Robert A. Dahl on John Stuart Mill

“Even when J. S. Mill contended that some pleasures are better than others, he continued to assume the axiom, for to Mill as to Bentham the relative value of an object or activity depended on its contribution to the pleasure or happiness of the recipient, not on the intrinsic and peculiar worth of the recipient.”

“As every reader of Representative Government soon discovers, it was Mill himself who undermined his own argument for universal inclusion by posing a counterargument based on consideration of competence. In the course of his discussion, he explicitly asserted that the criterion of competence must take priority over any principle, whether categorical or utilitarian, that makes inclusion in the demos a matter of general right among all adults subject to the laws... Mill brought into the open a problem that had been glossed over by some of his most illustrious predecessors. Yet in justifying an exclusionary demos Mill did no more than make implicit what had generally been implicit in all previous democratic theory and practice.”