Abstract
Many contemporary scholars defend the position that J. S. Mill was a
‘eudaimonist’, in a sense implying that he was not an ‘experiential’ hedonist.
One ‘activist’ argument for this interpretation rests on the claim that Mill’s
core axiological uses of ‘pleasure’ in Utilitarianism should be understood to
refer to worthy or pleasurable activities rather than mental states. This paper
offers a three-stage rebuttal of the activist interpretation. Firstly, in the
Analysis, the Examination and the Logic, Mill explicitly identifies pleasures and
pains as mental states. Secondly, if we read Mill’s core axiological uses of
‘pleasure’ in Utilitarianism along activist lines, the text’s overall coherence and
intelligibility becomes even more questionable than on the traditional
experientialist reading. Finally, in his discussions of Plato, Mill seems to
distance himself from the axiological view that non-hedonic features of mind
or character have intrinsic value in their own right. In consequence, in the
small number of cases in Utilitarianism in which Mill clearly speaks of
‘pleasures’ as activities, this is best construed as a derivative usage.