Daily Inspiration Quote by John Stuart Mill

Mill is quietly trying to keep pleasure from collapsing into a tally of sensations. The line is a rebuttal dressed up as a rule of thumb: if people who genuinely know both options consistently prefer one kind of enjoyment, even when they have no reason to posture as virtuous, then that preference counts as evidence of higher quality. He’s redefining what “better” means for utilitarianism, pushing it away from the crude arithmetic of “more pleasure” and toward a hierarchy of pleasures.

The specific intent is tactical. Bentham’s version of utilitarianism had an easy-to-mock leveling effect: pushpins could compete with poetry if they generated comparable enjoyment. Mill wants to rescue the tradition from that punchline by introducing “competent judges” and observable preference. Notice the precision: “all or almost all” signals he’s not demanding unanimity, just a stable pattern. “Irrespective of any feeling of moral obligation” is the real knife. Mill anticipates the objection that educated people merely claim to like “higher” pursuits to look refined. So he builds in a kind of anti-snob filter: the preference must hold even without social or moral incentives.

The subtext is both democratic and elitist. Democratic, because the criterion is experiential, not theological: you don’t need a priest to tell you what counts as worthwhile. Elitist, because not everyone’s vote weighs the same; only those with “experience of both” qualify. In Victorian context, this is philosophy meeting industrial modernity: mass entertainment, mass labor, and the fear that public happiness could be optimized into complacent consumption. Mill’s move makes room for dignity, depth, and the stubborn fact that some satisfactions feel like enlargements of the self, not just pleasant interruptions.