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Martha C. Nussbaum

Mill between Aristotle & Bentham

Who is the happy Warrior? Who is he
That every man in arms should wish to

be?

–William Wordsworth, “Character of

the Happy Warrior”

Man does not strive after happiness; only
the Englishman does that.

–Friedrich Nietzsche, “Maxims and

Arrows”

Powerful philosophical conceptions

conceal, even while they reveal. By shin-
ing a strong light on some genuinely im-
portant aspects of human life, Jeremy

Martha C. Nussbaum, Ernst Freund Distin-
guished Service Professor of Law and Ethics at
the University of Chicago, is appointed in the Phi-
losophy Department, Law School, and Divinity
School. A Fellow of the American Academy since
1988, Nussbaum is the author of numerous
books, including “The Fragility of Goodness:
Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philoso-
phy” (1986), “Women and Human Develop-
ment” (2000), “Upheavals of Thought: IL
Intelligence of Emotions” (2001), and “Hiding
from Humanity: Disgust, Shame, and the Law”
(2004).

Bentham’s Utilitarianism concealed oth-
ers. His concern with aggregating the
interests of each and every person ob-
scured, for a time, the fact that some
issues of justice cannot be well handled
through mere summing of the interests
of all. His radical abhorrence of suffering
and his admirable ambition to bring all
sentient beings to a state of well-being
and satisfaction obscured, for a time,
the fact that well-being and satisfaction
might not be all there is to the human
good, or even all there is to happiness.
Other things–such as activity, loving,
fullness of commitment–might also be
involved.

Infatti, so powerful was the obscuring
power of Bentham’s insights that a ques-
tion that Wordsworth took to be alto-
gether askable, and which, Infatti, he
spent eighty-½ve lines answering–the
question what happiness really is–soon
looked to philosophers under Bentham’s
influence like a question whose answer
was so obvious that it could not be asked
in earnest.

Thus Henry Prichard, albeit a foe of

Utilitarianism, was so influenced by
Bentham’s conception in his thinking
about happiness that he simply assumed
that any philosopher who talked about
happiness must have been identifying it
with pleasure or satisfaction. When Ar-
istotle asked what happiness is, Prichard

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argued, he could not really have been
asking the question he appears to have
been asking, since its answer was so
obvious: happiness is contentment or
satisfaction. Instead of asking what hap-
piness consists in, Poi, he must really
have been asking about the instrumental
means to the production of happiness.1
Nietzsche, allo stesso modo, understood hap-
piness to be a state of pleasure and con-
tentment, and expressed his scorn for
Englishmen who pursued that goal rath-
er than richer goals involving suffering
for a noble end, continued striving, ac-
tivities that put contentment at risk, E
so forth. Unaware of the richer English
tradition concerning happiness that
Wordsworth’s poem embodied, he sim-
ply took English ‘happiness’ to be what
Bentham said it was.

But Wordsworth’s poem, Infatti, rep-
resented an older and longer tradition of
thinking about happiness–derived from
ancient Greek thought about eudaimonia
and its parts, and inherited via the usual
English translation of eudaimonia as
‘happiness.’ According to this tradition,
represented most fully in Aristotle’s
Nicomachean Ethics, happiness is general-
ly agreed to be a kind of living that is ac-
tive, inclusive of all that has intrinsic val-
ue, and complete, lacking nothing that
would make it richer or better. Aristotle
then proceeded to argue for a more spe-
ci½c conception of happiness that iden-
ti½ed it with a speci½c plurality of valu-
able activities–for example, activities
in accordance with ethical, intellectual,

1 Henry A. Prichard, “The Meaning of Agathon
in the Ethics of Aristotle,” Philosophy 10 (1935):
27–39, famously discussed and criticized in J. l.
Austin, “Agathon and Eudaimonia in the Ethics of
Aristotle,” in Austin, Philosophical Papers, ed.
J. O. Urmson and G. J. Warnock (Oxford and
New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 1–
31. My account of Prichard follows Austin’s,
including his (fair) account of Prichard’s im-
plicit premises.

and political excellences,2 and activities
involved in love and friendship. Plea-
sure, he believed, is not identical with
happiness, but usually accompanies
the unimpeded performance of the
activities that constitute happiness.

Wordsworth was relying on a concep-

tion like this when he asked what the
character and demeanor of the happy
Warrior would be in each of the many
areas of life. As J. l. Austin memorably
wrote in a devastating critique of Prich-
ard on Aristotle, “I do not think Words-
worth meant . . . : ‘This is the warrior
who feels pleased.’ Indeed, he is ‘Doomed
to go in company with Pain / And fear
and bloodshed, miserable train.’” As
Austin saw, the important thing about
the happy Warrior is that he has traits
that make him capable of performing all
of life’s many activities in an exemplary
modo, and that he acts in accordance with
those traits. He is moderate, kind, coura-
geous, loving, a good friend, concerned
for the community, honest,3 not exces-
sively attached to honor or worldly am-
bition, a lover of reason, an equal lover
of home and family. His life is happy be-
cause it is full and rich, even though it
sometimes may involve pain and loss.
John Stuart Mill knew both the Ben-
thamite and the Aristotelian/Wordswor-
thian conceptions of happiness and was
torn between them. Despite his many

2 I thus render the Greek aretê, usually trans-
lated as ‘virtue.’ Aretê need not be ethical; In-
deed it need not even be a trait of a person. È
a trait of anything, whatever that thing is, Quello
makes it good at doing what that sort of thing
characteristically does. Thus Plato can speak of
the aretê of a pruning knife.

3 Here we see the one major departure from
Aristotle that apparently seemed to Words-
worth required by British morality. Aristotle
does not make much of honesty. In other re-
spects, Wordsworth is remarkably close to
Aristotle, whether he knew it or not.

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Dædalus Spring 2004

Martha C.
Nussbaum
SU
happiness

criticisms of Bentham, he never stopped
representing himself as a defender of
Bentham’s general line. Nel frattempo, he
was a lover of the Greeks and a lover of
Wordsworth, the poet whom he credited
with curing his depression. Mill seems
never to have fully realized the extent of
the tension between the two concep-
zioni; thus he never described the con-
flict between them, nor argued for the
importance of the pieces he appropriat-
ed from each one.

The unkind way of characterizing the

result would be to say that Mill was
deeply confused and had no coherent
conception of happiness. The kinder
E, Credo, more accurate thing to say
is that, despite Mill’s unfortunate lack of
clarity about how he combined the two
conceptions, he really did have a more
or less coherent idea of how to integrate
them–giving richness of life and com-
plexity of activity a place they do not
have in Bentham, and giving pleasure
and the absence of pain and of depres-
sion a role that Aristotle never suf½cient-
ly mapped out. The result is the basis, at
least, for a conception of happiness that
is richer than both of its sources–more
capable of doing justice to all the ele-
ments that thoughtful people have as-
sociated with that elusive idea.

Bentham has a way of making life seem

simpler than it is. He asserts that the on-
ly thing good in itself is pleasure, and the
only thing bad in itself is pain. From the
assertion that these two “masters” have
a very powerful influence on human
conduct, he passes without argument to
the normative claim that the proper goal
of conduct is to maximize pleasure and
minimize pain. The principle of utility,
as he puts it, is “that principle which
approves or disapproves of every action
whatsoever, according to the tendency
which it appears to have to augment or

diminish the happiness of the party
whose interest is in question: O, what is
the same thing in other words, to pro-
mote or to oppose that happiness.” In
turn, he de½nes utility in a manner that
shows his characteristic disregard of dis-
tinctions that have mattered greatly to
philosophers:

By utility is meant that property in any
object, whereby it tends to produce bene-
½t, advantage, pleasure, good, or happi-
ness, (all this in the present case comes to
the same thing) O (what comes again to
the same thing) to prevent the happening
of mischief, pain, evil, or unhappiness to
the party whose interest is considered.

Ignoring or flouting the long Western
philosophical tradition that had debated
whether happiness could be identi½ed
with pleasure–a tradition in which the
negative answer greatly predominated,
the positive answer being endorsed by
few apart from the Epicureans–Ben-
tham simply declares that pleasure,
good, and happiness are all the same
thing, and goes on from there.

An equally long philosophical tradi-
tion before Bentham had debated how
we should understand the nature of
pleasure. We speak of pleasure as a type
of experience, but we also say things
like, “My greatest pleasures are listening
to Mahler and eating steak.” Such ways
of talking raise several questions, for in-
stance: Is pleasure a single unitary thing,
or many things? Is it a feeling, or a way
of being active, O, perhaps, activity it-
self? Is it a sensation at all, if such very
different experiences count as plea-
sures? Could there be any one feeling or
sensation that both listening to Mahler’s
Tenth and eating a steak have in com-
mon?

Plato, Aristotle, and a whole line of
subsequent philosophers discussed such
questions with great subtlety. Bentham

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simply ignores them. As Mill writes,
“Bentham failed in deriving light from
other minds.” For him, pleasure is a sin-
gle homogeneous sensation containing
no qualitative differences. The only vari-
ations in pleasure are quantitative: it can
vary in intensity, duration, certainty or
uncertainty, propinquity or remoteness,
E, ½nally, in causal properties (tenden-
cy to produce more pleasure, eccetera.). Per-
haps Bentham’s deep concern with pain
–which can somewhat plausibly be con-
sidered as a unitary sensation varying
only in intensity and duration–is the
source of his feeling that various plea-
sures do not meaningfully differ in quali-
ty. But this conclusion, Mill says, is the
result of “the empiricism of one who has
had little experience”–either external,
he adds, or internal, through the imagi-
nation.

Activity, at the same time, plays no
special role in Bentham’s system. IL
goal of right action is to maximize plea-
sure, understood as a sensation. Questo è
the only good thing there is in the world.
So, in effect, people and animals are
large containers of sensations of plea-
sure or satisfaction. Their capacity for
agency is of interest only in the sense
that it makes them capable of choosing
actions that produce utility. A person
who gets pleasure by being hooked up
to an experience machine–the famous
example of the late Robert Nozick–is
just as well off as the person who gets
pleasure by loving and eating and listen-
ing. Even in the context of nonhuman
animals, this is a very reduced picture of
what is valuable in life. Where human
beings are concerned, it leaves out more
or less everything.

Nor is Bentham worried about inter-

personal comparisons, a problem on
which economists in the Utilitarian tra-
dition have labored greatly. For Bentham
there is no such problem: when we en-

large our scope of consideration from
one person to many people, we simply
just add a new dimension of quantity.
Right action is ultimately de½ned as that
which produces the greatest pleasure for
the greatest number. Inoltre, Ben-
tham sees no problem in extending the
comparison class to the entire world of
sentient animals.

Another problem that has troubled
economists in the Benthamite tradition
is that of evil pleasures. If people get
pleasure from inflicting harm on others,
as so often they do, should that count as
a pleasure that makes society better?
Most economists who follow Bentham
have tried to draw some lines here, In
order to rule out the most sadistic and
malicious pleasures. In so doing, Essi
complicate the Utilitarian system in a
way that Bentham would not have
approved, introducing an ethical value
that is not itself reducible to pleasure or
pain.

What is most attractive about Ben-
tham’s program is its focus on the urgent
needs of sentient beings for relief from
suffering. Infatti, one of the most ap-
pealing aspects of his thought is its great
compassion for the suffering of animals,
which he takes to be unproblematically
comparable to human suffering.4 But
Bentham cannot be said to have devel-
oped anything like a convincing account
of pleasure and pain, of happiness, or of
social utility. Because of his attachment
to a dogmatic simplicity, his view cries
out for adequate philosophical develop-
ment.

Unlike Bentham, Aristotle sees that the

nature of happiness is very dif½cult to
pin down. In book 1 of the Nicomachean
4 It should be noted, Tuttavia, that he denied
that animals suffered at the very thought of
death, and thus he argued that the painless kill-
ing of an animal should sometimes be permit-
ted.

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Martha C.
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SU
happiness

Ethics, he sets about that task. He argues
that there is general agreement on sever-
al formal characteristics of happiness: It
must be most ½nal, questo è, inclusive of all
that has intrinsic value. It must be self-
suf½cient, by which he means that there
is nothing that can be added to it that
would increase its value. (He immediate-
ly makes clear that self-suf½ciency does
not imply solitariness: the sort of self-
suf½ciency he is after is one that includes
relationships with family, friends, E
fellow citizens.) It must be active, since
we all agree that happiness is equivalent
to “living well and doing well.” It must
be generally available, to anyone who
makes the right sort of effort, since we
don’t want to de½ne happiness as some-
thing only a few can enjoy. And it must
be relatively stable, not something that
can be removed by any chance misfor-
tune.

Aristotle concludes this apparently
uncontroversial part of his argument by
suggesting that there is a further deep
agreement: happiness is made up of ac-
tivity that is in accordance with excel-
lence, either one excellence, O, if there
are more than one, then the greatest
and most complete. Scholars argue a lot
about the precise meaning of this pas-
sage, but let me simply assert. He must
mean, whatever the excellent activities
of a human life turn out to be, happiness
involves all of these in some suitable
combination, and the way all the activi-
ties ½t together to make up a whole life is
itself an element in the value of that life.
In the remainder of the Nicomachean
Ethics, Aristotle considers the areas of
human life in which we characteristical-
ly act and make choices, trying to identi-
fy the excellent way of acting in each of
these areas. He seems to think that there
is relatively little controversy about the
fact that courage, moderation, justice,
eccetera. are worth pursuing; the controversy

pertains to the more precise de½nition of
these excellences–presumably because
in each of these spheres we all have to
make some choice or another: we have
to devise some way of facing the risk of
death, some way of coping with our bod-
ily appetites, eccetera.

Where in all of this does pleasure ½g-

ure? Early in the work, Aristotle dis-
misses the claim that pleasure is identi-
cal with happiness, saying that living for
pleasure only would be “to choose the
life of dumb grazing animals.” Later
he advances some further arguments
against the identi½cation. First of all, Esso
is by no means easy to say exactly what
pleasure is. Aristotle himself offers two
very different conceptions of pleasure,
one in book 7 and one in book 10. IL
½rst identi½es pleasure with unimpeded
activity (not so odd if we remember that
we speak of “my pleasures” and “enjoy-
ments”). The second, and probably bet-
ter, account holds that pleasure is some-
thing that comes along with, that neces-
sarily supervenes on, activity, “like the
bloom on the cheek of youth”; one gets
it by doing the relevant activity in a cer-
tain, apparently unimpeded or complete
modo. In any case, Aristotle does not re-
gard pleasure as a single thing that varies
only in intensity and duration; it con-
tains qualitative differences related to
the activities to which it attaches.

Inoltre, by his account, pleasure
is just not the right thing to focus on in a
normative account of the good life for a
human being. Some pleasures are bad;
evil people take pleasure in their evil be-
havior. Happiness, by contrast, is a nor-
mative notion: since it is constitutive
of what we understand as “the human
good life,” or “a flourishing life for a
human being,” we cannot include evil
pleasures in it.

Another problem, and a revealing one
for Mill, is that some valuable activities

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are not accompanied by pleasure. Aristo-
tle’s example is the courageous warrior
(perhaps a source for Wordsworth’s po-
em) who faces death in battle for the
sake of a noble end. It is absurd to say
that this warrior is pleased at the pros-
pect of death, says Aristotle. Infatti, IL
better his life is, the more he thinks he
has to lose and the more pain he is likely
to feel at the prospect of death. Nonethe-
less, he is acting in accordance with ex-
cellence, and is aware of that; and so he
is happy. This just goes to show, says Ar-
istotle, that pleasure does not always ac-
company the activities that constitute
happiness.

Nel frattempo, according to Aristotle,
there are people whose circumstances,
by depriving them of activity, deprive
them of happiness. He names the im-
prisoned and tortured as examples. If
one has the unfortunate “luck of Priam”
–whose friends, children, and way of life
were suddenly snatched away from him
by defeat and capture–here too one can
be “dislodged from happiness.”

Mill’s Utilitarianism is organized as

an extended defense of Bentham’s pro-
gram against the most common objec-
tions that had been raised against it.
Mill defends both the idea that pleasure
is identical with happiness and the idea
that right action consists in producing
the greatest happiness for the greatest
number. Along the way, Tuttavia, con-
out open defection from the Benthamite
camp, he introduces a number of crucial
modi½cations.

First of all, he admits that “To give a
clear view of the moral standard set up
by . . . [Bentham’s] theory, much more
requires to be said; in particular, what
things it includes in the ideas of pain
and pleasure; and to what extent this is
left an open question.” Shortly after-
ward, Mill makes it plain that, for him,

“Neither pains nor pleasures are homog-
enous”: there are differences “in kind,
apart from the question of intensity,"
that are evident to any competent judge.
We cannot avoid recognizing qualitative
differences, particularly between “high-
er” and “lower” pleasures. How, Poi, A
judge between them?

Like Plato in book 9 of the Republic,
Mill refers the choice to a competent
judge who has experienced both alterna-
tives. This famous passage shows Mill
thinking of pleasures as very like activi-
ties, O, with Aristotle, as experiences so
closely linked to activities that they can-
not be pursued apart from them. In a
later text, he counts music, virtue, E
health as major pleasures. Elsewhere he
shows that he has not left sensation ut-
terly out of account: he asks “which
of two modes of existence is the most
grateful to the feelings.” Clearly the uni-
ty of the Benthamite calculus–its reli-
ance on quantity as the only source of
variation in pleasures–has been thrown
fuori, replaced here by an idea of compe-
tent judgment as to what “manner of ex-
istence” is most “worth having.” This
talk suggests that Mill, like Aristotle,
imagines this judge as planning for a
whole life, which should be complete as
a whole and inclusive of all the major
sources of value.

When Mill describes the way in which

his judge makes choices, things get still
more complicated. The reason an experi-
enced judge will not choose the lower
pleasures is “a sense of dignity, Quale
all human beings possess in one form
or other, . . . and which is so essential a
part of the happiness of those in whom
it is strong, that nothing which conflicts
with it could be, otherwise than momen-
tarily, an object of desire to them.” So a
sense of dignity is a part of what happi-
ness is for many people: it acts as a gate-
keeper, preventing the choice of a life de-

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Dædalus Spring 2004

Martha C.
Nussbaum
SU
happiness

voted to mere sensation. Nozick’s expe-
rience machine would clearly be rejected
by this judge. Inoltre, Mill continues,
anyone who supposes that this sense of
dignity will cause people to forfeit some
of their happiness “confoun[ds] two
very different ideas, of happiness, E
content.” Mill has thus rejected one
more of Bentham’s equivalences.

Summarizing his discussion, Mill
writes that the happiness which the an-
cient philosophers “meant was not a life
of rapture; but moments of such, in an
existence made up of few and transitory
pains, many and varied pleasures, con un
decided predominance of the active over
the passive.” At this point Mill appears
to have jettisoned the equivalence of
happiness with pleasure: for happiness
is now “made up of” pleasures, some
pains, and activity; and its “parts” in-
clude virtue and the all-important sense
of dignity. Even though pleasure itself is
complex and heterogeneous, standing in
a close relation to activity, it is here said
to be but one part of happiness. E
yet an emphasis on pleasure persists
throughout Mill’s work; he cannot ut-
terly leave it aside.

Nel frattempo, in one crucial passage, he
shows us that his attitude toward pained
virtue is subtly different from that of
Aristotle and Wordsworth. Imagining a
virtuous man in the present “imperfect
state of the world’s arrangements,” he
concludes that this man must sacri½ce
his own happiness if he wishes to pro-
mote the happiness of others. But Mill
does not tell us enough about this man.
If his sacri½ce is very great, so that his
life is deprived of activity, Mill’s position
may be Aristotelian: for Aristotle, we
recall, judges that Priam is “dislodged
from happiness” by his many and great
misfortunes. But if this man is more like
the happy Warrior who endures pain for
a noble cause, then Mill, in judging him

to be unhappy, is at variance with Aristo-
tle and Wordsworth.

We might put this point by saying that

Mill sets the bar of fortune higher than
Aristotle does. Aristotle thinks that for-
tune dislodges a person from happiness
only when it impedes activity so severely
that a person cannot execute his chosen
plan of life at all. The pained warrior is
happy because he can still live in his own
chosen way, and that is a good way. For
Mill, the presence of a great deal of pain
seems signi½cant beyond its potential
for inhibiting activity. A life full of ethi-
cal and intellectual excellences and ac-
tivity according to those excellences
does not suf½ce for happiness if pleasure
is insuf½ciently present, or if too much
pain is present.

Why did Mill think this? Well, as he
tells us, he had experienced such a life–
non, like Wordsworth’s warrior, in a mo-
ment of courageous risk-taking, but dur-
ing a long period of depression. This life
was the result of an upbringing that em-
phasized excellent activity to the exclu-
sion of emotional satisfactions, includ-
ing feelings of contentment, pleasure,
and comfort.

Mill, as he famously records, and as

much other evidence demonstrates,
was brought up by his father to be able
to display prodigious mastery of many
intellectual skills, and to share his fa-
ther’s shame at powerful emotions. Nor
did he receive elsewhere any successful
or stable care for the emotional parts of
his personality. Mill’s mother was evi-
dently a woman of no marked intellectu-
al interests or accomplishments; she
soon became very exhausted by bearing
so many children. Her son experienced
this as a lack of warmth. In a passage
from an early draft of the Autobiography
(he deleted the passage prior to publica-
tion at the urging of his wife Harriet)

Dædalus Spring 2004

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Mill speaks of his mother with remark-
able harshness:

That rarity in England, a really warm-
hearted mother, would in the ½rst place
have made my father a totally different
being, and in the second would have made
his children grow up loving and being
loved. But my mother, with the very best
of intentions, only knew how to pass her
life in drudging for them. Whatever she
could do for them she did, and they liked
her, because she was kind to them, but to
make herself loved, looked up to, or even
obeyed, required qualities which she un-
fortunately did not possess. I thus grew up
in the absence of love and in the presence
of fear; and many and indelible are the ef-
fects of this bringing up in the stunting of
my moral growth.

In his early twenties, Mill encountered

a crisis of depression. He remained ac-
tive and carried out his plans, but he was
aware of a deep inner void. He tried to
relieve his melancholy through dedica-
tion to the general social welfare, Ma
the blackness did not abate. The crucial
turning point was a very mysterious in-
cident that has been much discussed:

I was reading, accidentally, Marmontel’s
Memoirs, and came to the passage which
relates his father’s death, the distressed
position of the family, and the sudden in-
spiration by which he, then a mere boy,
felt and made them feel that he would be
everything to them–would supply the
place of all that they had lost. A vivid con-
ception of the scene and its feelings came
over me, and I was moved to tears. From
this moment my burthen grew lighter.
The oppression of the thought that all
feeling was dead within me, was gone. IO
was no longer hopeless: I was not a stock
or a stone . . .

death wish toward his father. The as-
sumption is that Mill is identifying him-
self with Marmontel, and so expressing
the desire to care for his family by dis-
placing the father he feared. No doubt
this interpretation is not altogether mis-
guided, for hostility toward his father is
a palpable emotion in the narrative, if
counterbalanced by a great deal of love
and admiration. The problem with this
account, Tuttavia, is that Mill does not
seem particularly keen on caring for oth-
ers, either before or after this episode.
Infatti, he tells us that he tried to lift his
depression by being actively concerned
with the well-being of others, but that
this effort did no good. Invece, the fo-
cus of his search is on ½nding care for
himself, and in particular for the emo-
tions and subjective feelings that his fa-
ther had treated as shameful. It seems to
me much more likely that Mill above all
identi½es with the orphaned family who
were now going to receive the care they
necessario. He imagines someone saying to
him, Your needs, your feelings of pain,
deadness, and loneliness, will be recog-
nized and ful½lled, you will have the care
that you need. Your distress will be seen
with love, and you will ½nd someone
who will be everything to you.

If we now examine the original Mar-

montel passage, as interpreters of the
Autobiography usually do not bother to
do, we see that it strongly con½rms this
reading. Marmontel makes it clear that
his consolation of his family is accom-
plished through the aid of a dif½cult con-
trol over his own emotions, as he deliv-
ers his speech “without a single tear.”
But at his words of comfort, streams of
tears are suddenly released in his mother
and younger siblings: tears no longer of
bitter mourning, he says, but of relief at
receiving comfort.5 So Mill is clearly in

Mill between
Aristotle &
Bentham

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Mill’s Marmontel episode has typical-

ly been analyzed in terms of an alleged

5 Jean François Marmontel, Mémoires (Paris:
Mercure de France, 1999), 63: “‘Ma mère, mes

Dædalus Spring 2004

the very childlike character of Bentham,
the man who loved the pleasures of
small creatures, who allowed the mice in
his study to sit on his lap, that made him
able to see something Aristotle did not
Vedere: the need that we all have to be held
and comforted, the need to escape a ter-
rible loneliness and deadness.

Mill’s Utilitarianism is not a fully devel-

oped work. It frustrates philosophers
who look for a tidy resolution to the
many tensions it introduces into the
Utilitarian system. But it has proved
compelling over the ages because it con-
tains a subtle awareness of human com-
plexity that few philosophical works can
rivale. Here, as in his surprising writings
on women, Mill stands out–an adult
among the children, an empiricist with
experience, a man who painfully at-
tained the kind of self-knowledge that
his great teacher lacked, and who turned
that self-knowledge into philosophy.

Martha C.
Nussbaum
SU
happiness

the emotional position not of the self-
composed son, but of the weeping
mother and children as they are relieved
to ½nd a comfort that assuages sorrow.
In part, as the Autobiography makes
clear, Mill’s wish for care is ful½lled
when he becomes able to accept, care
for, nourish, and value the previously
hidden aspects of himself. In part, pure,
he shortly discovers in Harriet Taylor–
as her letters show, an extremely emo-
tional person who is very skilled at cir-
cumnavigating John’s intellectual de-
fenses–the person who would care for
him as his mother, he felt, did not.

To relate the Autobiography to the com-

plexities of Mill’s relation to Bentham
and Aristotle is conjectural. But it is the
sort of conjecture that makes sense, E,
Inoltre, the sort that Mill invites.

For Mill, Poi, we may suppose, IL
Aristotelian conception of happiness is
too cold. It places too much weight on
‘correct’ activity–not enough on the re-
ceptive and childlike parts of the person-
ality. One might act correctly and yet
feel like “a stock or a stone.” Here the
childlike nature of Bentham’s approach
to life, which Mill often stresses, proves
valuable: for Bentham understood how
powerful pain and pleasure are for chil-
dren, and for the child in us. Bentham
did not value the emotional elements of
the personality in the right way; he over-
simpli½ed them, lacking all understand-
ing of poetry (as Mill insists) and of love
(as we might add). But perhaps it was

frères, mes soeurs, nous éprouvons, leur dis-je,
la plus grande des afflictions; ne nous y lais-
sons point abattre. Mes enfants, vous perdez
un père; vous en retrouvez un; je vous en ser-
virai; je le suis, je veux l’être; j’en embrasse
tous les devoirs; et vous n’êtes plus orphelins.’
À ces mots, des ruisseaux de larmes, mais de
larmes bien moins amères, coulèrent de leurs
yeux. ‘Ah!’ s’écria ma mère, en me pressant
contre son coeur, ‘mon ½ls! mon cher enfant!
que je t’ai bien connu!’”

Dædalus Spring 2004

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