This paper is part of an extended program of research with two aims: to understand Mill's moral and political philosophy, and to develop a utilitarian doctrine in its most plausible or least vulnerable form, in order to identify what, if anything, may reasonably be said for or against utilitarianism as a general type of doctrine. These aims fit together because I have found when trying to interpret Mill that he suggests lines of development somewhat different and in some ways more promising than the usual versions of utilitarianism.

The Principle of liberty is not a simple corollary of utilitarianism, and Mill argues for it. I am not concerned with his arguments for it, however, so much as I am with his applications of it, since they tell us how it is to be understood.

‘It is to be observed, in the second place, that the obligation, as a general rule, to respect possession and promises, admits of being clearly shewn by reference to the consequences of actions taken as species and classes.’ Alexander Smith: The Philosophy of Morals.

Once upon a time I wrote a paper in which I defended a version of utilitarianism. This paper has received a certain amount of attention, but, I think, not as much individual attention as it might have done, had it not been confused with another version of utilitarianism, which became prevalent at about that time. This second version of utilitarianism came quite quickly to be known as rule utilitarianism. It has engendered a considerable amount of interest, so much so that it seems to me to be very likely that philosophers, who are utilitarians at all, are nowadays more likely to be rule utilitarians than they are to be ordinary act utilitarians.

Can utilitarianism be reconciled with individualism? The short answer might be that Mill tried to reconcile them, and failed: the quite uncompromising individualism of On Liberty is commonly thought to be inconsistent with his utilitarianism. This is in part because of his rejection of paternalism, which seems to imply that spontaneity and freedom are more valuable than happiness. Mill himself argued that they are, at least in the long run and for the community as a whole, the surest means to happiness. But, while this is defensible, it is hard to see how it could be conclusively demonstrated; and it seems clear that Mill's belief that it is so is the result rather than the cause of his attachment to freedom. Moreover, Mill is, as Fitzjames Stephen pointed out, committed to the assertion that the suppression of opinion always, whatever the circumstances, has worse consequences than not suppressing it; and this seems much too sweeping a principle not to have some exceptions.

Mill is neither an act-utilitarian nor a rule-utilitarian. Although he professes to regard “utility as the ultimate appeal on all ethical questions”, he in fact makes no appeal to it in determining in Utilitarianism what actions are “of more absolute obligation than any others”. Nor does he appeal to it in his arguments for the two main conclusions of his essay, On Liberty.

The interpretation of the utilitarianism of John Stuart Mill has been a matter of controversy at least since J.O. Urmson published his well known paper over twenty-five years ago. Urmson attributed to Mill a form of “rule-utilitarianism”, contrasting his reading with the “received view” on which Mill held a form of “act-utilitarianism”. Since then, the interpretive problem has typically been seen to be that of determining which of these two types of theory should be attributed to Mill, or, at least of determining whether Mill was a “rule-utilitarian”. However, as the distinction is typically made, it is possible to have a utilitarian theory which is neither an act- nor a rule-utilitarian theory (nor a form of “utilitarian generalization“). 1n particular, as I will attemptto show, Mill's theory is of neither type but is an example of a sophisticated type of utilitarianism which we might call “iterated-utilitarianism”, for reasons which will become clear in what follows.

A sure route to philosophic immortality is to produce a work both too important to ignore and too enigmatic to understand. Whether J.S. Mill consciously elected this strategy or not, his Utilitarianism is destined to enjoy a very long life indeed. Utilitarian theories still define one of our principal options in moral philosophy and Mill remains a major figure in the utilitarian tradition. Although the principle of utility was the centrepiece of Mill's normative system of ethics and politics, he devoted only this slender volume to the nature and implications of that principle. And we are still not sure Just what he said.

The main difficulty utilitarians have faced is the problem of reconciling the dictates of utility with what seem clearly to be moral duties, but based on considerations of Justice. John Stuart Mill addressed this problem in his essay, Utilitarianism, and the result has not served to silence the critics of utilitarianism on this score. In part, this is due to the fact that Mill's position in the chapter on Justice is not entirely clear, nor is it entirely convincing where it is clear. Still, I do not think Mill's views on Justice have been given their due. In this essay, I shall try to show that Mill anticipated recently defended principles that rely on appeal to a notion of fairness or fair play, and that these can be given a utilitarian foundation.

Few questions about utilitarianism have been more vexed than that of its relation to rights (and its associated notion, Justice). It is commonplace to hold that there are nonutilitarian rights, rights not founded on considerations of utility. And it is even thought that the very notion of rights is inherently incapable of being significantly employed within the utilitarian framework. In the present paper, I wish to consider both of these matters. I propose to give reasons—mostly not really new—for rejecting the stronger, conceptual claim; and on the former, substantial question, I want to argue that the utilitarian at least has a respectable way of handling the vocabulary of rights, even a useful one. Further, I shall argue that what the utilitarian—in particular, J. S. Mill—has to say about rights is quite plausible, though I shall conclude with a question about how illuminating it is.

Considerations of Justice and their place in the ethical evaluation of human behavior is the focus of almost all criticism of utilitarianism as an adquate and self-sufficient criterion for determining the morality of human action.

In turn, the historical turns of utilitarianism—the move from a criterion which evaluates individual acts according to their utility to a criterion which evaluates acts in accordance with their conformity to de facto or ideal utilitarian rules, the presentation of utilitarianism as a logical thesis rather than a normative principle, the argument by some philosophers that the utilitarian consequences which Justify actions must be optimific in terms of happiness produced rather than mere pleasure experienced, and, by others, that the Justifying utilitarian consequences must be even more broadly construed as “instrinsically worthwhile“—all represent attempts by utilitarians to overcome, in one way or another, the charge of injustice.

The dominance of the utilitarian tradition has given a particular prominence to the problem of egoism and altruism in Anglo-American moral philosophy. For, if actions are to be justified by their capacity to satisfy desires and interests, we are bound to confront the question: whose interests? Many philosophers would say that morality is, almost by definition, tied to altruism, to the idea that any moral agent's pursuit of his own interests ought to be qualified by a recognition of the interests of others. It has, however, appeared notoriously difficult to provide any rational argument as to why someone not already committed to a recognition of others’ interests should take any account of them.

In an era commonly believed to be subject to disintegrating crises—whether a (further or continuing) crisis of capitalism, a crisis of legitimacy, the imminence of ecological Armageddon, an uprising of the third or fourth worlds, or whatever—the claims of liberalism are widely contested, at both prescriptive and descriptive levels. The progressive doctrines of a confident and vital age seem to have stultified and grown old, becoming banalities in the next. Liberalism is seen commonly as a body of cliches, disguising a brutal reality and Justifying what one of its most vocal critics has called ‘a non-terroristic economic-technical co-ordination which operates through the manipulation of needs by vested interests’. Its continuing appeal in ‘affluent’ societies is but one measure of our collective false consciousness.

John Stuart Mill is one of the very few philosophical representatives of the liberal political tradition to have given a detailed and sympathetic examination of the socialist critique of private property. While endorsing many of the extreme criticisms of the existing property system that serve as premises in arguments for socialism, Mill is definitely opposed to recommending socialism as an expedient for the present and inclined to be skeptical of the idea that at some future time socialism will be the right form of social organization. Prominent among the various reasons which incline Mill to this skepticism is a concern that socialism poses a threat to individual liberty. That concern I propose to examine in this essay.