J.F. Stephen’s on Fraternity and Mill’s Universal Love

In chapter 3 of Utilitarianism, J.S. Mill forcefully presents and defends the idea of a universal love for humanity proclaimed to be the definitive and final sanction of morality; a love that constitutes (in Mill’s words) “a natural basis of sentiment for utilitarian morality”. Once we knowledge that general happiness constitutes the ethical standard, only that sentiment can afford us the strength to carry out this utilitarian morality and constitute the adequate sanction for this demanding standard. Again, in Mill’s words, “this firm foundation is that of the social feelings of mankind; the desire to be in unity with our fellow creatures, which is already a powerful principle in human nature, and happily one of those which tend to become stronger, without express inculcation, from the influences of advancing civilization. The social state is at once so natural, so necessary, and so habitual to man, that... he never conceives himself otherwise than as a member of a body; and this association is riveted more and more as mankind are further removed from the state of savage independence” (p.284). This progressive fortification of social ties does not only give everyone a practical interest in the well-being of everyone else, but “it also leads him to identify his feelings more and more with their good”, and identification that will take on, in the extreme case, the character of a religion: “If we now suppose this feeling of unity to be taught as a religion, and the whole force of education, of institutions, and of opinion, as it was once in the case of religion, to make every person to grow up from infancy surrounded on all sides both by the profession and by