Utilitarianism

Born in 1806, John Stuart Mill was a prodigy: at six he had had written a history of Rome and by eight he was reading both Plato and Sophocles in the original Greek. Open-minded and magnanimous, in early adulthood John Stuart Mills was far ahead of his time, espousing just about every progressive ideal, from total sexual equality, through slave emancipation and votes for the working classes, to the absolute right to contraception. In 'Utilitarianism', Mill argues for the rightness of this philosophy, which is based on the principle that "actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness," and originates from the social nature of humanity. In five chapters he clearly sets forth a more nuanced and complex idea of this important moral and social theory.