action toward which we tend as we make our choices and behave as our analyses dictate. "Living right" is a moral proposition that is more than an abstraction based on concepts of pleasure and pain and the development of a sum total of happiness. For Mill, living right is itself part of the happiness and the pleasure we seek. He also sees the individual as a coherent part of a social whole, and as the individual develops as a social being, morality adds to the sum total of happiness on the individual and the social level as the individual acts in a conscious way to be part of and enjoy the social level.
For Mill, the individual has a moral duty to live according to the laws of the state, but this is not an absolute duty. The element of utility takes precedence so that some laws might be considered unjust because they would produce unhappiness rather than happiness. Some laws may be unjust, giving rise to the question of whether it is right to disobey it:
Some maintain that no law, however, bad, ought to be disobeyed by an individual citizen; that his opposition to it, if shown at all, should only be shown in endeavoring to get it altered by competent authority. . . Other persons, again, hold the directly contrary opinion that any law, judged to be bad, may blamelessly be disobeyed, even though it be not judged to be unjust but only inexpedient, while others would confine the license of disobedience to the case of unjust laws.
Mill himself would propose limits for criminal law and also for the moral force of social disapproval. The general test of law is utilitarian, based on the standard of whether the law tends to maximize pleasure and minimize pain.
Mill argues that right and wrong cannot be equated merely with whether or not something maximizes happiness and sees a number of potential sources for the punishment that accrues to the individual who transgresses certain laws, punishment from the law, from his fellow ci...