In Chapter 5 of Utilitarianism, entitled “On the Connection between Justice and Utility,” Mill acknowledges that one of the strongest objections to utilitarianism as a complete account of ethics is the apparent independence of the idea of justice from the idea of what produces the greatest happiness, even if adherence to principles of justice does, in the long run, have that effect. If considerations of justice are independent of considerations of utility, it is possible that the two could come into conflict, that an unjust social arrangement could produce more happiness than a just one. In that case even someone sympathetic to utilitarianism on other grounds might feel that justice should take precedence in some or all such cases and that utilitarianism is not a complete ethical system. It is often said that utilitarianism is only an “aggregative” doctrine, not a “distributive” one. Or it is said that utilitarianism does not take seriously the separateness of persons: it seeks to maximize happiness without regard to whose happiness it is.

Before turning to an interpretation of Chapter 5 of Utilitarianism, I want to discuss the intuition that justice and utility are in conflict, using an example of a conflict between equality of utility and greater total utility.

Suppose for the sake of argument that it is possible to make interpersonal comparisons between quantities of utility.