Pleasure and freedom from pain, are the only things desirable as ends.

The sentence expresses the core axiom of classical utilitarianism as Mill inherited it from Jeremy Bentham and defended it in the mid‑nineteenth century. Mill wrote in an era of intense debate about moral foundations, political reform, and the legitimacy of “utility” as a standard for ethics. In his utilitarian writings, he argues that happiness—understood as pleasure and the absence of pain—is the only thing valued for its own sake; everything else (virtue, money, power, knowledge) is valued either as a means to happiness or as something that becomes part of what people experience as happiness. The claim functions as a foundational premise for the utilitarian “greatest happiness” principle.

Mill is stating a hedonistic thesis about ultimate value: only pleasure and the absence of pain are desirable as final ends, not merely as instruments. Other things people pursue can be genuinely desired, but their desirability is derivative—either because they lead to happiness or because, through habit and association, they become constituents of a happy life. The line is often read as reducing morality to sensation, but in Mill’s framework it supports a broader account of human flourishing, including “higher” pleasures (intellectual, moral, aesthetic) that he argues are qualitatively superior to merely bodily gratification. The quote thus anchors his attempt to give utilitarianism a defensible moral psychology and a robust conception of well-being.