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John Stuart Mill's book Utilitarianism is a philosophical defense of utilitarianism in ethics. The...

John Stuart Mill's book Utilitarianism is a philosophical defense of utilitarianism in ethics. The essay first appeared as a series of three articles published in Fraser's Magazine in 1861; the articles were collected and reprinted as a single book in 1863. It went through four editions during Mill's lifetime with minor additions and revisions. Although Mill includes discussions of utilitarian ethical principles in other works such as On Liberty and The Subjection of Women, Utilitarianism contains Mill's only major discussion of the fundamental grounds for utilitarian ethical theory. The essay is divided into five chapters, namely In the first two chapters, Mill aims to define precisely what utilitarianism claims in terms of the general moral principles that it uses to judge concrete actions, as well as in terms of the sort of evidence that is supposed to be given for such principles. He hopes thus to do away with some common misunderstandings of utilitarianism, as well as to defend it against philosophical criticisms, most notably those of Kant. In the first chapter, he distinguishes two broad schools of ethical theory — those whose principles are defended by appeals to intuition