John Stuart Mill published Utilitarianism in 1863, originally in Fraser's Magazine. The essay defends the utilitarian principle, associated primarily with Jeremy Bentham, that actions are right insofar as they promote happiness and wrong insofar as they promote the reverse. Mill's version differs from Bentham's primarily in his insistence on qualitative distinctions between pleasures: "It is better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied," a claim that Bentham's purely quantitative calculus, where pleasures differ only in amount, duration, and certainty, cannot accommodate. Mill argues that those who have experienced both higher and lower pleasures consistently prefer the higher ones, and that this preference should count in the calculation.
The essay addresses three standard objections to utilitarianism: that it is a doctrine worthy only of pigs (which the Socrates formulation addresses); that it is too demanding or impractical as a guide to individual action (which Mill addresses by distinguishing between the criterion of right action and the practical guide to everyday decision-making); and that it conflicts with justice (which Mill addresses in Chapter V by arguing that justice is itself a particularly important form of utility, concerning the most fundamental social interests in security). Chapter IV, the notorious proof of the utilitarian principle, has been criticized as a logical fallacy, but Mill's actual argument is more qualified than the crude version of the proof suggests.
Utilitarianism is the most accessible introduction to consequentialist ethics and raises the central question of moral philosophy more directly than most: what are moral considerations ultimately about, and what makes them binding? Mill's answer, that morality is about maximizing human welfare broadly understood, is clear enough to generate precise objections, which is the mark of a philosophical text worth engaging with. The disputes it opens, between consequentialism and deontological ethics, between individual and aggregate welfare, remain live in bioethics, public policy, and political philosophy.
Nietzsche completed Thus Spoke Zarathustra in just 10 days, describing it as something given to him rather than written.
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