John Stuart Mill (1808–1873) carried on the Utilitarian tradition and became the most famous and effective advocate of the philosophy. Mill's father, James, was also a philosopher of note and was a staunch supporter of Bentham and his beliefs.

John Stuart Mill's book Utilitarianism elabortes and improves upon the philosophy espoused by Bentham. Mill agreed with Bentham about pleasure and pain and morality.

Higher and Lower Pleasures

Mill sought to combat the critics who mocked the Utilitarian concept of the statistical analysis of every act to determine the pleasure factor before undertaking the act. He did not agree with the notion and created his own compromise. Mill differed from Bentham on the quality of pleasure, not just the quantity. Mills defined the nature of pleasure into two levels, the higher and the lower. Mill made value judgments on pleasure that Bentham did not, and he believed that a little pain was not a bad thing if, in the long run, it served society as a whole. By making the moral determination that some pleasures are better and more beneficial than others, Mill was attacked for not only elitism but for undermining the very foundation of Utilitarianism.

Mill's most famous book is called On Liberty. Considered politically liberal at the time, it now reads like it could be the manifesto of a conservative talk radio host. Mill stresses personal responsibility for yourself and your actions, your pursuit of happiness, and your pleasure. Society is concerned only with Big Picture issues, and minimal government interference into personal lives is the ideal. The state is only expected to intervene in the personal affairs of people when individuals are guilty of gross antisocial behavior and are a danger to others. If the harm you are doing is only to yourself, then that is your business. Of course, there are exceptions to Mill's rules for order. Free speech is a cornerstone, but to incite riot or to encourage people to commit crimes or other assorted acts of mayhem should naturally be restricted.

The Role of Women

Mill was ahead of his time as far as women's rights were concerned, and his utopia had strict laws protecting wives from spousal abuse. And in a time when children worked for hours in unsafe conditions, Mill also championed the rights of the very young. In short, the freedom of the individual is paramount, and state interference should be minimal and infrequent.

Mill also wrote a book called The Subjection of Women that predated the modern feminist movement by almost a century. The political and social women's rights movement of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was called the suffrage movement, and Mill was a leading advocate of universal suffrage. Suffrage literally means the right to vote, and this was the focal point of the women's movement of the day, but it actually encompassed much more.

Mill's book was a passionate polemic attacking the injustices of the patriarchal society of the time. Women did not have the right to vote and were in general treated as second-class citizens. Mill compared the situation of women to slavery, which had been abolished some time before in England and only recently in America. The book was published in 1869, four years after the end of the American Civil War. The mistreatment was a vestige of the caveman epoch of prehistory when brute force ruled. This “might is right” mentality had, Mill argued, been abolished in every other aspect of civilized society except as far as women were concerned.