Key Ideas
1. The greatest happiness principle
Right actions tend to promote happiness; wrong actions tend to produce pain or the loss of happiness.
2. Happiness includes pleasure and absence of pain
Mill’s ultimate end concerns positive enjoyment as well as freedom from suffering.
3. Pleasures differ in quality
Intellectual, imaginative and moral activities can be better kinds of enjoyment, not merely larger quantities.
4. Competent judges know both alternatives
Experienced preference supplies Mill’s test for comparing the quality of pleasures.
5. Human dignity affects preference
People with developed faculties commonly refuse a lower form of contentment that requires surrendering those capacities.
6. Everyone’s happiness counts
The moral point of view is impartial and does not privilege the agent’s welfare simply because it is his or her own.
7. Sacrifice is a means, not an end
Self-denial has moral value only when it prevents suffering or enables greater well-being.
8. Moral rules preserve accumulated experience
Secondary principles guide ordinary action without requiring constant calculation from the ultimate standard.
9. Utility resolves conflicts between rules
When recognised duties pull in different directions, their purpose in human welfare supplies a common court of appeal.
10. Right action and good motive are distinct
Consequences bear on conduct, while motives reveal character and influence the wider pattern of future action.
11. Conscience is an internal sanction
The pain associated with violating duty can motivate morality from within rather than through external punishment alone.
12. Social feeling can be cultivated
Education and cooperation strengthen identification with other people and support impartial concern.
13. Ultimate ends receive evidence rather than deduction
Mill does not claim that happiness can be demonstrated from more fundamental moral premises.
14. Desire is offered as evidence of desirability
That people seek happiness is central to Mill’s proof, although the inference remains philosophically disputed.
15. Virtue can become part of happiness
A quality first pursued as a means may become loved for itself and incorporated into the person’s conception of flourishing.
16. Justice protects especially important utilities
Its stringency reflects the vital interests at stake rather than a foundation wholly separate from well-being.
17. Security is a primary social interest
People require dependable protection from harm in order to plan, cooperate and pursue any stable good.
18. Rights impose assignable obligations
To possess a right is to have an interest society ought to protect and a claim others are bound to respect.
19. Justice joins judgement with moral sentiment
Generalised resentment supplies emotional force while utility determines when protection and punishment serve society.
20. Competing claims of justice need an umpire
Ideas such as equality, desert and fairness can conflict; consequences for human welfare help decide among them.