utilitarianism and wet-nursing

Should infants nurse only at their mother's breast? A little-known passage from John Stuart Mill's Utilitarianism addresses the age-old question.

Whether one is to wet-nurse or to nurse one's own infant, this poor philosopher cannot say. Aristides of Sparta declared the wet-nurse a parasite. Bentham encouraged the practice. That an infant must be nursed is indisputable, but the method cannot be reconciled to any theorem or axiom of the moral calculus.

Better ask a Kantian.





[thirty-fifth in a series]