her of the essay’s conclusion. Does it seem to you both that the relevant attraction or motivation or objection or whatever is compelling, a reason to think that the relevant theory has a significant advantage over others that lack the attraction (in the case of an attraction) or that its plausibility is seriously dented unless it’s amended (in the case of an objection)? Does it seem to you that things will seem the same way to a reasonable interlocutor? You may not be sure of this, but that’s okay: confidence about these things comes with philosophical experience and training. You still have to make the judgments to write the essay. If you haven’t been doing this, go back through your notes and set down your assessment in each case of the power of the relevant consideration.

• This should all leave you with a sense of what you think in answer to the question. For instance, you might conclude that: hedonism is well-motivated by a democratic sense of the need to defer to subjects about their own well-being (which rules out objective list theory as an alternative), but that this motivation is just as well satisfied by desire-satisfaction theory, which avoids certain key objections to hedonism and can be amended in such a way as to avoid the main objections to it. Or you might think that hedonism can avoid the key objections (e.g. by appeal to the higher/lower distinction, among other things) and that rival theories are vulnerable to fatal objections. In the former case, your answer to the question is yes. In the latter case, your answer is no. And this gives you what you need to write your introduction. For instance, building on the motivating sentences you wrote earlier, your introduction might run as follows:

  Yes. Mill would have done better to adopt a desire-satisfaction account of utility. The hedonist account of utility that Mill did adopt may be motivated partly by Mill’s wish to present his view as an elaboration of the utilitarian tradition in which utility is so understood, and it also has certain advantages in itself. Among these are its seemingly democratic character, since the different pastimes of the rich and poor alike may be equal as far as the pleasure they give is concerned, and the tractability of measurement and interpersonal comparison necessary for political implementation of utilitarian morality. However, Mill himself worries that hedonism opens utilitarianism up to accusations that it is “a doctrine worthy only of swine” (ibid.), and hedonist accounts of well-being must also address doubts about their ability to make sense of our interest in the veridicality of our experiences and of the welfare value of non-pleasurable parts of life. I will argue that some of these accusations are fatal to the hedonist account. The desire-satisfaction account shares and perhaps even improves upon hedonism’s democratic character, and can avoid the objections from veridicality and non-pleasurable value. Moreover, objections that have been levelled against the desire-satisfaction account are not fatal.

• Write your introduction, including only the following elements: your answer to the question (yes or no); motivation for the question; and the reasons the essay will be giving for its answer, in brief summary. Although your summaries of your reasons should be brief, they should not include unexplained jargon or unelaborated references to ideas or examples or arguments. Your reader shouldn’t be expected to know the details of any of the ideas, examples, or arguments that will play a part in making the case that the essay makes. So no unelaborated mentions of Haydn and the oyster or the experience machine or “Crisp’s argument” etc. (That’s why in the example above I haven’t mentioned the experience machine, but instead talked about “our interest in the veridicality of our experiences”.)
• Now all you need to do is write the paragraphs that do what the introduction says the essay will do. Most of the philosophical work has already been done (although it’s typical of philosophy that as you write out your arguments you start to see new arguments and objections that you’d missed before—which is partly why writing essays is so important). So, for example, the structure for the paragraphs following the introduction above might be as follows:

  Paragraph 1: Explain what Mill’s account of utility is, and explain that and how it is a hedonist account.

  Paragraph 2: Explain what motivates Mill’s adoption of utility, and what further advantages hedonism has besides any you think motivated Mill himself.

  Paragraph 3: Set out some of the problems facing hedonist views.

  Paragraph 4: Set out Mill’s/a response to one of the problems (obviously choose one to which he did respond if it’s Mill’s response you’re discussing).

  Paragraph 5: Assess Mill’s response, and any further objections and replies in this line of argument (break into further paragraphs as necessary). Make sure you end this step with a signposting sentence explaining how things stand at this point. (E.g. “So Mill can fend off the ‘philosophy of swine’ objection.”)

  Paragraphs 6–7: Set out Mill’s/a response to another of the problems, assess it, and set out and assess any further objections and replies in this line.

  Paragraphs 8–9: Set out Mill’s/a response to another of the problems, assess it, and set out and assess any further objections and replies in this line. Given the introduction, at least one or two of the objections discussed will have to be judged compelling.

  Paragraph 10: Signposting, indicating what conclusions the discussion of hedonism has left us with and indicating how that relates to the argument of the essay. For instance: “Despite the attractions of hedonism, then, and despite the good answers a hedonist can give to the ‘philosophy of swine’ objection, the objections from the verdicality requirement and from the diversity of goods do not appear to be surmountable. Still, if rivals to hedonism were no more plausible, perhaps we would have to accept hedonism anyway. However, as I will now argue, although the objective list theory is not more plausible, the desire-satisfaction view is.”

  Paragraph 11: Set out the objective list theory and its attractions, highlighting in particluar respects in which it may seem able to avoid the objections levelled at hedonism.

  Paragraphs 12–15: Set out the key objections to the objective list theory and assess responses (and counter-replies and responses to those), finding the objections compelling in at least some cases.

  Paragraph 16: Signposting, indicating what conclusions the discussion of objective list theory has left us with and indicating how that relates to the argument of the essay. For instance: “As these arguments show, objective list theory is not a plausible rival to hedonism, despite the problems for hedonists that I set out earlier.”

  Paragraphs 17–20: Set out the desire-satisfaction view, its motivations, the respects in which it meets objections to hedonism and preserves its advantagees (if it does). Set out the main objections to it and who how they can be overcome (which may be a matter not of avoiding them altogether but of mitigating their impact, showing that it can be tolerated, especially given the costs of accepting rivals).

  Pargraph 21: Conclusion. The conclusion should not introduce any new considerations or attempt to give a balanced overview. It should simply restate the essay’s answer and the reasons that have been given. For instance:

  I have argued that Mill would have done better to adopt an account of utility as a matter of the satisfaction of desires rather than of pleasure and the absence of pain. As we saw, desire-satisfaction views share the most important virtues of hedonism, including its democratic or anti-elitist character, but they avoid objections that hedonists cannot avoid—most importantly, the experience machine objection and the objection from diversity of goods. Moreover, desire-satisfaction views can be sophisticated in ways that allow them to avoid the objections to cruder formulations, and they cohere well with Mill’s wider commitments in Utilitarianism.

And you’re done!

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Priority reading (Hide)

• J.S. Mill, Utilitarianism, ed. Roger Crisp (Oxford, 1998), chs. 1–2, 4

On Mill's view in particular

• Roger Crisp, Routledge Philosophy Guidebook on Utilitarianism (Routledge, 1997), chs. 2–3
  In chapter 2, Crisp places Mill’s remarks on happiness in historical context as a response to doubts about Bentham’s hedonism, and then discusses Mill’s distinction between ‘higher’ and ‘lower’ pleasures, defending it from some objections and arguing for its compatibility with a kind of hedonism that Crisp attributes to Mill. Chapter 3 begins with a version of Nozick’s ‘experience machine’ example and then proceeds to discuss the plausibility of an ‘experience requirement’ on contributors to welfare, desire-satisfaction accounts of welfare, and objective list accounts of welfare (he calls these ‘broad ideal’ accounts).
• David O. Brink, ‘Mill’s Deliberative Utilitarianism’, Philosophy & Public Affairs vol. 21, no. 1 (1992), pp. 68–84
  Making some useful distinctions along the way, Brink argues for interpreting Mill as an objectivist and an anti-hedonist about happiness, contrary to standard readings of Utilitarianism. Brink's discussion offers a good example of some key scholarly virtues, such as defending one's interpretation of one part of a text by showing how it helps to make sense of another.
• Wendy Donner, The Liberal Self: John Stuart Mill's Moral and Political Philosophy (Cornell, 1991), chapters 2–3
  Donner offers an interpretation of Mill’s complex hedonism and then pits hedonism against desire-satisfaction views, arguing that it acquits itself well.

On accounts of well-being more generally

• Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons (Oxford University Press, 1984) pp. 493–502
  Parfit distinguishes three kinds of theory about what makes a person's life go well: hedonistic theories, desire-fulfilment theories, and objective list theories, and surveys some objections and refinements to the theories.
• James Griffin, Well-Being: Its Meaning, Measurement and Moral Importance (Oxford, 1988), chs. 1–2
  Griffin does not talk much about hedonism, but offers detailed analysis and development (via response to objections) of desire accounts of well-being.
• Roger Crisp, ‘Hedonism Reconsidered’, Philosophy & Phenomenological Research vol. 73, no. 3 (2006)
  Distinguishing between ‘enumerative’ and ‘explanatory’ conceptions of theories of well-being, Crisp makes a case for explanatory hedonism, understood as the view that enjoyed experiences make life good for the subject because they share the characteristic of feeling good. He defends it from important objections from the heterogeneity of enjoyable experiences, the difference between ‘lower’ and ‘higher’ pleasures, and the experience machine.
• Guy Fletcher, ‘A Fresh Start for the Objective-List Theory of Well-Being’, Utilitas vol. 25, no. 2 (2013)
  Making a number of useful distinctions along the way, Fletcher clarifies the relations between objective-list, hedonist, and desire-fulfilment theories of well-being. He then defends his own objective list account, arguing in particular that it captures the main attraction of the leading rival, desire-fulfilment theory.
• Gwen Bradford, ‘Problems for Perfectionism’, Utilitas (2016)
  Bradford defends perfectionism—the theory that well-being consists in the development of characteristically human capacities—from the objection that it fails to capture the relevance of the subject’s own preferences and enjoyment, and from the objection that it valorises the development of capacities that it is intuitively not good for a person to develop. She then suggests that a deeper problem for perfectionists is to show that perfectionism not only unifies the list of capacities that are said to be good to develop, but explains why it is good to develop them. She argues that several possible responses to the deeper problem are inadequate, but concludes that since rival theories of well-being face the same problem, perfectionism is at no comparative disadvantage.

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Further reading (Hide)

• Connie S. Rosati, ‘Persons, Perspectives, and Full Information Accounts of the Good’, Ethics vol. 105, no. 2 (1995)
  Rosati discusses ‘ideal adviser’ theories of well-being, according to which what is good for a person is what a fully-informed counterpart would advise or desire. She argues that the source of an ideal adviser’s authority as an adviser is undermined by the nature of the changes that she undergoes in becoming fully informed as ideal adviser accounts conceive this. She also casts doubt on the coherence of the notion of full information that is invoked by defenders of ideal adviser accounts.
• Roger Crisp, Reasons and the Good (Oxford, ), ch. 4
• Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (Basic Books, 1974), ch. 3
• Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons (Oxford University Press, 1984) pp. 493–502
• Elizabeth Anderson, ‘John Stuart Mill and Experiments in Living’, Ethics vol. 102, no. 1 (1991)
• T.M. Scanlon, ‘Value, Desire, and Quality of Life’, in his The Difficulty of Tolerance (Cambridge, 2003)
• Amartya Sen, ‘Utilitarianism and Welfarism’, Journal of Philosophy vol. 76, no. 9 (1979)
• Christopher Heathwood, ‘Desire Satisfactionism and Hedonism’, Philosophical Studies vol. 128, no. 3 (2005)
• L.W. Sumner, Welfare, Happiness, and Ethics (Oxford, 1999), chs. 1, 4–5
• Shelly Kagan, ‘The Limits of Well-Being’, Social Philosophy & Policy vol. 9, no. 2 (1992)
• Krister Bykvist, Utilitarianism: A Guide for the Perplexed (Continuum, 2010), ch. 4
• Christopher Heathwood, ‘The Problem of Defective Desires’, Australasian Journal of Philosophy vol. 83, no. 4 (2005)
• Fred Feldman, ‘The Good Life: A Defense of Attitudinal Hedonism’, Philosophy & Phenomenological Research vol. 65, no. 3 (2002)
• Serena Olsaretti, ‘The limits of hedonism: Feldman on the value of attitudinal pleasure’, Philosophical Studies vol. 136, no. 3 (2007)
• Joseph Raz, The Morality of Freedom (Oxford, 1986), chapter 12

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Here are some of the things it’s most important to grasp when you’re thinking about this topic. Make sure you understand them fully (use the readings, or ask me, to help you make sense of them if you don’t):

• Commentators write of Mill’s ‘proof’, rather than of Mill’s proof (i.e. without the inverted commas) because Mill quite explicitly says that the sort of thing he’s trying to defend cannot be defended by means of a (deductive) proof. He is simply trying to give the best argument he can for the Principle of Utility, just as last week you tried to give the best argument you could for whichever answer to the essay question you favoured. You should follow the commentators: use the inverted commas if you use the word ‘proof’, and don’t hold Mill’s argument to the standards of a deductive proof.
• Make sure you know what the Principle of Utility that Mill is trying to defend says. Don’t confuse it with utilitarianism or the Greatest Happiness Principle!
• It’s common and helpful to analyse the argument for the Principle of Utility into three distinct steps. One step is supposed to establish the desirability of a person’s happiness as an end; another is supposed to establish the desirability of the general happiness as an end; and the third is supposed to establish that nothing but happiness is an end.
• Mill does not try to infer each of the steps in this argument from the preceding one; rather, he gives independent arguments for each step, and the three steps together are sufficient to establish the Principle of Utility. For each step, you should identify the passage in chapter 4 of Utilitarianism that gives Mill’s argument for that step, and make this the focus of some of your analysis of Mill’s argument.
• How damaging objections to Mill’s argument for any given step are will depend on how that step interacts with the others to secure Mill’s conclusion (i.e. the Principle of Utility). For instance, it might be that Mill’'s argument for the claim that an individual’s happiness is desirable as an end can secure only the conclusion that an individual’s happiness is desirable for her. In that case, it seems that the argument for the desirability of the general happiness (the second step) can’t be based on the simple (though not uncontroversial) principle that if A is good and B is good, then A + B is good. But it may be that it can go through by appeal to a different principle. So how serious the objection to the first step is depends on what options there are with respect to the second.

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Priority reading (Hide)

• J.S. Mill, Utilitarianism, ed. Roger Crisp (Oxford, 1998), chs. 1–2, 4
• Roger Crisp, Routledge Philosophy Guidebook on Utilitarianism (Routledge, 1997), pp. 67–90
  Crisp offers a clear analysis and reconstruction of Mill’s ‘proof’, together with some helpful background and discussion of the limitations of Mill’s argument as Crisp interprets it.
• Everett W. Hall, ‘The “Proof” of Utility in Bentham and Mill’, Ethics vol. 60, no. 1 (1949), pp. 1–18 (skip pp. 14–16 on Bentham). Reprinted in J.B. Schneewind (ed.), Mill: A Collection of Critical Essays (Palgrave Macmillan, 1968)
  Hall defends Mill from the charge that the ‘proof’ commits a number of fallacies. Don’t worry too much about the details of the various fallacies that the article discusses; focus on Hall’s careful readings of passages from Utilitarianism. You should try to emulate this kind of attention to detail, but not Hall’s scornful tone!
• Henry R. West, ‘Mill’s “Proof” of the Principle of Utility’, in Henry R. West (ed.), The Blackwell Guide to Mill’s Utilitarianism (Blackwell, 2006)
  West briefly defends Mill against the accusations that he commits the fallacies of equivocation and composition. He spends more time attempting to reconcile the hedonistic account of happiness he attributes to Mill with the step in Mill’s ‘proof’ in which Mill says that other things, such as music and virtue, are parts of happiness.

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Further reading (Hide)

• David Brink, Mill’s Progressive Principles (Oxford, 2013), ch. 5
• James Seth, ‘The Alleged Fallacies in Mill’s “Utilitarianism”’, The Philosophical Review vol. 17, no. 5 (1908), pp. 469–488
• D. Daiches Raphael, ‘Fallacies in and about Mill’s “Utilitarianism”’, Philosophy vol. 30, no. 115 (1955), pp. 344–357
• Geoffrey Sayre-McCord, ‘Mill’s “Proof” of the Principle of Utility: A More than Half-Hearted Defense’, Social Philosophy & Policy vol. 18, no. 2 (2001), pp. 330–360
• Fred R. Berger, Happiness, Justice, and Freedom: The Moral Philosophy of John Stuart Mill (University of California Press, 1984), chs. 1–2
• Krister Bykvist, Utilitarianism: A Guide for the Perplexed (Continuum, 2010), ch. 2

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Here are some of the things it’s most important to grasp when you’re thinking about this topic. Make sure you understand them fully (use the readings, or ask me, to help you make sense of them if you don’t):

• Act utilitarianism may be said to be very demanding in at least three different senses: in that it requires us to give away a lot of our time and resources; in that doing as it requires is incompatible with genuine friendship and other valuable relationships; and in that doing as it requires is incompatible with an agent’s ‘integrity’. A good essay will address the question of utilitarianism’s demandingness in all of these senses.
• Although utilitarianism does impose demands, it doesn’t force anyone to do anything. (A theory can’t use force. Only people—including utilitarians—can use force.
• On any plausible view, morality can be demanding. What could it be about the utilitarian conception of morality that makes it toodemanding? Is it begging the question to think it is? (Begging the question is assuming what you’re arguing for in the course of making your argument for it. So here the worry is that critics of utilitarianism are assuming a non-utilitarian morality in their arguments to the effect that utilitarianism is too demanding to be a plausible account of morality.)
• One response that utilitarians give to demandingness objections notes that the utilitarian requirement to do what maximises utility applies just as much to deliberation as to the choices that are the output of deliberation. This kind of response (multi-level utilitarianism) doesn’t reject or amend the basic act utilitarian requirement to choose the act that maximises utility. In this respect it contrasts with rule utilitarianism, which does.
• Concerns about alienation and integrity are not just concerns about the acts that utilitarianism requires, but about the patterns of reasoning and caring utilitarianism permits or excludes. To understand the concerns, you need to think about what’s involved in (say) being a friend besides performing certain acts. What kind of caring? What kind of reasoning? Do responses to demandingness objections adequately accommodate these?

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Priority reading (Hide)

• J.S. Mill, Utilitarianism, ed. Roger Crisp (Oxford, 1998), chs. 2–3, 5
• Bernard Williams, ‘A critique of utilitarianism’, sections 3–5, in J.J.C. Smart and Bernard Williams, Utilitarianism: For and Against (Cambridge University Press, 1973)
  Williams argues that utilitarianism’s commitment to a doctrine of ‘negative responsibility’ (which he interprets as an extreme form of impartiality) generates deep problems for it, which he illustrates with two famous examples. In particular, Williams accuses utilitarianism of mounting an attack on agents’ integrity.
• Wendy Donner, ‘Mill’s utilitarianism’, in John Skorupski (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Mill (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 287–9
  Donner defends Mill against objections to the way it handles dilemmas such as those described by Williams, arguing that it appropriately eschews the moral narcissism of those who are lucky enough to be in “privileged sanctuaries”.
• Elizabeth Ashford, ‘Utilitarianism, Integrity, and Partiality’, The Journal of Philosophy vol. 97, no. 8 (2000)
  Ashford replies to Williams’s ‘integrity’ critique of utilitarianism. She begins by arguing that the integrity that matters must be appropriately sensitive to real moral considerations. Then she argues that the present ‘emergency situation’ of the world generates demands that conflict with the integrity that matters even on Williams’s own account of our moral obligations, as well as other non-consequentialist accounts, and that it is a virtue of utilitarianism that it explicitly acknowledges the conflict. She ends by defending utilitarianism from the charge that even in ideal conditions, it would threaten agents’ integrity.
• Peter Railton, ‘Alienation, Consequentialism, and the Demands of Morality’, Philosophy & Public Affairs vol. 13, no. 2 (1984)
  Railton considers examples of ‘alienation’ in which something important seems to be missing from people's attitudes to their loved ones, and asks how a commitment to morality can avoid engendering this sort of alienation. Drawing on a solution to the ‘paradox of hedonism’, he distinguishes between criterion of right and decision procedure, and defends a ‘sophisticated consequentialist’ view according to which the appropriate decision procedure may be non-consequentialist. This, he suggests, need not be alienating. Railton also responds more directly to Williams’s critique, and ends with some reflection on meaningfulness in life and its significance for questions about morality‘s demandingness.
• Neera Badhwar Kapur, ‘Why It Is Wrong to be Always Guided by the Best: Consequentialism and Friendship’, Ethics vol. 101, no. 3 (1991)
  Badhwar argues that any plausible theory of morality must be compatible with what she calls ‘end friendship’, and suggests that even Railton-style sophisticated consequentialism is fundamentally incompatible with end friendship. The key idea is that end friendship requires us to justify our attitudes to our friends in a certain way, and not just to have those attitudes. More generally, Badhwar argues that friendship is itself intrinsically moral in a way that consequentialism cannot make sense of.
• Samuel Scheffler, The Rejection of Consequentialism, revised edition (Oxford, 1994), pp. 1–22, 55–70
  In the first extract, Scheffler clarifies the nature and appeal of consequentialism and distinguishes two non-consequentialist conceptions of morality, one of which (the ‘hybrid conception’) he defends in the book as a whole. He proceeds to describe two important objections to consequentialism, Williams’s ‘integrity’ objection and a distributive justice-based objection, before giving more details of the hybrid conception that he thinks avoids the objections. That conception includes an ‘agent-centred prerogative’ to assign greater weight to one’s own interests than to those of others. After discussing alternative responses to the integrity objection in the pages preceding the second extract, Scheffler defends the agent-relative prerogative in that extract by appeal to the independence of the personal point of view and the need for an adequate moral theory to reflect it.

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Further reading (Hide)

• Barbara Herman, The Practice of Moral Judgment (Harvard, 1993), pp. 161–2
• Roger Crisp, Routledge Philosophy Guidebook on Utilitarianism (Routledge, 1997), ch. 6
• Sarah Conly, ‘Utilitarianism and Integrity’, The Monist vol. 66, no. 2 (1983)
• Cheshire Calhoun, ‘Standing for Something’, in her Moral Aims (Oxford, 2016)
• Dean Cocking, and Justin Oakley, ‘Indirect Consequentialism, Friendship, and the Problem of Alienation’, Ethics vol. 106, no. 1 (1995)
• Elinor Mason, ‘Can an Indirect Consequentialist Be a Real Friend? ’, Ethics vol. 108, no. 2 (1998)
• Samuel Scheffler, ‘Introduction’, in Scheffler (ed.), Consequentialism and its Critics (Oxford University Press, 1988
• Thomas Nagel, The View from Nowhere (Oxford University Press, 1989), ch. 10
• Jonathan Glover, Causing Death and Saving Lives (Penguin, 1998), Introduction and Part 5

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Here are some of the things it’s most important to grasp when you’re thinking about this topic. Make sure you understand them fully (use the readings, or ask me, to help you make sense of them if you don’t):

• A person’s rights are standardly taken to be constraints on the pursuit of other ends by other people. They do this because if A has a (claim) right that B not do something, then B has a duty not to do that thing that B owes to A. As it’s standardly put: B has a directed duty not to do that thing. By the same token, if A has a directed duty to B, then B has a (claim) right against A.
• A duty should operate in a agent’s reasoning as an exclusionary reason, that is, a reason that excludes certain other facts (such as the fact that the agent would enjoy it or that more good would be done thereby) from counting as reasons in favour of acting contrary to the duty.
• Rights pose a problem for utilitarianism precisely because of the constraining and exclusionary character of the duties they impose. They make it the case that in at least some cases a duty-bearer should respect the right even if more good would be done by acting contrary to it and indeed that she should not even take into account the good that would be done by acting contrary to it (at least up to a point) in deciding what to do.
• In chapter 5 of Utilitarianism, Mill offers a genealogical analysis of the sentiment of justice and a conceptual analysis of morality as that which makes punishment in some form appropriate and justice as the department of morality concerned with rights, which in turn he analyses as correlating with duties to perform specific acts that are owed to particular people and appropriate objects of enforcement. He then argues that only a utilitarian justification can vindicate rights and justice. So Mill thinks that rights are not a problem for utilitarianism. But whether what Mill says here can really vindicate a requirement to respect rights in the face of the greater good of transgressing them is not clear, and may depend on our attributing a non-act-utilitarian form of utilitarianism to Mill that is not necessarily consistent with the form that arguments from earlier chapters suggest.
• Defences of Mill on rights tend to give a role to rules in utilitarianism, but they don’t all give the same role to rules. Some adopt rule-utilitarian interpretations of Mill; others adopt multi-level utilitarian intepretations. It’s important understand the differences between these. A rule-utilitarian thinks that we are required to do what is prescribed by rules that would, if followed under specified hypothetical circumstances (e.g. universal compliance), produce the most utility. A multi-level utilitarian thinks that the right thing to do is that which maximises utility, but that this is not the right way to go about making one’s decision about what to do.
• Utilitarianism may also have a problem accounting for distributive justice, the justice of the way in which societies distribute benefits and burdens among their members. Utilitarianism favours maximising utility even if that comes at the expense of an equitable distribution of utility. So, for instance, utilitarians must prefer an outcome in which one person has a million utils and nine people have no utils over an outcome in which each of the ten people has 90,000 utils.
• Utilitarians can defend egalitarian distributions of resources by appeal to the diminishing marginal utility of resources—the fact that extra resources bring a person less welfare the more she already has. But they can’t defend egalitarian distributions of utility this way.
• One way to solve this problem of distributive justice for utilitarians is to add equality as a distinct value (alongside aggregate utility) to the utilitarian axiology (i.e. the utilitarian theory about what is good as an end in itself). This kind of view faces what Derek Parfit dubbed the ‘Levelling Down Objection’, since it must say that ‘levelling down’ (simply throwing away some of what the better off have so that they are brought down to the level of the worst off) is good, at least in one respect. And this, Parfit contends, is implausible.
• Parfit has proposed that just as resources have dimishing marginal utility value, utility may have diminishing marginal moral. So-called ‘prioritarians’s accept this proposal. Prioritarians can make sense of the moral preferability of equal distributions of utility just as utilitarians can make sense of the utilitarian preferability of equal distributions of resources such as money, and without succumbing to the Levelling Down Objection.

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Priority reading (Hide)

• J.S. Mill, Utilitarianism, ed. Roger Crisp (Oxford, 1998), ch. 5
• Roger Crisp, Routledge Philosophy Guidebook on Utilitarianism (Routledge, 1997), ch. 7
  Crisp sets out the arguments of chapter 5 of Utilitarianism and discusses some problems that they seem to raise for Mill, paying particular attention to the sustainability of the distinction between perfect and imperfect obligations that grounds Mill’s distinction between justice and morality, and to doubts about Mill’s ability to account adequately for ideas of fairness or equity.
• F. M. Kamm, ‘Rights’, in Jules Coleman and Scott Shapiro (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Jurisprudence and Philosophy of Law (Oxford, 2004)
  Kamm offers a philosophically in-depth survey of various features of rights and rights theory. Concentrate on the introduction, section 1 (‘Conceptual Basics’), and section 3.1 (‘Conflicts of Rights and Goods’).
• L.W. Sumner, ‘Mill’s Theory of Rights’, in Henry R. West (ed.), The Blackwell Guide to Mill’s Utilitarianism (Blackwell, 2006)
  After a helpful summary of the analysis of rights and explaining how, in general, consequentialism looks basically incompatible with a commitment to rights, Sumner presents Mill as proposing a utilitarian justification of rights-conferring rules of thumb—a Railton-style ‘sophisticated consequentialism’.
• David Lyons, ‘Mill‘s Theory of Justice’, in Alvin I. Goldman and Jaegwon Kim (eds.), Values and Morals: Essays in Honor of William Frankena, Charles Stevenson, and Richard Brandt (Springer, 1978). Reprinted in David Lyons, Rights, Welfare, and Mill’s Moral Theory (Oxford, 1994)
  Lyons highlights two justice-based objections to utilitarianism. After raising some doubts about them directly, he sets out a reading of Mill’s account of morality and justice according to which Mill is not an act utilitarian but a special kind of rule utilitarian, which he thinks enables Mill to avoid the objections from justice.
• Douglas Portmore, ‘Combining Teleologial Ethics with Evaluator Relativism: A Promising Result’, Pacific Philosophical Quarterly vol. 86, no. 1 (2005)
  Portmore proposes that an ‘agent-relative’ form of teleological ethics accommodates non-consequentialist agent-relativity in the case of constraints, special obligations, and prerogatives while preserving consequentialism's most attractive feature (the idea that it's never impermissible to bring about the best state of affairs). Hence, acceptance of constraints etc. need not commit one to non-consequentialism (or rather, to non-teleology). (The Schroeder article in the further reading is a reply to Portmore and others advocating this kind of view.)
• Derek Parfit, ‘Equality or Priority?’, given as The Lindley Lecture (University of Kansas, 1991)
  Parfit's seminal lecture describes and defends 'the priority view', one of the two leading rivals (alongside sufficientarianism) to strictly egalitarian accounts of distributive justice. Parfit motivates the priority view in large part by appeal to the 'levelling down objection' to egalitarianism.

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Further reading (Hide)

• David Lyons, ‘Benevolence and Justice in Mill’, in Harlan B. Miller and William H. Williams (eds.), The Limits of Utilitarianism (University of Minnesota Press, 1982). Reprinted in David Lyons, Rights, Welfare, and Mill's Moral Theory (Oxford University Press, 1994)
• David O. Brink, Mill's Progressive Principles (Oxford University Press, 2013), ch. 9
• Fred R. Berger, Happiness, Justice and Freedom (University of California Press, 1984), ch. 4
• David Lyons, ‘Utility and Rights’, in J.R. Pennock and J.W. Chapman (eds.), Nomos XXIV: Ethics, Economics, and the Law (New York University Press, 1982). Reprinted in David Lyons, Rights, Welfare, and Mill's Moral Theory (Oxford University Press, 1994).
• John Skropuski, John Stuart Mill (Routledge, 1990), ch. 9
• Mark Schroeder, ‘Teleology, Agent-Relative Value, and “Good”’, Ethics vol. 117, no. 2 (2007)

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Here are some of the things it’s most important to grasp when you’re thinking about this topic. Make sure you understand them fully (use the readings, or ask me, to help you make sense of them if you don’t):

• The motivation for this question is that departures from act-utilitarianism can often look as if they are simply efforts to dodge objections that abandon core utilitarian commitments, so that their their proponents may just as well give up their utilitarianism.
• So a key question is: what are the fundamental utilitarian ideals or commitments? Don’t say: “utilitarians are fundamentally committed to the view that the right thing to do is that which maximises utility” (or anything that comes to the same thing)—that would just build act utilitarianism into the motivation for it. But perhaps there is some basic idea that act utilitarianism somehow embodies that (at least some) other forms don’t.
• Some key distinctions in forms of utilitarianism and consequentialism (some of which you’ve met already):
  • Single-level act utilitarianism combines an act-utilitarian criterion of right action with an act-utilitarian decision-procedure.Multi-level act utilitarianism combines an act-utilitarian criterion of right action with a non-act-utilitarian decision-procedure.
  • Act utilitarianism says that the right act is that which brings about the highest aggregate utility. Rule utilitarianism says that the right act is that which conforms to the rule that, under hypothesised circumstances (e.g. universal compliance) would result in the highest aggregate utility. (NB. this is not the same distinction as the preceding one!);
  • Maximising utilitarianism says that the right act (in act-utilitarianism) or the rule to which acts must conform (in rule-utilitarianism) is that which maximises aggregate utility. Satisficing utilitarianism says that an act is permissible (in act-utilitarianism) if it produces enough aggregate utility. (I leave it as a question for you what satisficing rule utilitarianism would say.)
  • Scalar utilitarianism dispenses with deontic categorisations (right, permissible, obligatory, forbidden) altogether, and says simply that there is more or stronger reason to do what produces more aggregate utility.
  • Consequentialism is the view that the moral assessment of an act is determined solely by reference to the consequences of performing it, umderstood as the value of the states of affairs that it produces (which may include the value of the act itself). Utilitarianism is welfarist consequentialism, in which the value of the states of affairs by reference to the production of which acts are morally evaluated is primarily understood in terms of the welfare of sentient beings.
• One reason you might look for an alternative to any given form of utilitarianism is that there are objections to it that seem fatal. But some forms of utilitarianism may express ideals or commitments that are very different from the form that seems vulnerable to fatal objection. So there may be a sense in which switching from one view to another involves throwing out the baby with the bathwater. We need, then, to work out for each form of utilitarianism what the ‘baby’ is—that is, what basic ideals or commitments it expresses or reflects or elaborates. For example, scalar utilitarians are partly motivated by scepticism about the ’deontic’ aspects of widespread moral thinking. If you’re not a sceptic about those aspects, adopting scalar utilitarianism may not be a good way to avoid objections to act utilitarianism—you may be throwing out at least one baby with the bathwater.
• There are many possible varieties of rule utilitarianism. One simple form says that the right act is that which conforms to the rule(s) that, if it were universally followed, would maximise aggregate utility. Another says that the right act is that which conforms to the rule(s) that, if it were complied with at roughly the same rate as ’commonsense’ morality is complied with today, would maximise aggregate utility. A third says that the right act is that which conforms to the rule(s) that, if it was what we internalised and passed on to our children, would maximise aggregate utility. There are others, more or less plausible. Each may be motivated differently.
• The ‘collapse objection’ to rule utilitarianism holds that rule utilitarianism is in effect no different from (collapses into) act utilitarianism, because for any given rule R1 not equivalent to act utilitarianism there is another rule R2 that is the same as R1 but with an exception allowing people to maximise utility where R1 forbade doing that, universal full compliance with which would produce more aggregate utility than R1. But the collapse objection may not hold for varieties of rule utilitarianism that don’t assess the utility of a given rule under conditions of universal full compliance.

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Priority reading (Hide)

• J.S. Mill, Utilitarianism, ed. Roger Crisp (Oxford, 1998), chs. 2–3, 5
• Roger Crisp, Routledge Philosophy Guidebook on Utilitarianism (Routledge, 1997), pp. 95–124
  Crisp introduces some important distinctions in utilitarian theory: between character and act utilitarianism, between actualism and probabilism, between decision-making procedure and criterion of right action, between act and rule utilitarianism (paying special attention to J.O. Urmson’s interpretation of Mill as a rule utilitarian), and between single-level and multi-level utilitarianism. Crisp defends a reading of Mill as a multi-level utilitarian before turning to discuss two objections (from demandingness and from ‘rule-worship’).
• Wendy Donner, ‘Mill’s utilitarianism’, in John Skorupski (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Mill (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 278–82
  Donner argues that Mill is best read as neither a strict act utilitarian nor as a strict rule utilitarian, and very helpfully frames the debate in terms of what’s at stake: “whether Mill's utilitarianism can formulate rules of justice or obligation which are strong enough to withstand being easily overturned, for minor or moderate gains in utility to others, yet flexible enough to be outweighed in rare cases of catastrophe”.
• Alastair Norcross, ‘The Scalar Approach to Utilitarianism’, in Henry R. West (ed.), The Blackwell Guide to Mill’s Utilitarianism (Blackwell, 2006)
  Norcross argues that the ‘all-or-nothing’ nature of the distinction between right and wrong, common to both maximising and satisficing utilitarian theories, introduces arbitrariness into these theories and fits badly with underlying utilitarian reasoning. He argues that these and the related categories of duty and obligation should be abandoned by utilitarians. He notes that adopting a scalar approach—treating utilitarianism “simply as a theory of the goodness of states of affairs and the comparative value of actions”—enables utilitarians to avoid objections from demandingness and supererogation, too.
• Brad Hooker, ‘Right, Wrong, and Rule-Consequentialism’, in Henry R. West (ed.), The Blackwell Guide to Mill’s Utilitarianism (Blackwell, 2006)
  Hooker briefly sets out rule consequentialism and then discusses two ways of arguing for it. He endorses the ‘Reflective Equilibrium’ argument for rule-consequentialism, defending it against competing consequentialist views. Then he specifies and defends a particular formulation of rule consequentialism in detail.
• Richard Arneson, ‘Sophisticated Rule Consequentialism: Some Simple Objections’, Philosophical Issues vol. 15, no. 1 (2005)
  Arneson argues that Hooker’s rule consequentialism cannot avoid objections relating to its recommendations for agents in circumstances of general non-acceptance of the rule-utilitarian code, to its deference to common-sense deontological distinctions, and to its dependence on intuitively irrelevant contingencies.
• Michael Ridge, ‘Introducing Variable-Rate Rule-Utilitarianism’, The Philosophical Quarterly vol. 56, no. 223 (2006)
  Ridge argues that rule-utilitarians can avoid major objections to standard full-compliance and partial-compliance versions of their view by adopting what he calls ‘variable-rate rule-utilitarianism’, according to which “an action is right if and only if it would be required by rules which have the following property: when you take the expected utility of every level of social acceptance between (and including) ?% and 100% for those rules, and compute the average expected utility for all of those different levels of acceptance, the average for these rules is at least as high as the corresponding average for any alternative set of rules”.
• Abelard Podgorski, ‘Wouldn’t it be Nice? Moral Rules and Distant Worlds’, Nous vol. 52, no. 2 (2018)
  Using some ingenious (and funny) philosophical tools, Podgorski argues that responses to ‘ideal world’ objections to rule consequentialism, such as Ridge’s variable-rate view, that involve altered specification of the conditions under which a rule is tested fail because they don’t get at the heart of the problem, which is that they make assessment of individual acts dependent upon assessment of features of the world that may not obtain alongside the performance of that act.

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Further reading (Hide)

• R. Eugene Bales, ‘Act-Utilitarianism: Account of Right-Making Characteristics or Decision-Making Procedure?’, American Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 8, no. 3 (1971)
• R.M. Hare, Moral Thinking: Its Levels, Method, and Point (Oxford University Press, 1981), chs. 2–3
• Roger Crisp, ‘Utilitarianism and the Life of Virtue’, The Philosophical Quarterly vol. 42, no. 167 (1992)
• Robert Merrihew Adams, ‘Motive Utilitarianism’, The Journal of Philosophy vol. 73, no. 14 (1976)
• John Rawls, ‘Two Concepts of Rules’, The Philosophical Review vol. 64, no. 1 (1965)
• David Lyons, Forms and Limits of Utilitarianism (Clarendon Press, 1965)
• J.J.C. Smart, ‘An outline of a system of utilitarian ethics’, section 7, and Bernard Williams, ‘A critique of utilitarianism’, section 6, in J.J.C. Smart and Bernard Williams, Utilitarianism: For and Against (Cambridge University Press, 1973)
• Brad Hooker and Guy Fletcher, ‘Variable versus Fixed-Rate Rule Utilitarianism’, The Philosophical Quarterly vol. 58, no. 231 (2008)
• Derek Parfit, On What Matters, Volume One (Oxford University Press, 2011), section 45

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Sample essay question (Hide)

Using the scholarly, philosophical, and essay-writing techniques and skills you’ve learned over the past five weeks, (e.g. structuring your thought around questions, checking interpretations against the text, and so on) write an essay of no more than 1800 words in answer to the following question:

What moral theory should we attribute to Mill?

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• J.S. Mill, Utilitarianism, ed. Roger Crisp (Oxford, 1998)
• J.O. Urmson, ‘The Interpretation of the Philosophy of J.S. Mill’, The Philosophical Quarterly vol. 3, no. 10 (1953)
  Urmson makes a well-known case for reading Mill as a rule utilitarian, highlighting several passages that seem to support his interpretation and arguing that even the so-called ‘Proportionality Doctrine’ need not be read as act-utilitarian.
• David Lyons, ‘Mill’s Theory of Morality’, Nous vol. 10, no. 2 (1976). Reprinted in David Lyons, Rights, Welfare, and Mill’s Moral Theory (Oxford, 1994)
  Focusing on a passage from chapter 5 of Utilitarianism, Lyons argues powerfully against an act-utilitarian reading of Mill and defends instead an interpretation of Mill that might be described as ‘coercive-rule utilitarian’ (though Lyons describes it as a ‘sanction theory’ and others have labelled it ‘sanction utilitarianism’). He ends by discussing one or two puzzles that this interpretation gives rise to.
• Wendy Donner, ‘Mill’s utilitarianism’, in John Skorupski (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Mill (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 289–92
  Donner argues that contemporary objections to utilitarianism are blunted by an appreciation of Mill’s conception of moral agents and and the importance to him of socialisation and self-development.
• David O. Brink, Mill's Progressive Principles (Oxford University Press, 2013), ch. 4
  Brink argues for an act-utilitarian reading of Mill, offering detailed analysis of the ‘Proportionality Doctrine’, Mill’s discussion of secondary principles, and chapter 5 of Utilitarianism. His argument is partly based on independent reasons for favouring act utilitarianism over sanction utilitarianism, since in his view Mill’s writings alone don’t unequivocally support one rather than the other.
• Daniel Jacobson, ‘Utilitarianism without Consequentialism: The Case of John Stuart Mill’, The Philosophical Review vol. 117, no. 2 (2008)
  Taking consequentialism to be committed to ‘agent-neutrality’ and ‘deontic impartiality’, Jacobson argues for the view that Mill was not a consequentialist. Jacobson relies on evidence from On Liberty as well as from chapter 5 of Utilitarianism; his interpretation resembles Lyons’s, but makes the distinctive nature of the moral sentiments through which we compel compliance with rules more central.

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Further reading (Hide)

• J.S. Mill, A System of Logic, Book VI, ch. 12
• J.S. Mill, On Liberty
• Alan E. Fuchs, ‘Mill’s Theory of Morally Correct Action’, in Henry R. West (ed.), The Blackwell Guide to Mill’s Utilitarianism (Blackwell, 2006)
• David Lyons, ‘Mill‘s Theory of Justice’, in Alvin I. Goldman and Jaegwon Kim (eds.), Values and Morals: Essays in Honor of William Frankena, Charles Stevenson, and Richard Brandt (Springer, 1978)
• Daniel Jacobson, ‘J.S. Mill and the Diversity of Utilitarianism’, Philosophers’ Imprint vol. 3, no. 2 (2003)
• Elizabeth Anderson, ‘John Stuart Mill and Experiments in Living’, Ethics vol. 102, no. 1 (1991)
• Fred R. Berger, Happiness, Justice, and Freedom: The Moral Philosophy of John Stuart Mill (University of California Press, 1984), ch. 3
• Henry R. West, ‘Mill’s Qualitative Hedonism’, Philosophy vol. 51, no. 195 (1976)

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