 The perfectionist reading offers one reconciliation of Mill’s disparate claims. It says that happiness consists in the exercise of higher capacities, that the preferences of competent judges are evidential of superior value, and that higher pleasures are objective pleasures. There is no doubt that his initial formulation of his conception of happiness in terms of pleasure misleadingly leads us to expect greater continuity between his own brand of utilitarianism and the hedonistic utilitarianism of the Radicals than we actually find. However, this perfectionist interpretation seems to afford the most consistent reading of Mill’s disparate claims about happiness (also see Saunders 2017).