Desirable as an end

The utilitarian objection is short and uncomfortable. In chapter 4 of Utilitarianism Mill argues that happiness is the only thing desirable as an end, and that whatever else people value, money, power, virtue itself, they value as a means to happiness or because it has become part of it. Virtue may be desired for itself, he says, but only because it has come to be "a part of the end." There is no third category of things that matter in the dark, whether or not anyone's life is better for them.

Apply that to your judgement. If exercising it makes your life go better, then it matters, and Mill would defend it fiercely. But that is an empirical claim about you, and the motion asks about the case where the assistant's choices are better and you are happier. There the utilitarian wants to know what, precisely, has been lost. Not welfare; that went up. Not virtue as a part of happiness; that is measured by the happiness. What is left is the word "yours," and Mill's challenge is that "yours" is not a value. It is a possessive pronoun.

The Stoic and the virtue ethicist both answer that a life can go better by every measure and still be a life you did not lead. The utilitarian reply is that going better by every measure was what a good life meant, and the feeling of loss is one more datum to enter, not a trump card outside the sum.