| Sumario: | The distinction between higher and lower pleasures may well be the most significant feature of Mill's utilitarianism. Whether it is indeed the case that it is "better to be a human dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied" is a question of intrinsic merit, and yet, divorced from the greater context of Mill's vision of the human person and the ethical life, the qualitative distinction which underlies the famous maxim is open to misplaced criticism. In this article, I argue that critiques of the distinction typically ignore its connection to Mill's call for moral self-cultivation. In so doing, they do an injustice to Mill's unique attempt to develop a moral theory which makes demands on us in a way that is much more consistent with the conception of ethics as concerned with human flourishing than is often thought.
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