"It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied." Really? 'Cause we all know where that got him - drinking hemlock and dead. But seriously, Mill has not yet, as of Chapter III, dealt with my greatest concern about utilitarianism: that the greatest happiness and least pain for the greatest number is in no deterministic way calculable. Remember that chaos theory craze of the 90s? You know, Jeff Goldblum in Jurassic Park explaining there is no way to predict which way the water will drip down his hand, or the butterfly flapping its wings in Japan, causing a hurricane in the Carribean, to mention but two pop culture references of thousands. Well, trite as this meme became, it did so because there is a kernel of robust validity to it. Just as we have immense trouble fully accounting for initial conditions or predicting the future states of dynamic systems such as weather, so too predicting the consequences of our actions so as to maximize happiness would seem nigh unto impossible, given all the unforeseen collateral effects all our actions have. The economists have a word for this: externalities. If you've never come across this concept, it is a fine implement to add to your intellectual toolbox: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality

Granted systems like weather can be probabilistically predicted, at least in the short term. So I can see the value of utilitarianism in that sense. But I think taking onboard cognitively the pragmatism of the sort Dewey formulated is the morality I'm personally going to espouse. To my understanding, he saw value in all the moral heuristics we have examined in this course, and, depending on the context, would figure out what each would recommend, then decide on a case by case basis. Virtue ethics, it seems to me, is best at the individual level when dealing with interpersonal issues but not technological issues. At the collective level, I see Kant's kingdom of ends as an inspiring ideal to strive for, yet a probabilistic hedonic calculus should be performed to see if there are clear, proximal consequences that should override the categorical imperative. A messy solution, I know, but hey, it is a messy world out there.