David O. Brink's study of John Stuart Mill's moral and political philosophy, Mill's Progressive Principles, is challenging and thought-provoking on multiple levels. While he takes seriously Mill's intellectual context, Brink focuses on the evaluation of the utilitarianism that Mill offers, i.e. he takes what he calls the ‘analytical’ as opposed to the ‘contextualist’ approach to the history of philosophy (p. xiii). Through his interpretation and evaluation of Mill's philosophy, Brink expands the options available for a defence of (direct act) utilitarianism. Thus, this is a work in the history of philosophy that is a significant and rewarding contribution to the continuing debate about the viability of utilitarianism.

Brink begins with a discussion of Mill's immediate utilitarian forebears, Jeremy Bentham and Mill's father, James Mill (ch. 1), and the ways in which he rejected their theories of motivation (ch. 2) and of value (ch. 3). He then offers a defence of Mill as a ‘considered, but not consistent’ direct act utilitarian (ch. 4) and an interesting re-reading of Mill's proof of the principle of utility (ch. 5). The rest of the book is concerned with Mill's application of his utilitarianism to the social and political context: the role and interpretation of the Harm Principle (chs. 6 and 8), the defence of freedom of expression (ch. 7), the viability of Mill's talk of rights within the context of his utilitarianism (ch. 9), and his defences of democracy and sexual equality (chs. 10 and 11).

I am going to focus on Brink's reading of Mill as a perfectionist about happiness, because the conception of value that Brink attributes to Mill is interesting not only as an interpretation of Mill, but as a contribution to normative value theory. Also, Brink's defence of Mill's version of political liberalism depends upon his understanding of Mill's theory of value – the former stands or falls with the latter.

Brink begins by claiming that we cannot square Mill's claim that some pleasures, the higher-quality ones, are more intrinsically valuable than the lower-quality ones with hedonism. If the higher-quality pleasures are distinguished from the lower-quality pleasures by their cause, ‘why should this difference itself affect the pleasurableness of the state in question?’ (p. 53). The cause of a mental state is extrinsic to that mental state, and the only intrinsic differences between pleasures are their intensities and durations. So it does not seem that cause could make a difference to the value of a pleasure considered in itself.

This seems right if one takes pleasure to be a unitary type of simple, unanalysable sensation, where the higher/lower quality distinction is merely a matter of cause. When one introspects, however, it is readily apparent that there is no simple feel common to the activities of both sex and discussing philosophy, for example. So a more plausible understanding of a hedonism that still sees pleasures as simple, unanalysable sensations would be one according to which pleasure is not a unitary type of sensation. Rather, there are at least two different kinds of feels, those associated with the intellectual activities and those associated with the bodily. However, because these sensations are simple and unanalysable, Mill decides to pick them out via their different sorts of causes. So we could take Mill's talk of extrinsic features of pleasures – their causes – as a way of directing our attention to an intrinsic feature of them – their feel. Different qualities of pleasure, then, are different feels, with one sort of feel being more valuable, in virtue of its feel, than another. Whatever the ultimate plausibility of such a view, it is a hedonism fully consistent with making a qualitative, intrinsic difference between pleasures.

But Brink takes a different tack in his attempt to make sense of the claim that higher-quality pleasures are more valuable than lower-quality pleasures just in so far as they are higher-quality. He introduces the distinction between a subjective pleasure – ‘a certain kind of mental state or sensation’ – and an objective pleasure – ‘non-mental items, such as actions, activities, and pursuits that can and often do cause pleasurable mental states’ (pp. 51–2). Brink claims that if we understand Mill as claiming that it is objective pleasures that are intrinsically valuable, we can also understand the distinction that Mill makes between happiness and contentment: Socrates may have fewer subjective pleasures than the fool, and so be less contented, but still be happier than the fool, because happiness is a matter of engaging in higher-quality objective pleasures understood as ‘the exercise of a person's higher faculties’ (p. 54).

Brink argues that ‘the preferences of competent judges should be understood as evidence of the greater value of the object of their preferences, rather than as constituting the object of their preferences as more valuable’ (p. 56). He regards the dignity passage as requiring this evidential – as opposed to a constitutive – reading: ‘it is a competent judge's sense of his own dignity that explains his preference for a life of higher pursuits’ (p. 65). Thus, Brink rejects the understanding of Mill as accepting a type of desire-satisfaction metaethic, i.e. a view according to which what it is for one kind of pleasure to be more valuable than another is for it to be preferred by some person or persons, real or hypothetical. Rather, the value of a pleasure is what draws the competent judges to prefer it.

This is an interesting attempt to make Mill consistent and to attribute to him some sort of objectivist metaethic. But there is at least one important textual snag for this reading, namely, the passage that Brink quotes on page 49, which begins by Mill saying ‘If I am asked what I mean by difference of quality in pleasures, or what makes one pleasure more valuable than another’, and ends with an appeal to the preferences of the competent judges (emphasis mine). This seems to be a clear attempt on Mill's part to offer a meaning analysis of claims about value. Also, it's hard to see why the dignity passage requires anything other than a desire-satisfaction metaethic: a sense of one's dignity may simply be a sense of difference that leads human beings to want to mark themselves as being such by living lives of which pigs and fools are not capable. The fact that our preferences have an explanation does not undermine a desire-satisfaction metaethic.

Brink takes his reading of Mill ‘as a kind of perfectionist about happiness who claims that human happiness consists in a kind of self-realization involving the proper exercise of those capacities essential to our nature’ (pp. 60–1) as an important aspect of his understanding of Mill's version of political liberalism. If we understand the use of our deliberative capacities as constituting happiness, then political and social institutions will be justified to the extent that they promote the use of those capacities. For example, one important use of our deliberative capacities is ‘in the justification of one's beliefs and actions that is required for theoretical and practical knowledge, . . . because justification involves comparison of, and deliberation among, alternatives’ (p. 155). Similar appeals are made by Brink in his discussions of Mill's defences of democracy and of sexual equality.

I think that Brink is absolutely right that the perfectionist reading of Mill makes the most sense of Mill's liberalism. (I think that this is particularly true of the defence of sexual equality that he offers in The Subjection of Women.) But I think that Brink makes Mill's defences of various liberties, such as expression, have a status that they cannot have: Brink insists that these liberties are ‘necessary conditions for exercising our deliberative capacities and so for producing the chief ingredients of human happiness’ (p. 158). This is an extremely strong claim, according to which it would be impossible to exercise our capacities in anything other than a liberal polity of a certain kind. But that seems just false: people have managed to use their practical reason under Hitler, Stalin and the Spanish Inquisition. I agree that those are not optimal conditions for the use of practical reason, particularly for the less able and courageous. But what an appeal to those conditions shows is that all we can look for are the best available conditions that causally support deliberative choice, and Mill might be right that liberal institutions are our best bet. However, any modally stronger claim seems unwarranted. And we might wonder why it is needed: as a utilitarian, Mill ought not to take anything as fixed other than his theory of value and the principle of utility. Any other claim is a matter of derivation from those two aspects of his theory in conjunction with various sorts of empirical causal claims.

Consider, for example, Brink's discussion of the Supreme Court's ‘fighting words’ doctrine, where fighting words ‘are words that in their context tend to evoke visceral and violent – rather than articulate – responses’ (p. 167; emphasis mine). I have emphasized the word ‘tend’ here because any such claim is a causal claim about the effects of certain kinds of speech on individual psychology. After all, it seems to me that, with appropriate education, people will respond without violence to, for example, hate speech, and be willing to take even the ugliest of such speech as an opportunity to rearticulate the reasons for their commitment to equality. Brink suggests that the Supreme Court should consider allowing more stringent hate speech regulation, because such speech does not contribute to deliberative reasoning. Whether or not that is true is entirely a causal matter, and even if it is true in Canada or France, it might not be true in the United States for any number of reasons. My point here is just that Mill's view cannot give us any absolute political commitments, other than a commitment to maximizing happiness.

My criticisms are certainly small in comparison with the many virtues of this book. It is an important work in Mill scholarship and an important work in utilitarian moral and political philosophy. The writing style is admirably clear and straightforward, making reading both enjoyable and rewarding. I think that Mill's Progressive Principles should structure any future debate about Mill and about the viability of direct act utilitarianism.