Liberty, the higher pleasures, and Mill's missing science of ethnic jokes

The intended contribution to his moral theory of John Stuart Mill's famous distinction between higher and lower pleasures has occasioned long-standing puzzlement on the part of his more alert interpreters. I am going to explain how the distinction was meant, among other things, to allow Mill to demonstrate that liberty really is required by the Principle of Utility, but I will also suggest that the argument made possible by the notion of higher pleasures was not the one that Mill in the end wanted. My objective here is to distinguish two problems which-viewed at a suitable level of abstraction-we share with Mill: one is that of determining whether a society hoping to promote the happiness of its members should allow them liberty, and the other, that of accounting for the importance, both for happiness and for liberty, of genuinely original personalities. The general drift of my discussion will be that the former problem is relatively tractable, and Mill's understanding of the higher and lower pleasures contains the resources for a straightforward solution to his version of it; the latter problem, however, is a great deal more difficult, both for him and for us.