just qua happiness, it is-if it is-as good.  What makes one form of happiness more worthy than another is simply, in the first place, its greater keenness or extent or freedom from pain, and in the second place its potentialities of future happiness or pain for self and others.  When Mill wrote, therefore, in his classic treatise, that “some kinds of pleasure are more desirable and valuable than others,” he showed a-for him unusual-failure to analyze.  Some kinds of pleasures are more desirable, for the reasons summarized above.  But pleasure, in the abstract, pleasantness, agreeableness, intrinsic worth, whatever you choose to call it, is itself a quality; there can be more or less of it in a concrete experience, that is all.  To speak of kinds of pleasure is to mean kinds of experience which have the common attribute of pleasantness.  In themselves all kinds of experience that are equally pleasant are equally worthy; there is no meaning to that adjective as applied to intrinsic immediate good.  “Worthy” and “unworthy” apply to experience only when we begin to consider their consequences.

Is morality merely subjective and relative?

Different people find happiness in different ways; if morality is simply the means to happiness, is it not relative to their varying desires; is it not a purely subjective matter and without a fixed objective nature?

We must discriminate.  Morality is not relative to our inclinations and desires, because those often do not rightly represent our own true welfare, still less the general welfare.  Happiness is desirable whether our impulses are adjusted so as to aim for it or not.  Nor is morality relative to our opinions; an act may be wrong though the whole world proclaim it right.  It is a matter not of opinion but of fact whether an act is going to bring the greatest attainable welfare or not.  However biased and shortsighted we may. be, the consequences of acts will be what they will be.  In a very real sense, then, morality is objective; it is valid whether we recognize its validity and want it or not.  It represents our needs more truly than our own wills, and thus has a greater authority, just as the rules of dietetics are not a matter of appetite or whim, but have a rational authority over our caprices.  Morality is not, like imagination, something we can shape at will; it is imposed upon us from without, like sensation.  Its development is predetermined by the structure of human nature and its environment; we do not invent it, we accept it. [Footnote:  Cf.  Cudworth (ca. 1688), Treatise, chap, n, sec. 3:  “It is so far from being true that all moral good and evil, just and unjust, are mere arbitrary and factitious things, that are created wholly by will, that (if we would speak properly) we must needs say that nothing is morally good or evil, just or unjust, by mere will without nature, because everything is what it is by nature, and not by will.”  A good recent