With this book, Frederick Rosen, for many years the director of the Bentham Project at University College London, presents a resolute defense of classical utilitarianism. It proceeds, in the first part, by tracing the development of three fundamental concepts – utility, justice, and liberty – in the writings of Hume, Helvétius, Smith, Bentham, Paley, and John Stuart Mill, looking at all of them from the perspective of the Epicurean tradition. The second part consists of four shorter, less historical and more philosophical, chapters, three of which address some of the most prevalent criticisms of utilitarianism – that it provides a justification for punishing the innocent, for sacrificing the individual in order to promote the general happiness, that utilitarianism cannot give an adequate foundation for minority rights – and one chapter on Isaiah Berlin's claim that Hobbes and Bentham shared the same concept of negative liberty. The 11 chapters of the first part make up four fifths of the book, which leaves one with the impression that the second part is of relatively less importance, especially since all four chapters had previously been published in the form of articles. As the author notes, the book provides “some of the ingredients” (p. x) for a defense of utilitarianism, rather than representing a systematic defense itself. The book does not, in other words, present a vision of classical utilitarianism, or even a comprehensive survey of the development of the doctrine, but rather a series of shorter presentations and arguments, primarily intended to clarify misunderstandings of classical utilitarians, the role of utility in Adam Smith's writings, and, in various contexts, of Bentham's utilitarianism. Rosen points out that some chapters will be of particular interest to some readers: “historians of economic thought will find most to interest them in the chapters on Smith and Bentham; moral philosophers might find most in the two chapters on Mill, while intellectual historians might be most interested in the material on Hume and Smith” (p. 3). Being most attracted by the moral philosophy, I will concentrate on Rosen's reading of Mill.

Rosen focuses his discussion of Mill's utilitarianism on the relation between Mill and Bentham, and the role of Carlyle. I am not aware of any better discussion of, especially, the relevance of Carlyle to Mill's writings, and greatly enjoyed reading Rosen's arguments.

It is almost a commonplace in the literature, both among contemporary utilitarians as well as their opponents, that Mill rejected Benthamite utilitarianism, which he had seen to be deficient during his mental crisis (around 1827), and presented an alternative conception about 35 years later, in Utilitarianism (1861). Rosen claims that even if Mill might have dismissed many of Bentham's views in his essays of the 1830s, later in life he had returned to Bentham's theory. In fact, it is not so much that Mill accepted Carlyle's criticisms – they first met in 1830 – but that by the time he wrote Utilitarianism, he felt the need to defend Benthamite utilitarianism against these objections. Rosen points out, interestingly, that Mill himself might have given his readers the wrong idea about his intentions when claiming that Bentham had said somewhere that “quantity of pleasure being equal, push-pin is as good as poetry” – even though Bentham had never said that. But, possibly, it is only because Mill says that Bentham had used this expression (even if only in his less-well-known 1838 essay on Bentham), that, when seeing Mill's talk of the “quality” of pleasures, he is read as explicitly making reference to this particular passage in Bentham.

Be that as it may, as Mill's discussion of “quantity and quality” are notoriously difficult to make sense of, Rosen would have to present both a new interpretation of Mill and show how this coheres with Bentham's utilitarianism for his claim that Mill defended Bentham to be fully substantiated. In my opinion, Rosen fails to give such a comprehensive reading of Mill. There is no doubt that Bentham was not a “shallow quantitative” utilitarian, yet, to argue for this, as Rosen successfully does, still leaves the problem of conceptually integrating their views: what do “quality” and “quantity” in Mill stand for? Though Rosen illustrates Bentham's uses of these words, he fails to give a clear account of how the relevant passages in Mill are supposed to be read as a result. Rosen does mention that Mill emphasizes the pleasures of the intellect, and convincingly shows how earlier Epicureans, including Bentham, had done the same. It seems to me that at least among any persons remotely sympathetic to utilitarianism, this part of the debate has already been settled. Indeed, so as to make sense of Mill's apparently problematic assertion that some pleasures are better due to their intrinsic nature – which Rosen reads as equivalent to them being intrinsically better – Rosen seems to suggest that even for Bentham, the different “qualitative” dimensions of the assessment of pleasures (e.g. intensity, duration, certainty, etc.) cannot straightforwardly be integrated into one summary assessment, even if any two pleasures might be comparable as to their scores on any of these dimensions. Even though Rosen does not present it thus, this seems a very radical reinterpretation of Bentham. In my opinion, Rosen doesn't do enough to show how this suggestion can be squared with Bentham's other writings. Ultimately, then, the project of showing how Mill has returned to Benthamite utilitarianism relies on a very unusual reading of Bentham, and thus only relocates the problem from interpreting Mill to interpreting Bentham.

I want to end with a note of unreserved praise. Rosen suggests that Mill's reply to Carlyle focuses on one particular criticism: the Puritan idea that men could (and should!) do without happiness altogether, and, hence, that the empirical theory at the base of utilitarianism – that people desire only happiness intrinsically – is false. Mill accepts the empirical observation, that people are not motivated by the prospect of their own pleasure, but defends utilitarianism by claiming that the martyr, who sacrifices his life, does so justifiedly only if having the intention of promoting the happiness of others, thus, though apparently not intrinsically or exclusively desiring his own happiness, still performing an action worth of the utilitarian's approval. I think this is an interesting reading of Mill, and as far as I am aware Rosen is the first to claim that this part of Mill's utilitarianism is explicitly addressed to Carlyle. A further step would be to examine whether this is ultimately compatible with the psychological theory it is supposedly based on.

There is a lot of material in this book that anyone interested in utilitarianism would benefit from mulling over. It presents interesting perspectives on some traditional themes, and succeeds in clarifying, if not resolving, a number of issues that I am sure will still be discussed in many years.