Utilitas

Table of Contents - 1992 - Volume 4, Issue 02  

Articles

Mill's Higher Pleasures and the Choice of Character*

Roderick T. Longa1

a1 University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

J. S. Mill's distinction between higher and lower pleasures is often thought to conflict with his commitment to psychological and ethical hedonism: if the superiority of higher pleasures is quantitative, then the higher/lower distinction is superfluous and Mill contradicts himself; if the superiority of higher pleasures is not quantitative, then Mill's hedonism is compromised.

Footnotes

* This article emerged from research supported by a Humane Studies Foundation Summer Residential Fellowship from the Institute for Humane Studies at George Mason University. I would like to thank Jeremy Shearmur for supervising that research and for providing valuable suggestions and discussion. For helpful comments and criticism, I am also grateful to David Schmidtz, and to the participants of a Harper Library Seminar at the Institute for Humane Studies, including my commentators Jonathan Riley and Alan Ryan.