in popular estimation and in that of the most enlightened, are
included among the precepts of justice. In one point of view, they may
be considered as corollaries from the principles already laid down. If
it is a duty to do to each according to his deserts, returning good
for good as well as repressing evil by evil, it necessarily follows
that we should treat all equally well (when no higher duty forbids)
who have deserved equally well of us, and that society should treat
all equally well who have deserved equally well of it, that is, who
have deserved equally well absolutely. This is the highest abstract
standard of social and distributive justice; towards which all
institutions, and the efforts of all virtuous citizens, should be made
in the utmost possible degree to converge.

  But this great moral duty rests upon a still deeper foundation,
being a direct emanation from the first principle of morals, and not a
mere logical corollary from secondary or derivative doctrines. It is
involved in the very meaning of Utility, or the Greatest Happiness
Principle. That principle is a mere form of words without rational
signification, unless one person's happiness, supposed equal in degree
(with the proper allowance made for kind), is counted for exactly as
much as another's. Those conditions being supplied, Bentham's
dictum, "everybody to count for one, nobody for more than one,"
might be written under the principle of utility as an explanatory
commentary.* The equal claim of everybody to happiness in the
estimation of the moralist and the legislator, involves an equal claim
to all the means of happiness, except in so far as the inevitable
conditions of human life, and the general interest, in which that of
every individual is included, set limits to the maxim; and those
limits ought to be strictly construed. As every other maxim of
justice, so this is by no means applied or held applicable
universally; on the contrary, as I have already remarked, it bends
to every person's ideas of social expediency. But in whatever case
it is deemed applicable at all, it is held to be the dictate of
justice. All persons are deemed to have a right to equality of
treatment, except when some recognised social expediency requires
the reverse. And hence all social inequalities which have ceased to be
considered expedient, assume the character not of simple inexpediency,
but of injustice, and appear so tyrannical, that people are apt to
wonder how they ever could have. been tolerated; forgetful that they
themselves perhaps tolerate other inequalities under an equally
mistaken notion of expediency, the correction of which would make that
which they approve seem quite as monstrous as what they have at last
learnt to condemn. The entire history of social improvement has been a
series of transitions, by which one custom or institution after
another, from being a supposed primary necessity of social
existence, has passed into the rank of a universally stigmatised
injustice and tyranny. So it has been with the distinctions of
slaves and freemen, nobles and serfs, patricians and plebeians; and so
it will be, and in part already is, with the aristocracies of
colour, race, and sex.

  * This implication, in the first principle of the utilitarian scheme,
of perfect impartiality between persons, is regarded by Mr. Herbert
Spencer (in his Social Statics) as a disproof of the pretensions of
utility to be a sufficient guide to right; since (he says) the
principle of utility presupposes the anterior principle, that
everybody has an equal right to happiness. It may be more correctly
described as supposing that equal amounts of happiness are equally
desirable, whether felt by the same or by different persons. This,
however, is not a pre-supposition; not a premise needful to support
the principle of utility, but the very principle itself; for what is
the principle of utility, if it be not that "happiness" and
"desirable" are synonymous terms? If there is any anterior principle
implied, it can be no other than this, that the truths of arithmetic
are applicable to the valuation of happiness, as of all other
measurable quantities.

  [Mr. Herbert Spencer, in a private communication on the subject of
the preceding Note, objects to being considered an opponent of
utilitarianism, and states that he regards happiness as the ultimate
end of morality; but deems that end only partially attainable by
empirical generalisations from the observed results of conduct, and
completely attainable only by deducing, from the laws of life and
the conditions of existence, what kinds of action necessarily tend
to produce happiness, and what kinds to produce unhappiness. What
the exception of the word "necessarily," I have no dissent to
express from this doctrine; and (omitting that word) I am not aware
that any modern advocate of utilitarianism is of a different
opinion. Bentham, certainly, to whom in the Social Statics Mr. Spencer
particularly referred, is, least of all writers, chargeable with
unwillingness to deduce the effect of actions on happiness from the
laws of human nature and the universal conditions of human life. The
common charge against him is of relying too exclusively upon such
deductions, and declining altogether to be bound by the
generalisations from specific experience which Mr. Spencer thinks that
utilitarians generally confine themselves to. My own opinion (and,
as I collect, Mr. Spencer's) is, that in ethics, as in all other
branches of scientific study, the consilience of the results of both
these processes, each corroborating and verifying the other, is
requisite to give to any general proposition the kind degree of
evidence which constitutes scientific proof.]

  It appears from what has been said, that justice is a name for
certain moral requirements, which, regarded collectively, stand higher
in the scale of social utility, and are therefore of more paramount
obligation, than any others; though particular cases may occur in
which some other social duty is so important, as to overrule any one
of the general maxims of justice. Thus, to save a life, it may not
only be allowable, but a duty, to steal, or take by force, the
necessary food or medicine, or to kidnap, and compel to officiate, the