John Stuart Mill (1806-73) is the last and now the best known of a line of British thinkers, known collectively as “Utilitarians,” who were tied not only by their views but also by connections of friendship and kinship and who, for a time, even lived within a few doors of each other. The others are Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832), James Mill (1773-1836), who was J.S. Mill’s father, and John Austin (1790-1859). The ideas of this movement were already well known when J.S. Mill published this work (as a series of three articles corresponding to your assignments) in 1861, and his main aim in it seems to be to respond to critics.

Although Mill acknowledges something like this aim by the end of his ch. 1, he begins with a more fundamental argument: the need for a single first principle of ethics. Notice also Mill’s claim that Kant, who certainly shared this concern, is in fact committed to the Utilitarians’ principle.

In ch. 2, Mill outlines the views that do most to distinguish his version of utilitarianism from others, that when measuring the “greatest happiness” of all, we must consider not only the intensity and duration of pleasure but also its quality. He summarizes his argument for this on p. 12.

After this, he considers a series of objections that are not primarily objections to his own conception of happiness but to utilitarianism very broadly: to the possibility of happiness (pp. 12-15), to the value of its renunciation (pp. 15-17), to utilitarianism’s demand that we renounce self-interest (pp. 18-20), to its focus on the consequences of actions rather than on people (pp. 20-21), that it is irreligious (p. 22), that it recommends “expediency” (pp. 22f), and that it entails calculations (of the consequences of actions) that are not feasible (pp. 23-25). He concludes (pp. 25-6) with a brief response to the objection that utilitarianism will lead people to make exceptions to moral rules (here you might think of the last assignment in Kant), replying with a point that he had made already and that will be echoed in his last chapter: utilitarianism provides a principle for assessing the exceptions (that all ethical systems must allow) to more specific rules, and the principle of utility need be invoked only when “secondary principles” are in conflict.