Mill’s Utilitarianism

Imagine a society where the main focus is the maximum happiness of its people on a grand scale; in other words the greatest good for the greatest amount of people. In its basic form this is Jeremy Benthams’ definition of utilitarianism. You cannot talk about utilitarianism without mentioning Bentham. He went even further to say that some good actions are better then other good actions. Realizing that this would be hard to prove he developed a formula that measures pleasure and pain. The conclusive definition of Benthams version on utilitarianism is that it focuses upon an action’s relevance depending fully on the value of its consequences. This is called act-utilitarianism. While Bentham was credited to be the father of utilitarianism, John Stuart Mill was considered the heart and soul of it. Mill’s version of utilitarianism focuses on rule-utilitarianism. In this paper I will discuss Mill’s version of utilitarianism and what kinds of objections are raised against it. ...