I always thought of utilitarianism as a somewhat capitalistic hence individualistic philosophy. I seem to remember reading John Stuart Mill's On Liberty in college and passages about the right of the British to sell opium to the Chinese, the right of free speech and freedom absent interference with others, which would suggest libertarianism. But I am reading Mill's Utilitarianism for a project on business ethics and am struck by this passage, which sounds to me like advocacy of social justice education (p. 28):
...education and opinion, which have so vast a power over human character, should so use that power as to establish in the mind of every individual an indissoluble association between his own happiness and the good of the whole; especially between his own happiness and the practice of such modes of conduct, negative and positive, as regard for the universal happiness prescribes; so that not only he may be unable to conceive the possibility of happiness himself, consistently with conduct opposed to the general good, but also that a direct impulse to promote the general good may be in every individual one of the habitual motives of action, and the sentiments connected therewith may fill a large and prominent place in every human being's sentient existence.
That is social justice education in a nutshell. One can see in Mill the close link between utilitarian capitalism and socialism; and the ease with which American capitalists in the past two years have wavered between them.
