ИПИ Библиотека

Volume 10 includes such significant essays as Utilitarianism,Auguste Comte and Positivism, and Three Essays on Religion, as well as other works, which clarify Mill’s enduring intellectual connection to Jeremy Bentham’s utilitarian school. In Utilitarianism, Mill sought to refine utilitarian doctrine by exploring the qualitative differences in different types of pleasures and arguing that higher artistic and intellectual pleasures should be given greater value over lesser types of pleasure.

Mill writes, “happiness is the sole end of human action, and the promotion of it the test by which to judge of all human conduct. . . .”1 He also makes it clear that the test is its promotion of happiness “to the greatest extent possible” (214). By such conduct Mill does not mean that which would promote happiness to the greatest extent conceivable, but that which would promote it to a greater extent than would any alternative. Mill also makes it clear that when he speaks of the promotion of happiness as “the test by which to judge of all human conduct,” the aspect of conduct of which he means that it is a test is whether it should be done.2 He thus holds that the test of whether something should be done is whether it would promote more happiness than would any alternative to it. Mill implies that if an action would satisfy this test, it should be done, and that if it would not, it is not one that should be done. Accordingly, the main principle which Mill maintains is that something should be done if and only if it would cause more happiness than would any alternative, and that something should not be done if and only if it would fail to cause as much happiness as would some alternative.

John Stuart Mill

John Stuart Mill (20 May 1806 – 8 May 1873) was a British philosopher and civil servant. An influential contributor to social theory, political theory, and political economy, his conception of liberty justified the freedom of the individual in opposition to unlimited state control. He was a proponent of utilitarianism, an ethical theory developed by Jeremy Bentham, although his conception of it was very different from Bentham's. Hoping to remedy the problems found in an inductive approach to science, such as confirmation bias, he clearly set forth the premises of falsification as the key component in the scientific method. Mill was also a Member of Parliament and an important figure in liberal political philosophy.

He is also the author of On Liberty (1859), Utilitarianism (1861), and The Subjection of Women (1869).