ETHICS Mill explains how various notions connected with justice—desert, impartiality, equality—are to be reconciled with the utilitarian principle of expediency With regard to quality, he cites a maxim of Bentham’s, ‘everybody to count for one, nobody for more than one’—each person’s happiness is counted for exactly as much as another’s But he does not really address the problem inherent in the greatest happiness principle, that it leaves room for the misery of an individual to be discounted in order to increase the overall total of happiness in the community Indeed, in Utilitarianism Mill has little to say about distributive justice other than to note that those forms on offer vary from system to system: Some Communists consider it unjust that the produce of the labour of the community should be shared on any other principle than that of exact equality; others think it just that those should receive most whose wants are greatest; while others hold that those who work harder, or who produce more, or whose services are more valuable to the community, may justly claim a larger quota in the division of the produce And the sense of natural justice may be plausibly appealed to in behalf of every one of these opinions (U 301) Schopenhauer on Renunciation The ethical teaching of Schopenhauer is closely linked to his metaphysics, and in particular to the theses that the world of experience is illusory and that the true reality, the thing-in-itself, is the universal will We see individuals rising out of nothing, receiving their lives as a gift, and then suffering the loss of this gift in death, returning again to nothing But if we consider life philosophically we find that the will, the thing-in-itself in all phenomena, is not at all affected by birth and death It is not the individual, but only the species, that Nature cares for, and for the preservation of which she so earnestly strives, providing for it with the utmost prodigality The individual, on the contrary, neither has nor can have any value for Nature, for her kingdom is infinite time and infinite space, and within these infinite multiplicity of possible individuals Therefore she is always ready to let the individual fall, and hence it is not only exposed to destruction in a thousand ways by the most insignificant accident, but originally destined for it, and conducted towards it by Nature herself from the moment it has served its end of maintaining the species (WWI 276) 228