ABSTRACT
John Stuart Mill, who had been brought up in a creed of fundamentalist utilitarianism by his father, eventually acknowledged that he could not subscribe to Bentham’s simplistic approach to happiness. For Bentham’s “felicifi c calculus” and the goal of the greatest happiness of the greatest number, it mattered not whether the pleasure on which happiness was founded came from “playing pushpin” or “reading poetry”. Mill came to doubt whether there could be a single benchmark for judging activities as desirable and for quantifying pleasure. He proposed a distinction between “higher pleasures” such as those of “the intellect, the feelings and imagination, and of moral sentiments” and “lower pleasures”, which involved “mere sensation” or the satisfaction of “animal appetites”. Some higher pleasures – particularly intellectual pleasures – might actually be associated with “a certain amount of discontent”. Even this adjustment of the crude utilitarianism that he had been forcefed since early childhood did not entirely satisfy him, as we shall see presently.
