ABSTRACT
John Stuart Mill thinks that human beings consists in happiness. He means pleasure or enjoyment and the absence of suffering. Some of Mill's most splendid outbursts are aimed at moralists who want to impose service to mankind as the rule of life. Mill was very ready to admire the ideal of working for human good – and responded to it personally to a quite unusual degree. The distinctions that are made in these passages are basic to Mill's kind of liberalism. The institutions of the liberal state, Mill thinks, are those under which human beings are happiest. The notion of self-development is crucial for Mill. This chapter examines its structural foundations: the Greatest Happiness Principle, how Mill tries to establish it, and how he thinks ideals of living are connected to happiness. Mill's foundational principle breaks down into a number of subclaims. For Mill, the content of self-realisation was given by a certain liberal ideal of character.
