Mill
He was the most thoroughly engineered mind of the nineteenth century. His father started him on Greek at three, Latin at eight, the whole apparatus of logic and economics before most children finish primary school, all of it built to produce a perfect instrument of Jeremy Bentham's utilitarianism, the doctrine that the right act is the one that produces the most happiness. The instrument worked, and then at twenty it broke down: Mill asked himself whether getting everything he had been trained to want would make him happy, and something in him answered no. He climbed out of that depression through poetry, and he came out the other side with a utilitarianism his teachers would not have recognized. Bentham had said all pleasures are equal, that the game of push-pin is as good as poetry if it gives as much pleasure. Mill said no: some pleasures are higher than others, better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. From that one repair the rest of his life unfolds: *On Liberty*, with its harm principle drawing a hard line around the individual against the crowd, written hand in hand with [Harriet Taylor](/philosophy/thinker/taylor), the woman he called its true co-author; *The Subjection of Women*, the most radical argument for sexual equality the century produced; and three years in Parliament where he rose and asked the House of Commons to give women the vote. He took the cold arithmetic of pleasure he was raised on and gave it a conscience.
