Utilitarianism
John Stuart Mill's Utilitarianism (1861) is the classic statement and defense of the utilitarian ethics he inherited from Jeremy Bentham and his father James Mill. In five short chapters Mill argues that actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness—understood as pleasure and the absence of pain—while refining the doctrine to distinguish higher from lower pleasures and to answer objections about proof, motivation, and justice. It remains the most influential defense of the greatest-happiness principle in the English language.
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