The founders of utilitarianism were political activists rather than professional academics, and so much of the debate over its moral theory and political programme has been conducted in the public arena, with novels such as Aldous Huxley's Brave New World or James Gunn's The Joy Makers serving as venues for criticism. Perhaps because Oscar Wilde was also anything but a professional academic, it is only recently that he has come to be appreciated as a moral philosopher, and a very ambitious one at that. In order to make room for his constructive agenda (which developed the idea that a life and personality should in the first place be a work of art), Wilde first had to clear the decks, and in the late nineteenth century that meant, among other things, engaging the utilitarians. The occasion he chose was his Picture of Dorian Gray. Students of utilitarianism should be, but generally have not been, closely interested readers of this sophisticated and intelligent assessment of their position, and the publication of what will be for the foreseeable future the standard scholarly edition of the work is an occasion to remedy what is now over a century of philosophers’ neglect.

The Principle of Utility had been invoked to assess actions, institutions and even characters on the basis of their contribution to overall happiness, and the utilitarians were thus assuming that such appeals could serve as the armature of a stable and sane social order. The movement's most prominent nineteenth-century theorists officially identified happiness with pleasure. Wilde's criticism accordingly directed itself against their implicit hedonic psychology, and went hand in hand with the public perception of the best-known utilitarians, memorably captured by Dickens's Hard Times, as leading grimly ascetic lives. The problem, cast into its ad hominem form, was that Bentham and the Mills, although relying on pleasure to do their theoretical work in morals and political philosophy, were themselves thoroughly inexpert on the subject. By contrast, Wilde presented himself, scandalously, as an expert on pleasure, and his criticism boiled down to this: once you appreciate what pleasure is really like, the doctrine that lives and a liveable social order can be built around utility is unsustainable.

Wilde's novel develops the complaint by exhibiting a long list of unsettling and difficult-to-manage enjoyments, some less interesting, like the pleasures of opium, or the ‘beautiful things that one can touch and handle’ (86/261), and some more so: the ‘luxury in self-reproach’ (73/250), among other ‘luxurious sterile emotions’ (77/253), such as the anticipation of becoming an ‘arbiter elegantiarum, to be consulted on the wearing of a jewel, or the knotting of a necktie, or the conduct of a cane’ (108/278); vanity whose object is being a sinner (79/255), and which is indulged in watching one's own descent into corruption (83/258, 106/277); ‘mysticism . . . and the subtle antinomianism that always seems to accompany it’ (111/280). There is the pleasure of the irrevocable decision, which (because the point was just the subjective pay-off of making it) is almost immediately revoked. There are the closely associated pleasures of ritual and religion (110/280); similarly, there are the pleasures of adopting scientific or scientific-sounding views.

(Wilde's barb here is directed towards the psychological theories the utilitarians hoped would underwrite their moral and political claims. These are presented as attractive merely in the role of an especially refined intellectual indulgence, as when Dorian Gray ‘found a curious pleasure in tracing the thoughts and passions of men to some pearly cell in the brain, or some white nerve in the body’ (111/280). Likewise, Lord Henry Wotton, speculating about the future of the science of psychology, is simply daydreaming (48–9/219–20).)

Wilde does better than Huxley's later treatment by addressing himself to the Millian distinction between higher and lower pleasures. He self-consciously picks out pleasures that are ‘higher’ both in the popular sense, that is, that involve cultural accomplishment, and in Mill's more technical sense, on which the higher pleasure is the one for which those who have experienced both it and its competitors will let all of the latter go. For instance, we are told, about vivisecting emotional lives (both others’ and one's own) that ‘there was a delight in that! What matter what the cost was?’ (47/218). Or again, the ‘terribly enthralling . . . exercise of influence’ is recommended on the grounds that it is ‘perhaps the most satisfying joy left to us in an age so limited and vulgar as our own, an age grossly carnal in its pleasures, and grossly common in its aims’ (199). The higher pleasures – and here Wilde means to correct Mill – are not those of autonomy, liberty, security and altruism, that is, the pleasures that underwrite the conclusions of On Liberty and the final chapter of Utilitarianism. On the contrary, the higher pleasures, it is being suggested, are predominantly the decadent pleasures.

Dorian Gray compulsively rereads a book that the informed reader will recognize as Huysmans's À Rebours, the iconic literary product of the French Decadents. The point of Decadence, for present purposes, is this. There are pleasures for which illnesses are preconditions (to take a trivial example, the peculiar way in which the weakness and aching muscles that accompany a fever can feel like an indulgent luxury), and many of these are pleasures which no one who has experienced them will be willing to forego. So an intelligent hedonist will make a point of cultivating both physical and psychological illnesses.

Let me parenthetically register, but not properly discuss, the worry that treating Wilde's arguments at face value is an exegetical blunder. After all, his Preface tells us that ‘no artist desires to prove anything’ (167). However, that the ‘proofs’ are not there because they are desired does not mean that they are not there; the reader does need to keep on the table the question of what they are there for.

This critical edition will facilitate scholarship by standardizing citations; the introductory matter provides a useful publication history; the original periodical version and the later novel-length expansion are printed seriatim, which is a real help in seeing how Wilde's conception of the work evolved; the critical apparatus allows the reader to track changes between the versions, corrections to the typescript, and so on. However, one part of the supplementary material seems to me, while inevitable, ill-conceived, given the nature of Wilde's project, namely, the lengthy and thoroughly researched notes at the back of the volume. To see why, think for a moment about the longish passage devoted to the obsessive pleasures of collecting. This material has always bewildered readers oblivious to the book's theoretical agenda, who have wondered how on earth it is supposed to advance the plot. Wilde works his lists of jewels, musical instruments, perfumes, embroideries, etc., into a prose poem whose rising and falling cadences are intended to conjure up an atmosphere of exoticism (111–18/281–6). Notice, because this is important to how the passage works, that Wilde is not simply describing the pleasures of the collector, but exhibiting them; as Alexander Theroux does, in his essay on ‘Odd Collections’, he is really putting on display his own compilation – of words, whose exotic sounds and associations he savours. Now, the effect of exoticism depends on one's not having those words’ definitions at one's fingertips, and that effect is systematically undermined if one uses the line-by-line commentary to find out just what cymophanes, peridots, bezoars, and so on and so forth are.

For better or for worse, pleasure no longer occupies the central position in moral psychology that it did a century and a half ago, and today utilitarians who hold precisely the doctrines that Wilde was criticizing are few and far between. Nonetheless, Wilde's objections are not merely of historical interest, and they deserve close attention on the part of moral theorists. How workable a social order or moral theory built around contemporary preference-based conceptions of utility really is depends to a greater degree than is often appreciated on just what sorts of preferences and desires – and informed preferences and desires – people are prone to have. And with few exceptions, academic moral philosophers are inexperienced on just this topic. Thus Wilde's treatment can serve as a model for a much-needed reassessment of contemporary utilitarian analyses and recommendations.

I am grateful to the editor of this journal for so graciously accommodating an extremely tardy review.