John Stuart Mill, answered from the texts and cited to the page.
The objection most commonly levelled against utilitarianism — that it is a doctrine worthy only of swine, fit for creatures who know nothing beyond appetite — rests on a confusion about what human beings actually are.1 The Epicureans saw this clearly enough: the comparison of their doctrine to a beast's life is felt as degrading precisely because a beast's pleasures do not satisfy a human being's conceptions of happiness.1
Human beings possess faculties more elevated than the animal appetites, and once made conscious of them, do not regard anything as happiness which does not include their gratification.1 Now, utilitarian writers have generally tried to defend mental pleasures over bodily ones by pointing to their circumstantial advantages — their greater permanency, safety, uncostliness.1
This line of argument is sound as far as it goes, but it concedes too much. It is quite compatible with the principle of utility to recognise that some kinds of pleasure are more desirable and more valuable than others — and it would be absurd that while quality is considered in estimating all other things, the estimation of pleasures should depend on quantity alone.1
What distinguishes higher from lower pleasures, then, is not merely that the higher last longer or cost less. The lower pleasures have a fixed limit at which they stop; they do not, in their own nature, stimulate the imagination to rise above known reality.2 The higher pleasures — those of the intellect, the feelings and imagination, the moral sentiments — represent attributes in a completeness and perfection of which our ordinary experience presents us with no example, and they therefore engage the active power of imagination in a way the lower pleasures, left to their own nature, cannot.2
The criterion for deciding between them is the judgment of the competent judge: one acquainted with both classes of pleasure, equally susceptible to each.3 From that verdict there can be no appeal. On a question of which mode of existence is most grateful to the feelings, the judgment of those qualified by knowledge of both must be admitted as final — and the experienced consistently declare the pleasures of the higher faculties to be preferable in kind, apart from the question of intensity, to those of which the animal nature alone is susceptible.3
It may be questioned whether anyone who has remained equally susceptible to both has ever knowingly and calmly preferred the lower; though many have broken down in an ineffectual attempt to combine both.3 The charge that this is circular — that those who prefer the lower are simply defined out of competence — misses what I am actually doing.4
I am calling attention to a range of motives qualitatively different from simple pleasure and confirmed by observation as operative in human nature: pride, the love of liberty and personal independence, and most properly what I call a sense of dignity.4 It is this sense of dignity, not a gerrymandered definition, that leads a being of higher faculties to refuse to sink into a lower category — and that refusal, I maintain, leads to the greatest happiness.4
The practical upshot is this: the standard of utilitarianism is not the agent's own greatest happiness but the greatest amount of happiness altogether; and whatever doubt there may be whether a noble character is always the happier for its nobleness, there can be no doubt that it makes other people happier, and that the world is immensely a gainer by it.3
Better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied — not because dissatisfaction is pleasant, but because what Socrates has and the fool lacks is the very faculty by which the comparison is made.4
Human beings have faculties more elevated than the animal appetites, and when once made conscious of them, do not regard anything as happiness which does not include their gratification... It is quite compatible with the principle of utility to recognise the fact, that some kinds of pleasure are more desirable and more valuable than others. It would be absurd that while, in estimating all other things, quality is considered as well as quantity, the estimation of pleasures should be supposed to depend on quantity alone.What Utilitarianism Is, p. 263
This does not happen with what we call our lower pleasures. To them there is a fixed limit at which they stop... the lower pleasure has, exceptionally, risen into the region of the aesthetic, and has superadded to itself an element of pleasure of a character and quality not belonging to its own nature.Miscellaneous Writings, p. 220
When, therefore, those feelings and judgment declare the pleasures derived from the higher faculties to be preferable in kind, apart from the question of intensity, to those of which the animal nature, disjoined from the higher faculties, is susceptible, they are entitled on this subject to the same regard.What Utilitarianism Is, p. 265
What Mill is actually doing is calling attention to a range of motives qualitatively different from simple pleasure, and confirmed by observation as operative in human nature... most properly described as proceeding from 'a sense of dignity.' And this in fact, says Mill, leads to the greatest happiness.UTILITARIANISM, pp. 32–33