Was Mill a Utilitarian?

Christopher Miles Coope

Utilitas, 1998, vol. 10, issue 1, 33-67

Abstract: Mill was receptive to all sorts of ideas, both plausible and implausible, which did not fit well with utilitarianism. He was, for example, inclined to think of equality, not just pleasure, as ‘good in itself’. He was able to think of himself as a utilitarian only by grossly expanding that notion to cover any doctrine which did not entirely rely, without the possibility of further explanation, on ‘intuition’ or God's commands. It is even doubtful whether he was a consequentialist in any sense. Mill's account of moral obligation is not a maximizing, nor even a satisficing, one. And the account emphasizes the place of supererogation. There is no suggestion in Mill that one is obliged to do something merely because a teaching to that effect would be felicific. Far from there being an obligation to maximize, it would sometimes be wrong merely to make Pareto-improvements. Sympathetically understood, the account of obligation in Mill is more or less the same as one finds in Hobbes, with his theorems ‘for the preservation of men in multitudes’.

Date: 1998
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/ ... type/journal_article link to article abstract page (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cup:utilit:v:10:y:1998:i:01:p:33-67_00

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Utilitas from Cambridge University Press Cambridge University Press, UPH, Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge CB2 8BS UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Kirk Stebbing ().