Part of this transformation can be traced to the shift from Hutcheson’s moralized happiness principle to Jeremy Bentham’s more radically subjective one, which gained traction in the early 19th century. Bentham’s version of the “greatest happiness for the greatest number” recast happiness as an arithmetic of feelings, something that could, in theory, be measured and maximized. At the heart of his system was “utility,” defined as the tendency of an action to produce pleasure or prevent pain. Utility, in Bentham’s view, was the ultimate moral standard — good acts, good policies and good laws were those that generated the most net happiness. And happiness was more about feeling groovy than proving worthy.
This “hedonic” conception of happiness had its upside. Casting off old prejudices, Bentham favored emancipating women, decriminalizing homosexuality, protecting animals from cruelty. His sturdy Scottish exponent, James Mill, helped spread the Benthamite basics, while raising his son, John Stuart Mill, in no creed but that of utilitarianism. By 7, the younger Mill was reading Plato’s dialogues in Greek; before long, he was writing a sequel to the “Iliad.” And by 20, precocious as ever, he had a midlife crisis.
If all his life’s projects — the great social reforms he had been trained to pursue — were achieved, John Stuart Mill asked himself, would he be happy? “An irrepressible self-consciousness distinctly answered, ‘No!’” he wrote later. The anguishing despair that overtook him after that revealed something hollow in the happiness he had been taught to prize. It wasn’t that he ever rejected Bentham’s framework outright; he still valued its pluralism, the way an experiential approach to happiness forced you to recognize that different people would have a different idea of the good life. But he came to see that true flourishing required depth, dignity, autonomy and the widely shared material security that a just state should try to secure. It was a vision of happiness that retained something of the classical ideal — richer, more demanding, less easily quantified.
Yet even as Mill sought to complicate the concept, industrial capitalism was pushing in another direction. A happiness stripped of depth — a debased version of Bentham — was spreading with weedy vigor. The rise of mass production and market economies bound happiness to economic growth. As Thomas Carlyle warned in 1843, the greatest-happiness principle was “fast becoming a rather unhappy one.” What had once been a philosophy of human flourishing was increasingly a ledger of economic output.
The “marginalist” revolution in economics, starting in the 1870s, completed the transformation. Utility was converted from a moral principle into a wealth function. No longer tied to broader notions of well-being, it became a measure of personal preference. Economics, which once grounded value in labor, production and exchange, now saw value as purely subjective — the satisfaction gained from an additional unit of a good. As William Stanley Jevons put it, utility was simply “the addition made to a person’s happiness.” Another early theorist of marginalism even imagined a “hedonimeter”: a device to quantify enjoyment, like a stock ticker of the soul.
