Mill's discussion of self-regarding action and the principle of liberty, in On Liberty, coheres with the metaethical account of right and wrong given in Utilitarianism. In both discussions, Mill maintains a fundamental asymmetry between self and other, corresponding to the distinction between the spheres of morality and prudence. In so doing, Mill follows the view of commonsense morality that it is foolish but not wrong to act self-destructively, and prudent but not obligatory to maximize one's own happiness even when that would be optimific. Thus Mill flouts the strict form of impartiality entailed by the metaphor of the impartial spectator, on which it makes no moral difference whose happiness or unhappiness is affected by an act. In Mill's view, morality does not treat everyone's happiness in exactly the same way (as deontic impartiality demands) even though everyone's happiness is of equal value (as axiological impartiality requires). Mill expressly rejects deontic impartiality by claiming that self-regarding but harmful acts are not amenable to moral disapprobation and that we cannot be compelled for our own good.
Any moral view that treats the agent's interests differently from others, in determining the rightness or wrongness of an action, does not adopt strict, deontic impartiality. And any view that rejects deontic impartiality is not consequentialist in the standard sense, widely adopted by philosophers and motivated in the first section of this essay. Yet Mill was a classical Utilitarian, not just because he was called a utilitarian by his contemporaries and identified himself as one, but because his moral theory is teleological and accepts the principle of utility as its axiology. Although my interpretation of Mill's view makes him a highly unorthodox utilitarian, this is in keeping with Mill's self-description, quoted earlier. Moreover, it agrees with the assessment of Mill's contemporaries such as John Grote (who termed Mill a neo-utilitarian) and Henry Sidgwick (who called Mill a "conservative utilitarian" for holding that moral rules issue in genuine obligations). Hence, there is no paradox involved in claiming that there is logical space for a utilitarian theory that rejects consequentialism, and there is considerable evidence for ascribing such a view to that most renowned, though not most orthodox, utilitarian, John Stuart Mill.
(Daniel Jacobson, "Utilitarianism Without Consequentialism: The Case of John Stuart Mill," The Philosophical Review 117 [April 2008]: 159-91, at 190-1 [italics in original; footnote omitted])
Note from KBJ: Shorter Jacobson: If you define "consequentialism" in such a way that John Stuart Mill is not a consequentialist, then you get the unsurprising result that John Stuart Mill is not a consequentialist.
