Mill Quote on the Greatest Happiness: The Utilitarian Standard

Quote

"Actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness." — John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism (1863)

Author

John Stuart Mill (1806–1873) was the greatest English philosopher of the nineteenth century, the author of Utilitarianism, On Liberty, and the defender of the greatest happiness principle.

Source

The quotation is from Chapter 2 of Utilitarianism (1863), where Mill states the "utilitarian standard" — the greatest happiness principle. The sentence is the most quoted line in the utilitarian literature.

Context

The sentence belongs to Mill's statement and defense of the greatest happiness principle. Mill inherited the principle from Bentham — the greatest happiness of the greatest number — and he refined it in two ways: he defined happiness as pleasure and the absence of pain, and he distinguished the higher pleasures of the mind from the lower pleasures of the body — "it is better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied." The sentence states the principle in its simplest form: the rightness of the action is determined by its tendency to promote happiness, and the happiness counted is the happiness of all affected, impartially.

Meaning

The quotation states the utilitarian standard with complete clarity. "Actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness" — the criterion: the rightness of the action is a matter of degree, measured by the tendency of the action to promote the happiness. "Wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness" — the contrast: the wrongness is measured by the tendency to produce the unhappiness, the pain. The two clauses together state the consequentialism: the moral quality of the action is determined by its consequences — the happiness or the unhappiness that it tends to produce — and not by the intention, the rule, or the character. The happiness is the happiness of all those affected, counted impartially — the "greatest happiness of the greatest number" — and the standard is the foundation of the modern utilitarianism and the applied ethics that descended from it.

Related Wisdom

The quotation belongs to the utilitarian ethics of happiness and the philosophy of consequentialism. Its account of the greatest happiness connects to the application of utilitarianism and to the wider wisdom tradition's teaching on the measure of the action by its consequences.