[In the following essay, West asserts the logical plausibility of Mill's proof of his utility principle.]

Utilitarianism, in every one of its forms or formulations, requires a theory for the evaluation of consequences. Whether the units of behavior being judged are acts, rules, practices, attitudes, or institutions, to judge them by their utility, that is, by their contribution to good or bad ends, requires a theory of what count as good or bad ends. In the philosophies of the classical utilitarians, Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, some variety of hedonism served this purpose. Mill calls this

the theory of life on which this theory of morality is grounded—namely that pleasure, and freedom from pain, are the only things desirable as ends; and that all desirable things (which are as numerous in the utilitarian as in any other scheme) are desirable either for the pleasure inherent in themselves, or as means to the promotion of pleasure and the prevention of pain.¹

In Chapter IV of his essay entitled Utilitarianism, Mill addresses himself to the question of what sort of proof this principle is susceptible. The twelve paragraphs of the chapter present an argument which, if successful, is one of the most important arguments in all of moral philosophy, for, although Mill says questions of ultimate ends are not amenable to “direct proof,” he believes that considerations may be presented capable of determining the intellect to give its assent to the doctrine.²

Unfortunately, few commentators on Mill have had their intellects convinced, and perhaps even fewer have agreed on the correct interpretation of the argument. J. B. Schneewind says of it:

A greater mare's nest has seldom been constructed. It is now generally agreed that Mill is not, in this chapter, betraying his own belief that proof of a first moral principle is impossible, but there is not a general agreement as to what he is doing. In the last fifteen years there have been more essays dealing with the topic of “Mill's Proof” than with any other single topic in the history of ethical thought.³

Mill does say of the Utilitarian formula of ultimate ends that it is impossible to give a proof in the “ordinary or popular meaning of the term,” but he continues,

We are not, however, to infer that its acceptance or rejection must depend on blind impulse or arbitrary choice. … The subject is within the cognizance of the rational faculty, and neither does that faculty deal with it solely in the way of intuition. Considerations may be presented capable of determining the intellect either to give or withhold its assent to the doctrine, and this is the equivalent of proof.⁴

Furthermore, at the end of Chapter IV, he says that if the doctrine he has argued for is true, “the principle of utility is proved.”⁵

Given the claim, that he has proved his principle or presented something equivalent to proof, I think it is worthwhile to lay out the structure of the argument in deductive form. In that way we can determine the nature of the premises he introduces, locate the gaps that prevent it from being a valid deduction, and see if plausible assumptions can be formulated or interpretations offered that will support the premises and bridge the gaps. I shall present what I believe to be a reasonable interpretation of what Mill had in mind, and I shall claim that the assumptions necessary to make the argument sound are—though controversial—at least plausible.

The conclusion he is seeking is stated in Paragraph 2: “The utilitarian doctrine is that happiness is desirable, and the only thing desirable, as an end, all other things being only desirable as a means to that end.” The connection between this idea and morality is mentioned at the end of Paragraph 9, where he says that the promotion of happiness is the test by which to judge all human conduct, “from whence it necessarily follows that it must be the criterion of morality, since a part is included in the whole.” Mill has a complex view of the way the ultimate standard of the promotion of happiness is to be applied in morality, and morality is only one of the “three departments” of what he calls the “Art of Life.” These general teleological views on testing conduct, and the place of morality within this teleological framework, are found elsewhere in the essay and in the Logic.⁶ They are not part of this “proof,” and I shall not be discussing them in this paper. I shall be examining only how he gets to the conclusion that happiness is desirable and the only thing desirable as an end.

The structure of the argument is very simple. In Paragraph 3 he argues that happiness is desirable. In the remainder of the chapter he argues that happiness is the only thing desirable. The outline of the argument can be given in Mill's own words:

(1) “The sole evidence it is possible to produce that anything is desirable is that people do actually desire it.” (Paragraph 3)

(2) “Each person, so far as he believes it to be attainable, desires his own happiness.” (Paragraph 3)

(Therefore,)

(3) “Happiness is a good.” (Paragraph 3)

He substitutes the expression “is a good” for the expression “is desirable,” but I presume that this is only for stylistic reasons. I think he would regard his use of these two as interchangeable in this context.⁷

The argument to show that happiness is the only thing desirable is likewise based on the evidence of actual desire:

(4) “Human nature is so constituted as to desire nothing which is not either a part of happiness or a means of happiness.” (Paragraph 9, but argued throughout Paragraphs 5-10)

(Therefore,)

(5) “Nothing is a good to human beings but insofar as it is either pleasurable or a means of attaining pleasure or averting pain.” (Paragraph 11)

Here his use of “pleasure” and “pleasurable” instead of “happiness” is merely stylistic. Throughout the essay he says that by happiness he means pleasure and freedom from pain.

This is the simple outline of the argument. It is complicated by the fact that each individual's desire is for his own happiness, whereas the utilitarian doctrine that Mill is seeking to establish is that the general happiness is the foundation of morality.⁸ In Paragraph 3, this distinction is explicit. Having said that each person desires his own happiness, Mill says we have all the proof it is possible to require

that happiness is a good, that each person's happiness is a good to that person, and the general happiness, therefore, a good to the aggregate of all persons.

These propositions we may state as separate these:

(3A) “Each person's happiness is a good to that person.”

(Therefore,)

(3B) “The general happiness [is] a good to the aggregate of all persons.”

The distinction also can be introduced into the second part of the argument. Without doubt the psychological premise (4) means:

(4′) Each person desires nothing which is not either a part of his happiness or a means of his happiness.⁹

And parallel to (3A) and (3B) the distinction between each person and the aggregate of all persons can be introduced. This would give:

(5A) Nothing is a good to each person but insofar as it is either a part of his happiness or a means of his happiness.

(Therefore,)

(5B) Nothing is a good to the aggregate of all persons but insofar as it is either a part of the general happiness or a means of the general happiness.

From (3B) and (5B), we can then deduce an interpretation of the “utilitarian doctrine,” as follows:

(6) “[The general] happiness [or a part of the general happiness] is desirable, and the only thing desirable, as an end, all other things being only desirable as means to that end.” (Paragraph 2)

Examining the argument, it can be seen that (1) is a methodological premise; (2) and (4) are factual psychological premises; (3) or (3A) and (5) or (5A) are supported by (2) and (4), respectively. (3B) and (5B) putatively follow from (3A) and (5A), respectively. The premise (2) is probably non-controversial. The controversial premises are (1) and (4), and the controversial steps are from the fact of happiness being desired to its being normatively desirable, and from each person's happiness being desirable to that person to the conclusion that the general happiness is desirable to the aggregate of all people. There seem, then, to be three central issues: (A) Mill's methodology, which is to argue for what is desirable on the evidence of what is in fact desired; (B) his psychological hedonism, that each person desires his own happiness as an end and nothing as an end which is not a part of his happiness; and (C) the argument that if each person's happiness is a good and inclusive of the only good for him, as an end, the general happiness is a good, and encompasses the only good, as an end, to the aggregate of all persons. I shall take these issues up in turn.

A. DESIRE AS EVIDENCE OF DESIRABLE

I think it is hardly necessary to point out that Mill did not say that “desirable” or “the good” means “desired,” as Moore says he does.¹⁰ He is not committing a naturalistic or definist fallacy.¹¹ Mill is quite explicit in demarcating factual and normative propositions.¹²

I also think it is not likely he was misled by the similarity of the verbal endings of “visible” and “audible” into thinking that “desirable” means “able to be desired.”¹³ The significance of the analogy with visible and audible is announced in the first paragraph of the chapter. The first premises of our knowledge do not admit of proof by reasoning, but are subject to a direct appeal to the senses; he suggests that the first premises of conduct are subject to a direct appeal to our desiring faculty. It does not follow that he regards what is desirable as a “permanent possibility of desire.” That would be to regard it as a matter of fact. The analogy is that as judgments of existence are based on the evidence of the senses and corrected by further evidence of the senses, so judgments of what is desirable are based on what is desired and corrected by further evidence of what is desired. The only evidence on which a recommendation of an end of conduct can be based is what is found appealing to the desiring faculty.

Mill also supports his appeal to desire by what is a pragmatic argument:

If the end which the utilitarian doctrine proposes to itself were not, in theory and in practice, acknowledged to be an end, nothing could ever convince any person that it was so.¹⁴

Nothing about the logic of recommending an end of conduct prevents any end whatsoever from being recommended, but only one based on actual desires will be convincing. This is one respect in which the “proof” is not a proof in the ordinary sense. There is no necessity about accepting desire as the sole evidence for desirability. It is logically possible that ends of conduct that are not in fact desired be recommended without contradiction. The force of the appeal to what is desired is only to convince, not logically to rule out all other possibilities.

The import of premise (1), however, is primarily negative. It denies the existence of an intellectual intuition of the normative ends of conduct. The faculty to which Mill appeals is one that takes “cognizance” of practical ends, but by way of feeling or “sensibility” rather than intellect or moral sense. He is denying that we intuit what is intrinsically a good in some directly cognitive way.

The only way to argue a negative claim such as this conclusively would be to take each putative intuition and examine it critically to try to show that it can be reduced to desire or else to absurdity. I can obviously not do this to defend Mill's proof. I can only state that I find unconvincing all claims to intuit values, independent of desires (or likes and dislikes); so I find his skeptical starting point a plausible one. However, the desires we do have provide practical ends that will be pursued unless frustrated by the pursuit of the ends of other desires. This provides an arena in which practical reason can seek to bring order out of disorder by analyzing desires to determine which, if any, are illusory; which, if any, are fundamental; what, if anything, is the common object of them all. It is this last question that Mill's psychological hedonism claims to answer.

B. PSYCHOLOGICAL HEDONISM

Mill's argument for (4) has two parts. One is in Paragraph 11, which classifies as mere habit those ends of conduct that are sought neither as means to happiness nor as a part of happiness. He claims that they have become ends of conduct:

Will is the child of desire, and passes out of the domination of its parent only to come under that of habit. That which is the result of habit affords no presumption of being intrinsically good.¹⁵

That argument leaves him with everything that affords any presumption of being intrinsically good an object of conscious desire. I think it is unnecessary to accept Mill's Associationist accounts of all habitual conduct or his account of all nondeliberative nondesiring willed behavior as habit. It is enough if actions that are not the result of deliberation and conscious desire afford no presumption that their ends help to identify for us what is desirable. Evolutionary ethicists, natural law theorists, and many others would perhaps deny this, but I find it a plausible skepticism.

The other part of his argument is to claim that every object of conscious desire is associated with pleasure or the absence of pain, either as a means or an end. Many desires are acquired, such as the desire for virtue or for the possession of money, and have come to be desired through the mechanism of their association with pleasure or the absence of pain. Whether acquired or not, the ultimate ends of the desires can be regarded as experiences or states of affairs with a pleasure component: They are pleasures or “parts of happiness.” Although they may fall under various other descriptions, it is the fact that they are ingredients of happiness that provides a common denominator and a unified account of desire.

If Mill is correct that there is a pleasure component to the ultimate end of every desire, and if no other common denominator provides a unified account of desire, then Mill has a persuasive claim that it is the pleasure component (i.e., being part of happiness) that is the element in all objects of desire that makes them desirable as ends, which recommends them to the intellect as the basis for action and which can provide for critical assessment in case of conflict between desires.

It is tempting to read into Mill the claim that it is the agreeable quality of the state of consciousness desired that is the real object of desire. Just as the sense-data theorist claims that one sees only sense data, although it is palpable that he sees things that, in common languages, are decidedly distinguished from sense data (i.e., from whatever common language words are sense data words—“sights,” “sounds,” “appearances,” or whatever), so Mill might be thought to hold that one desires only the pleasure component of desired experiences, although it is palpable that people “do desire things, which, in common language, are decidedly distinguished from happiness.”¹⁶ I think this is impossible to reconcile with Mill's talk of the objects of desire as being “music,” “health,” “virtue,” “power,” “fame,” “possession of money,” not just the agreeable feeling attending these. Furthermore, he does not need to make such a strong claim. He only needs to claim that, as a psychological fact, music, health, etc., would not be desired if no pleasure or freedom from pain or past association with these were connected with music, health, etc. Desire is evidence of desirability, but it does not confer desirability. This is obvious in the case of things desired as means. On reflection, it is obvious in the case of things desired as ends. The possession of money is desired by the miser. This desire does not make the possession of money a normative object of action for a reasonable person. The evidence furnished by desire must be analyzed; it is only by analysis of the fact that the miser desires the possession of money as part of his happiness—that he would be made happy by its possession—that the evidence of desire fits into a comprehensive theory. It is this comprehensive theory that identifies the pleasure inherent in desirable things as what makes them desirable. The pleasure inherent in them does not itself have to be discriminated as the object of desire.

Some commentators also have thought that Mill reduces the relation between desire and pleasures to a trivial one in the passage where he says that:

desiring a thing and finding it pleasant, aversion to it and thinking of it as painful, are phenomena entirely inseparable, or rather two parts of the same phenomenon—in strictness of language, two different modes of naming the same psychological fact; that to think of an object as desirable (unless for the sake of its consequences), and to think of it as pleasant, are one and the same thing; and that to desire anything, except in proportion as the idea of it is pleasant, is a physical and metaphysical impossibility.¹⁷

This statement is certainly puzzling to the twentieth-century reader, but in context Mill is asking the reader to engage in “practiced self-consciousness and self-observation.” If the terms were reducible to one another independent of observation, it is hard to see why he would invite one to attempt what appears to be an empirical discovery. A clue to interpretation is that “metaphysical” means approximately “psychological” for him.¹⁸ In his notes on his father's Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind, Mill takes issue with his father's statement, “The term ‘Idea of a pleasure’ expresses precisely the same thing as the term Desire. It does so by the very import of the words.”¹⁹ J. S. Mill says that desire:

is more than the idea of pleasure desired, being, in truth, the initiatory state of Will. In what we call Desire there is, I think, always included a positive stimulation to action.²⁰

According to J. S. Mill, then, a distinction is to be made between desiring a thing and thinking of it as pleasant. Desire is psychologically more complex and conceivably could have an object not thought of as pleasurable. It is obvious that it may have a more inclusive object, as is the case in desiring the means to an end when the means are unpleasant. In any case the question is a psychological, not a linguistic one.

Mill's substantive claim is that desire and pleasure (or the avoidance of pain) are psychologically inseparable. If this is true, two things follow: First, (4) is established—each person desires nothing that is not either a part of his happiness or a means of his happiness; second, since attainment of pleasure and avoidance of pain are the common denominators of desire, the evidence of desire supports the theory that it is the pleasure and pain aspects of the objects of desire and aversion that make them desirable and undesirable and that should serve as the criteria of good and bad consequences in a normative theory of conduct.

An adequate defense of Mill's position would require a more thorough analysis of desire and of pleasure and pain, happiness and unhappiness. I believe, however, that the interpretation given above shows that the position does not completely lack plausibility and that it might be supported by such a refined analysis.

C. FROM EACH PERSON'S HAPPINESS TO THE GENERAL HAPPINESS

If the intellect is convinced that the person's happiness is a good and the sole good to that person, does it follow that it will be convinced that the general happiness is a good and the sole good to the aggregate of all persons? Mill presumably thinks this is obvious, simply asserting it without argument. He apparently thinks he has practically established (3B) when he has established (3A), and (5B) when he has established (5A). I think Mill has been misinterpreted in this argument because commentators have thought his conclusion to be a much stronger claim than it is. He is making a very weak claim, which is seen when we notice what he means by “the general happiness.”

According to Mill “the general happiness” is a mere sum of instances of individual happiness. Just as personal happiness is not a “collective something” but simply a sum of pleasures,²¹ so we can take Mill as holding that the general happiness is simply a sum of individual pleasures. There are still two ways of understanding the argument. One is that “to that person” represents the point of view of the agent when he is making prudential decisions; “to the aggregate” represents the point of view of the benevolent man when he is acting morally. Some things can be said in support of this interpretation, but I do not think that it is the correct one. I think rather that he believes that his analysis of desire shows that happiness is the kind of thing that constitutes intrinsic welfare, wherever it occurs. All instances of happiness will be parts of the personal welfare of someone, that is, “a good to someone,” but being instances of happiness, they have a common denominator that makes them the same kind of thing wherever they occur—whether in different experiences of a given individual or in the experiences of different individuals. Moreover, Mill assumes that the value of different instances of happiness can be thought of as summed up to generate a larger good. These assumptions are explicit in a letter Mill wrote regarding the move from (3A) to (3B):

As to the sentence you quote from my Utilitarianism, when I said the general happiness is a good to the aggregate of all persons I did not mean that every human being's happiness is a good to every other human being, though I think in a good state of society and education it would be so. I merely meant in this particular sentence to argue that since A's happiness is a good, B's a good, C's a good, etc., the sum of all these goods must be a good.²²

His assumptions are even more explicit in a footnote to Chapter V of Utilitarianism. There, answering the objection that the principle of utility presupposes the anterior principle that everybody has an equal right to happiness, Mill says:

It may be more correctly described as supposing that equal amounts of happiness are equally desirable, whether felt by the same or by different persons. This, however, is not a presupposition, not a premise needful to support the principle of utility, but the very principle itself; … If there is an anterior principle implied, it can be no other than this—that the truths of arithmetic are applicable to the valuation of happiness, as of all other measurable quantities.²³

It seems clear, then, that the “to each person” in (3A) and (5A) does not represent a “point of view,” but simply the location or embodiment of welfare that cannot exist without location or embodiment, and the “to the aggregate of all persons” in (3B) and (5B) refers to the location or embodiment of welfare in a group of individuals, not a point of view. A good to the aggregate of A, B, C, etc., is interpreted by Mill to be a sum of goods to A, plus goods to B, plus goods to C, etc. He assumes both that happiness is arithmetical, capable of being summed up to find a total, “general” happiness, and that goods to different people are arithmetical, capable of being summed up to find a total good “to the aggregate of all persons.”

With these assumptions, (3B) does follow from (3A), for to say that the general happiness is a good to the aggregate of all persons is merely to say that A's happiness, plus B's happiness, plus C's happiness, etc., constitutes a good to A, plus a good to B, plus a good to C, etc. And (5B) follows from (5A). If nothing is a good to each person but insofar as it is a part of his happiness (or a means to it), then nothing will be part of the sum of goods to A, plus goods to B, plus goods to C, etc., but insofar as it is a part of the happiness of A or part of the happiness of B, etc., or a means to these. This interpretation explains why Mill did not bother to state (5A) and (5B) explicitly and why he passed from (3A) to (3B) in one sentence. The evidence of desire shows that happiness is the kind of thing desirable as an end. It is not a different kind of thing when it is located in A's experience from what it is when it is located in B's experience. Thus, whether or not any single individual desires the general happiness, if each of its parts is shown to be desirable by the evidence of desire, because of the kind of thing each part is, then the sum of these parts will be desirable because it is simply a summation of instances of the same kind of thing.²⁴ Given this interpretation the “utilitarian doctrine” represented by (6), is perhaps better stated by making clear that Mill believes happiness, wherever it occurs, is what is desirable as an end. This could be restated with the following reinterpretation:

(6) Happiness is [the kind of thing which is] desirable, and the only [kind of] thing desirable, as an end, all other things being desirable only as means to that end.

From this, the connection with morality is said to follow:

(7) The promotion of [happiness] is the test by which to judge of all conduct from whence it necessarily follows that it must be the criterion of morality, since a part is included in the whole.²⁵

If my earlier elucidation of Mill's argument for happiness as the kind of thing that makes the objects of desires desirable was convincing, then the argument has some plausibility. Desire does not confer desirability; it is evidence for what kind of thing constitutes welfare. Thus, that one desires only his own happiness does not restrict the desirability of happiness to one's own happiness. If the desirability of happiness as such is identified (and not created) by one's own desire for it in one's own experience, its desirability—wherever it is located—can be admitted by the intellect.

That the value of different instances of happiness is arithmetical is certainly controversial, but not, I think, indefensible. Without an operational definition for measurement, it is difficult to know how happy two different individuals are, but it seems plausible that if two people do happen to be equally happy, then twice as much happiness exists. Mill recognizes the difficulty in determining how happy a person is. He thinks Bentham's measures of intensity and duration are inadequate to capture the complex hedonic dimensions of experience, asserting that the only test of the comparative pleasure of two experiences is the unbiased preference of those who have experienced both. This is not a direct measurement of felt experience, since the experiences are seldom if ever simultaneous. It is a judgment based on memory. In making interpersonal comparisons, it is even less reliable, since one can assume only a rough equality of sensibility between persons or make a rough estimate of difference in case evidence based on behavior or physiology shows a basis for difference. Thus summations of instances of happiness will be imprecise, but we do make judgments that one course of action will make oneself or another person more or less happy. These are not meaningless judgments; even if only rough estimates, they assume (and, I think, justifiably) that different instances of happiness are commensurable.

That the general happiness is simply the sum of the happiness of all individuals and that the good to the aggregate of all is simply the sum of the goods to each is, like Mill's methodological principle, primarily negative in its import. He is denying that there is any happiness or any value that cannot be analyzed without remainder as the happiness or the good of some individual or individuals. To prove this would require refutation of every claim to such an irreducible social good. So, again, I simply assert that I find his skepticism plausible.

If Mill's proof is plausible, as I have suggested, it does not follow that anyone will act on it. The intellect may be convinced that it is plausible or even that it is correct, without one thereby being moved to conduct his life in such a way as to maximize his own happiness or thereby being moved to identify the general happiness with his own and become a practicing utilitarian. That, according to Mill, requires a good state of society and education. But convincing the intellect may be a first step.

Notes

1. John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism, Chapter II, Paragraph 2. Utilitarianism, published in 1861, is reprinted in Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Volume X: Essays on Ethics, Religion and Society, ed. J. W. Robson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1969), pp. 203-259, and in various other editions. References will be to chapter and paragraph. Unless otherwise noted, references will be to paragraphs of Chapter IV.

2. Chapter I, Paragraph 5.

3. “Introduction” to Mill's Ethical Writings, edited with an introduction by J. B. Schneewind (London: Collier-Macmillan Ltd., New York: Collier Books, 1965), p. 31. In the years following 1965 when Schneewind wrote this, the frequency of essays on the topic even increased.

4. Chapter I, Paragraph 5.

5. Paragraph 11. (Emphasis added).

6. Book VI, Chapter XII. For an analysis of these complex views, see D. P. Dryer, “Mill's Utilitarianism,” in Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Volume X: Essays on Ethics, Religion and Society, pp. lxiii-cxiii, especially xcv-cxiii, and David Lyons, “Mill's Theory of Morality,” Nous 10 (1976): 101-120.

7. In her essay, “Mill's Theory of Value,” Theoria 36 (1970): 100-115, Dorothy Mitchell makes a distinction between “desirable” and “good” based on an analysis of the use of “desirable” in contexts of ordinary language. I think she is correct that they are not synonyms in English, but I think, nevertheless, that Mill is using them as such in this essay.

8. For a discussion of this point, see H. R. West, “Reconstructing Mill's ‘Proof’ of the Principle of Utility,” Mind 81 (1972): 256-257.

9. This part of Mill's psychological doctrine is stated explicitly in his essay on “Whewell's Moral Philosophy.” He quotes Whewell as saying that “we cannot desire anything else unless by identifying it with our happiness.” To this Mill says he should have nothing to object, “if by identification was meant that what we desire unselfishly must first, by a mental process, become an actual part of what we seek as our own happiness; that the good of others becomes our pleasure because we have learnt to find pleasure in it; this is, we think, the true philosophical account of the matter.” (“Whewell's Moral Philosophy,” Collected Works, Volume X: Essays on Ethics, Religion and Society, p. 184 note; Schneewind, ed., Mill's Ethical Writings, p. 192 note.)

10. George Edward Moore, Principia Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1948 [first edition 1903]), p. 66.

11. Moore's interpretation of Mill as committing the “naturalistic fallacy” is analyzed and refuted by E. W. Hall in “The ‘Proof’ of Utility in Bentham and Mill,” Ethics 61 (1950-51): 66-68. R. F. Atkinson in “J. S. Mill's ‘Proof’ of the Principle of Utility,” Philosophy 32 (1957): 158-167, calls attention to the continuing difficulty presented by a footnote in Chapter V where Mill says “… for what is the principle of utility, if it be not that ‘happiness’ and ‘desirable’ are synonymous terms.” This is a puzzling use of “synonymous” but I do not think that it has to be interpreted (absurdly) as claiming that “Happiness is desirable” is a tautology. He may simply mean that the two terms are applicable to the same phenomena, one descriptively, the other normatively.

12. This is found in Book VI, Chapter XII, Section VI of the Logic where he says that a first principle of an Art (including the Art of Life, which embodies the first principles of all conduct) enunciates the object aimed at and affirms it to be a desirable object. It does not assert that anything is, but enjoins that something should be. “A proposition of which the predicate is expressed by the words ought or should be, is generically different from one which is expressed by is, or will be.”

13. Another of Moore's charges, in Principia, p. 67.

14. Paragraph 3.

15. Paragraph 11.

16. Paragraph 4, J. S. Mill's father, James Mill, apparently did hold such a view: “… we have a desire for water to drink, for fire to warm us, and so on.” But, “… it is not the water we desire, but the pleasure of drinking; not the fire we desire, but the pleasure of warmth.” (James Mill, Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind, 2nd edition, ed. John Stuart Mill, Chapter XIX.)

17. Paragraph 10.

18. For example, he says that “the peculiar character of what we term moral feelings is not a question of ethics but of metaphysics.” (“Whewell's Moral Philosophy,” p. 185.) This interpretation of the term “metaphysical” is argued forcefully in M. Mandelbaum, “On Interpreting Mill's Utilitarianism,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 6 (1968): 39.

19. James Mill, Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind, 2nd edition, Chapter XIX. The passage continues: “The idea of a pleasure, is the idea of something good to have. But what is desire, other than the idea of something good to have; good to have, being really nothing but desirable to have? The term, therefore, ‘idea of pleasure,’ and ‘desire,’ are but two names; the thing named, the state of consciousness, is one and the same.”

20. James Mill, Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind, 2nd edition, Volume II, Note 36.

21. Paragraph 5 and Paragraph 6.

22. The Letters of John Stuart Mill, 2 volumes, ed. H. S. R. Elliot (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1910), Vol. 2, p. 116; Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Vol. XVI: The Later Letters of John Stuart Mill 1819-1873, edited by Francis E. Mineka and Dwight N. Lindley (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1972), p. 1414. Quoted in Schneewind (ed.), Mill's Ethical Writings, p. 339.

23. Chapter V, the second from the last paragraph of the chapter.

24. John Marshall, in “The Proof of Utility and Equity in Mill's Utilitarianism,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy 3 (1973-74): 13-26, especially p. 16, points out the ambiguity in the question, “What is desirable as an end?” It can be taken to ask “What kind of thing?” or “What specific thing?” He interprets Mill as thinking more in terms of the first question in arguing that each person's happiness is desirable. I am claiming that Mill's proof is concerned only with the first question and believe that Marshall is reading in too much in finding a proof of equity as well. For a further statement of Marshall's position, see “Egalitarianism and the General Happiness” in The Limits of Utilitarianism, ed. by Harlan B. Miller and William H. Williams (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982).

25. Paragraph 9.