John Stuart Mill was the leading British philosopher of the nineteenth century and his famous essay Utilitarianism is the most influential statement of the philosophy of utilitarianism: that actions, laws, policies and institutions are to be evaluated by their utility or contribution to good or bad consequences. Henry West has written the most up-to-date and user-friendly introduction to utilitarianism available. The book serves as both a commentary to and interpretation of the text. It also defends Mill against his critics. An (...) appendix reviews in detail the structure and arguments of Utilitarianism. This book is primarily intended as a textbook for students in philosophy assigned to read Utilitarianism but it should also prove helpful to students and professionals in other fields such as political science, history and economics. (shrink)

This chapter contains section titled: Alternatives to Mill's Methodology Conclusion.

John Stuart Mill's version of utilitarianism is that there is something that is a value as an end of action and that all actions, rules for action, laws, policies, and so on, are to evaluated by their promotion of that value or reduction of the negative of that value. The value judgment, that promotion of happiness and reduction of unhappiness are the normative ends of action is the “principle of utility,” and the “proof” is designed to argue for that principle. (...) The proof is an argument from introspective psychology, on what people desire, and are averse to, as ends. The claim is that when properly analyzed each person desires his or her own happiness, and this is evidence that happiness is the kind of thing that is valuable as an end, whether it exists in the agent's or another's consciousness. It is a “comprehensive formula, including all things which are in themselves good, and that whatever else is good, is not so as an end, but as a means…”. (shrink)

John Stuart Mill's Utilitarianism continues to serve as a rich source of moral and theoretical insight. This collection of articles by top scholars offers fresh interpretations of Mill's ideas about happiness, moral obligation, justice, and rights. Applying contemporary philosophical insights, the articles challenge the conventional readings of Mill, and, in the process, contribute to a deeper understanding of utilitarian theory as well as the complexity of moral life.

Supererogation is the theory that some acts go beyond the call of duty. They are praiseworthy, but their omission is not blameworthy. Notice that supererogation has to do with praise and blame as well as with what is a duty or morally obligatory. Moral duty requires a moral system on the basis of which duty or obligation is assigned. Utilitarianism can provide a criterion of moral obligation, and it can also provide a criterion for moral praise and blame. However, there (...) is no necessity that the utilitarian criteria for praise and blame should be precisely correlated with its criteria of the morally obligatory and permissible. (shrink)

Act Utilitarianism and Rule Utilitarianism, in one formu lation of each, are not extensionally equivalent, that is, they do not require of an agent precisely the same behavior as is shown by Gerald Barnes in "Utilitarianisms”, Ethics 82 (197I) 56-64. As a result each theory passes and sometimes fails different utilitarian tests: the comparative consequences of universal conformity by everyone (distributively) vs. universal conformity by everyone (collectively) Barnes argues that the latter is the appropriate test. I argue that the test (...) which AU passes is the appropriate one, since everyone, collectively, does not make moral choices. Moral choices are made by everyone individually. (shrink)

This chapter begins with an overview of John Stuart Mill's life and philosophy. Mill's chief contributions to the history of ethics are two-fold. The first was to popularize utilitarianism: to present utilitarianism in a short text, written by a recognized great philosopher, which could be read with apparent understanding by an ordinary person. The second was to persuade academic philosophers to take utilitarianism so seriously that it could compete with Aristotle and Kant as one of the three greatest traditions in (...) ethics. The discussions then turn to Mill's complex theory of morality and theory of justice. (shrink)