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John Stuart Mill is, of course, the pivotal figure in the history of utilitariansim; and Donner here undertakes to defend Mill's moral and political philosophy against a range of misconceptions, friendly and otherwise. Her thesis is that the central principle of Mill's ethics, based upon Bentham but moving decisively beyond him, is his commitment to promotion of self-development of individual intellectual, affective, and moral capacities. Consequent upon that principle is Mill's use of preferential ranking of experiences by competent (developed) judges as the standard of good. She confronts and dismisses most of the traditional problems and contradictions found in Mill, arguing that the self-development principle throughout his work is unaffected by his errors in fact or by his cultural and class biases. The concluding chapter addresses how Mill's essential theory applies to current problems of political and economic democracy. An unnoted result of this study is the light it throws upon Mill's importance for such American philosophers as James and Dewey. Upper-division undergraduate and graduate collections.