My "Takeaway" from Last Evening's Meeting on "Utilitarianism" by John Stuart Mill

I would like to thank the eighteen participants in last night's discussion. We seem to have touched on all of Mill's parries against the anti-Utilitarians. Mill wrote the piece in order to refute, one by one, the major objections to Utilitarian philosophy. Those objections are:

(1) Won't most people inevitably prefer the lower pleasures to the higher ones?
(2) How do you measure pleasure and pain?
(3) What good is self-sacrifice if it doesn't help anyone?
(4) Isn't Utilitarianism "too high a standard for humanity"?
(5) Is Utilitarianism a "godless doctrine"?
(6) Is it a merely an expedient one?
(7) Who has time to "calculate and weigh effects" of actions?

Mill can be tough sledding. He writes extremely systematically and to miss the point of one sentence in his singularly long-winded paragraphs is to miss his entire argument. I commend all of you for persevering.