The Fictive Worlds of John Stuart Mill’s Utilitarianism

Abstract

Argues that in Utilitarianism, Mill presents readers with two very different visions of the world. Both are fictions, each endowed with selectively featured pasts, presents, and futures, populated by a personification of Utilitarianism itself and partly shaped by conflicting analogies that are sometimes obviously contrived but more often used unconsciously. Finds Utilitarianism is the product not only of a calculated rhetoric but also of a mind persuaded by its own partial and conflicting images of reality.