 Green focuses on Mill’s explanation of the preferences of competent judges for modes of existence that employ their higher faculties. Higher pleasures are those things (e.g., activities) that a competent judge would prefer, even if they produced less pleasure in her than the lower pleasures would (Mill Utilitarianism II 5 in Works X 211). But why should competent judges prefer activities that they often find less pleasurable unless they believe that these activities are more valuable? Mill explains the fact that competent judges prefer activities that exercise their rational capacities by appeal to their sense of dignity (Utilitarianism II 5 in Works X 212). Green thinks that the dignity passage undermines hedonism (PE §164–66, 171). In claiming that it is the dignity of a life in which the higher capacities are exercised and the competent judge’s sense of her own dignity that explains her preference for those activities, Mill implies that her preferences reflect judgments about the value that these activities have independently of their being the object of desire or the source of pleasure. We take pleasure in these activities because we recognize their value; they are not valuable, because they are pleasurable.