ABSTRACT
Any individual's encounter with issues of philosophical ethics inevitably takes place within a specific historical context. To present-day readers, Hobbes's extreme caution about breaking covenants, together with his dire descriptions of the human condition outside of political society and his justification of absolute sovereignty, may seem a curious mix. John Stuart Mill began Utilitarianism with a declaration. Little, he said, is "more significant of the backward state in which speculation on the most important subjects still lingers" than the lack of progress in establishing a "criterion of right and wrong". Mill believed that the end that gives moral rules their "character and color" is the greatest pleasure or happiness of all. Hedonism is a claim of normative ethics. 'Pleasure' is multiply ambiguous, and Mill's argument may depend on one sense, and hedonism, at least as it is standardly interpreted, may involve another.
