Does Intention Matter?

In his Utilitarianism, John Stuart Mill proposes a moral philosophy that demands the following principle – do that act which will result in the greatest amount of pleasure/happiness and the least amount of pain. It sounds simple enough and is very appealing, because everyone wants to experience more pleasure and less pain. However, I do not find such a consequentialist philosophy to be sufficient.

A troubling issue I have with Mill is his theory that morality comes more from results rather than from intentions. This surely cannot be the criteria for virtue. To illustrate this, I will pose the idea of self-sacrifice. Mill seems to argue that a sacrifice is only virtuous if it leads to success and happiness. I can easily think of scenarios where seemingly less moral people could act in a way in which they would somehow unintentionally enable better results than seemingly more moral people. For example, say a good man loves his family and his community, so when a war comes around, he wants to sacrifice his life to defend his village. So, he valiantly fights in the war until he is killed, only for his village to be eventually destroyed. Now, say another man is an evil psychopath, charged with several murders, fights for another village that is being attacked. However, he is military against his will, and fights he wants freedom to kill as many people as he can, eventually until his village is saved as a result of his murderous killing spree. Would Mill argue that the second man is morally more virtuous? The second man’s action resulted in more happiness and less pain (for his own community at least ha), but I doubt his character is superior to the first man’s.