INTRODUCTION 921
pursuit of this end. The end had ceased to charm, and how could there ever
again be any interest in the means? I seemed to have nothing left to live for.” He
eventually came to the conclusion that his rigorous intellectual training had
weakened his ability to feel emotion. Reading such writers as Wordsworth and
Coleridge, he began to teach himself to feel as his father had taught him to
think. During this period, he encountered divergent philosophies, such as those
of socialist philosopher Claude-Henry Saint-Simon and positivist thinker
Auguste Comte, and he began to see some of the inadequacies of the strict
quantificational method of Bentham.
In 1831, Mill was introduced to Harriet Taylor, the wife of a successful mer-
chant. They quickly developed a strong friendship and collaborated on a number
of works, including Principles of Political Economy, On Liberty,and The
Subjection of Women. Mill attributed to Taylor a number of his most important
ideas, including his liberal feminism, and claimed that next to his father, she was
the chief intellectual influence on his life. He even claimed she was the inspira-
tion for his major epistemological work,A System of Logic(1843). Following her
husband’s death in 1849, they were finally married in 1851.
John and Harriet Mill moved to Avignon, France, in 1858, with neither of them
in good health. Shortly after arriving, Harriet Taylor Mill died, and her daughter
came to take care of her stepfather. Over the next seven years, Mill published On
Liberty(1859),Utilitarianism(1861),Considerations on Representative Govern-
ment(1861),Auguste Comte and Positivism(1865), and The Subjection of Women
(written 1861, published 1869). In 1865, Mill was surprised by an offer to run for
Parliament. Without campaigning he was elected and spent two years working on
behalf of women’s suffrage, Irish land reform, and the rights of blacks in Jamaica.
Returning once again to the south of France, he wrote his Autobiographyjust
before dying in 1873.
Although Mill wrote on a variety of topics and his work on induction is still used
today, he is best known for his modification of Bentham’s utilitarianism and his
defense of individual liberty. Bentham had taught that ethics should be grounded on
maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain, rather than on abstractions such as
Kant’s “duty” or conscience. Accordingly, Bentham developed a “hedonistic calcu-
lus,” a mathematical method of determining which actions would most likely pro-
vide a greater quantity of pleasure over pain and hence yield happiness. Whereas
this system might seem egoistic and individualistic, Bentham claimed that it would
be to each individual person’s advantage to seek the “greatest happiness of the
greatest number.”
In his Utilitarianism,given here (complete), Mill accepts Bentham’s quantita-
tive hedonism and argues that happiness, or pleasure, is the one thing that all
people seek. But whereas Bentham’s system merely measured quantities of plea-
sure and pain, Mill maintains that the qualityof a given pleasure or pain has to
be considered as well. Even though a pig might gain a great quantityof pleasure
from wallowing in the mud, it would be a very low qualitypleasure; and “It is
better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates
dissatisfied than a fool satisfied.” According to Mill, the person best able to
make a qualitative determination between rival pleasures is the one who has