There have been many reasons why not only Plato but mankind in general have been unwilling to acknowledge that “pleasure is the chief good.” Either they have heard a voice calling to them out of another world; or the life and example of some great teacher has cast their thoughts of right and wrong in another mould; or the word “pleasure” has been associated in their mind with merely animal enjoyment. They could not believe that what they were always striving to overcome, and the power or principle in them which overcame, were of the same nature. The pleasure of doing good to others and of bodily self-indulgence, the pleasures of intellect and the pleasures of sense, are so different:—Why then should they be called by a common name? Or, if the equivocal or metaphorical use of the word is justified by custom (like the use of other words which at first referred only to the body, and then by a figure have been transferred to the mind), still, why should we make an ambiguous word the cornerstone of moral philosophy? To the higher thinker the Utilitarian or hedonist mode of speaking has been at variance with religion and with any higher conception both of politics and of morals. It has not satisfied their imagination; it has offended their taste. To elevate pleasure, “the most fleeting of all things,” into a general idea seems to such men a contradiction. They do not desire to bring down their theory to the level of their practice. The simplicity of the “greatest happiness” principle has been acceptable to philosophers, but the better part of the world has been slow to receive it.
Before proceeding, we may make a few admissions which will narrow the field of dispute; and we may as well leave behind a few prejudices, which intelligent opponents of Utilitarianism have by this time “agreed to discard” (“Philebus” 14 D). We admit that Utility is coextensive with right, and that no action can be right which does not tend to the happiness of mankind; we acknowledge that a large class of actions are made right or wrong by their consequences only; we say further that mankind are not too mindful, but that they are far too regardless of consequences, and that they need to have the doctrine of utility habitually inculcated on them. We recognize the value of a principle which can supply a connecting link between Ethics and Politics, and under which all human actions are or may be included. The desire to promote happiness is no mean preference of expediency to right, but one of the highest and noblest motives by which human nature can be animated. Neither in referring actions to the test of utility have we to make a laborious calculation, any more than in trying them by other standards of morals. For long ago they have been classified sufficiently for all practical purposes by the thinker, by the legislator, by the opinion of the world. Whatever may be the hypothesis on which they are explained, or which in doubtful cases may be applied to the regulation of them, we are very rarely, if ever, called upon at the moment of performing them to determine their effect upon the happiness of mankind.
There is a theory which has been contrasted with Utility by Paley and others—the theory of a moral sense: Are our ideas of right and wrong innate or derived from experience? This, perhaps, is another of those speculations which intelligent men might “agree to discard.” For it has been worn threadbare; and either alternative is equally consistent with a transcendental or with an eudaemonistic system of ethics, with a greatest happiness principle or with Kant’s law of duty. Yet to avoid misconception, what appears to be the truth about the origin of our moral ideas may be shortly summed up as follows:—To each of us individually our moral ideas come first of all in childhood through the medium of education, from parents and teachers, assisted by the unconscious influence of language; they are impressed upon a mind which at first is like a waxen tablet, adapted to receive them; but they soon become fixed or set, and in after life are strengthened, or perhaps weakened by the force of public opinion. They may be corrected and enlarged by experience, they may be reasoned about, they may be brought home to us by the circumstances of our lives, they may be intensified by imagination, by reflection, by a course of action likely to confirm them. Under the influence of religious feeling or by an effort of thought, anyone beginning with the ordinary rules of morality may create out of them for himself ideals of holiness and virtue. They slumber in the minds of most men, yet in all of
