similar sacrifices? Would it be made if he thought that his
renunciation of happiness for himself would produce no fruit for any
of his fellow creatures, but to make their lot like his, and place
them also in the condition of persons who have renounced happiness?
All honour to those who can abnegate for themselves the personal
enjoyment of life, when by such renunciation they contribute
worthily to increase the amount of happiness in the world; but he
who does it, or professes to do it, for any other purpose, is no
more deserving of admiration than the ascetic mounted on his pillar.
He may be an inspiriting proof of what men can do, but assuredly not
an example of what they should.

  Though it is only in a very imperfect state of the world's
arrangements that any one can best serve the happiness of others by
the absolute sacrifice of his own, yet so long as the world is in that
imperfect state, I fully acknowledge that the readiness to make such a
sacrifice is the highest virtue which can be found in man. I will add,
that in this condition the world, paradoxical as the assertion may be,
the conscious ability to do without happiness gives the best
prospect of realising, such happiness as is attainable. For nothing
except that consciousness can raise a person above the chances of
life, by making him feel that, let fate and fortune do their worst,
they have not power to subdue him: which, once felt, frees him from
excess of anxiety concerning the evils of life, and enables him,
like many a Stoic in the worst times of the Roman Empire, to cultivate
in tranquillity the sources of satisfaction accessible to him, without
concerning himself about the uncertainty of their duration, any more
than about their inevitable end.

  Meanwhile, let utilitarians never cease to claim the morality of
self devotion as a possession which belongs by as good a right to
them, as either to the Stoic or to the Transcendentalist. The
utilitarian morality does recognise in human beings the power of
sacrificing their own greatest good for the good of others. It only
refuses to admit that the sacrifice is itself a good. A sacrifice
which does not increase, or tend to increase, the sum total of
happiness, it considers as wasted. The only self-renunciation which it
applauds, is devotion to the happiness, or to some of the means of
happiness, of others; either of mankind collectively, or of
individuals within the limits imposed by the collective interests of
mankind.

  I must again repeat, what the assailants of utilitarianism seldom
have the justice to acknowledge, that the happiness which forms the
utilitarian standard of what is right in conduct, is not the agent's
own happiness, but that of all concerned. As between his own happiness
and that of others, utilitarianism requires him to be as strictly
impartial as a disinterested and benevolent spectator. In the golden
rule of Jesus of Nazareth, we read the complete spirit of the ethics
of utility. To do as you would be done by, and to love your
neighbour as yourself, constitute the ideal perfection of
utilitarian morality. As the means of making the nearest approach to
this ideal, utility would enjoin, first, that laws and social
arrangements should place the happiness, or (as speaking practically
it may be called) the interest, of every individual, as nearly as
possible in harmony with the interest of the whole; and secondly, that
education and opinion, which have so vast a power over human
character, should so use that power as to establish in the mind of
every individual an indissoluble association between his own happiness
and the good of the whole; especially between his own happiness and
the practice of such modes of conduct, negative and positive, as
regard for the universal happiness prescribes; so that not only he may
be unable to conceive the possibility of happiness to himself,
consistently with conduct opposed to the general good, but also that a
direct impulse to promote the general good may be in every
individual one of the habitual motives of action, and the sentiments
connected therewith may fill a large and prominent place in every
human being's sentient existence. If the, impugners of the utilitarian
morality represented it to their own minds in this its, true
character, I know not what recommendation possessed by any other
morality they could possibly affirm to be wanting to it; what more
beautiful or more exalted developments of human nature any other
ethical system can be supposed to foster, or what springs of action,
not accessible to the utilitarian, such systems rely on for giving
effect to their mandates.

  The objectors to utilitarianism cannot always be charged with
representing it in a discreditable light. On the contrary, those among
them who entertain anything like a just idea of its disinterested
character, sometimes find fault with its standard as being too high
for humanity. They say it is exacting too much to require that
people shall always act from the inducement of promoting the general
interests of society. But this is to mistake the very meaning of a
standard of morals, and confound the rule of action with the motive of
it. It is the business of ethics to tell us what are our duties, or by
what test we may know them; but no system of ethics requires that
the sole motive of all we do shall be a feeling of duty; on the
contrary, ninety-nine hundredths of all our actions are done from
other motives, and rightly so done, if the rule of duty does not
condemn them. It is the more unjust to utilitarianism that this
particular misapprehension should be made a ground of objection to it,
inasmuch as utilitarian moralists have gone beyond almost all others
in affirming that the motive has nothing to do with the morality of
the action, though much with the worth of the agent. He who saves a
fellow creature from drowning does what is morally right, whether
his motive be duty, or the hope of being paid for his trouble; he
who betrays the friend that trusts him, is guilty of a crime, even
if his object be to serve another friend to whom he is under greater
obligations.