misapprehensions of utilitarian ethics, even those which are so
obvious and gross that it might appear impossible for any person of
candour and intelligence to fall into them; since persons, even of
considerable mental endowments, often give themselves so little
trouble to understand the bearings of any opinion against which they
entertain a prejudice, and men are in general so little conscious of
this voluntary ignorance as a defect, that the vulgarest
misunderstandings of ethical doctrines are continually met with in the
deliberate writings of persons of the greatest pretensions both to
high principle and to philosophy. We not uncommonly hear the
doctrine of utility inveighed against as a godless doctrine. If it
be necessary to say anything at all against so mere an assumption,
we may say that the question depends upon what idea we have formed
of the moral character of the Deity. If it be a true belief that God
desires, above all things, the happiness of his creatures, and that
this was his purpose in their creation, utility is not only not a
godless doctrine, but more profoundly religious than any other. If
it be meant that utilitarianism does not recognise the revealed will
of God as the supreme law of morals, I answer, that a utilitarian
who believes in the perfect goodness and wisdom of God, necessarily
believes that whatever God has thought fit to reveal on the subject of
morals, must fulfil the requirements of utility in a supreme degree.
But others besides utilitarians have been of opinion that the
Christian revelation was intended, and is fitted, to inform the hearts
and minds of mankind with a spirit which should enable them to find
for themselves what is right, and incline them to do it when found,
rather than to tell them, except in a very general way, what it is;
and that we need a doctrine of ethics, carefully followed out, to
interpret to us the will God. Whether this opinion is correct or
not, it is superfluous here to discuss; since whatever aid religion,
either natural or revealed, can afford to ethical investigation, is as
open to the utilitarian moralist as to any other. He can use it as the
testimony of God to the usefulness or hurtfulness of any given
course of action, by as good a right as others can use it for the
indication of a transcendental law, having no connection with
usefulness or with happiness.

  Again, Utility is often summarily stigmatised as an immoral doctrine
by giving it the name of Expediency, and taking advantage of the
popular use of that term to contrast it with Principle. But the
Expedient, in the sense in which it is opposed to the Right, generally
means that which is expedient for the particular interest of the agent
himself; as when a minister sacrifices the interests of his country to
keep himself in place. When it means anything better than this, it
means that which is expedient for some immediate object, some
temporary purpose, but which violates a rule whose observance is
expedient in a much higher degree. The Expedient, in this sense,
instead of being the same thing with the useful, is a branch of the
hurtful. Thus, it would often be expedient, for the purpose of getting
over some momentary embarrassment, or attaining some object
immediately useful to ourselves or others, to tell a lie. But inasmuch
as the cultivation in ourselves of a sensitive feeling on the
subject of veracity, is one of the most useful, and the enfeeblement
of that feeling one of the most hurtful, things to which our conduct
can be instrumental; and inasmuch as any, even unintentional,
deviation from truth, does that much towards weakening the
trustworthiness of human assertion, which is not only the principal
support of all present social well-being, but the insufficiency of
which does more than any one thing that can be named to keep back
civilisation, virtue, everything on which human happiness on the
largest scale depends; we feel that the violation, for a present
advantage, of a rule of such transcendant expediency, is not
expedient, and that he who, for the sake of a convenience to himself
or to some other individual, does what depends on him to deprive
mankind of the good, and inflict upon them the evil, involved in the
greater or less reliance which they can place in each other's word,
acts the part of one of their worst enemies. Yet that even this
rule, sacred as it is, admits of possible exceptions, is
acknowledged by all moralists; the chief of which is when the
withholding of some fact (as of information from a malefactor, or of
bad news from a person dangerously ill) would save an individual
(especially an individual other than oneself) from great and unmerited
evil, and when the withholding can only be effected by denial. But
in order that the exception may not extend itself beyond the need, and
may have the least possible effect in weakening reliance on
veracity, it ought to be recognised, and, if possible, its limits
defined; and if the principle of utility is good for anything, it must
be good for weighing these conflicting utilities against one
another, and marking out the region within which one or the other
preponderates.

  Again, defenders of utility often find themselves called upon to
reply to such objections as this- that there is not time, previous to
action, for calculating and weighing the effects of any line of
conduct on the general happiness. This is exactly as if any one were
to say that it is impossible to guide our conduct by Christianity,
because there is not time, on every occasion on which anything has
to be done, to read through the Old and New Testaments. The answer
to the objection is, that there has been ample time, namely, the whole
past duration of the human species. During all that time, mankind have
been learning by experience the tendencies of actions; on which
experience all the prudence, as well as all the morality of life,
are dependent. People talk as if the commencement of this course of
experience had hitherto been put off, and as if, at the moment when
some man feels tempted to meddle with the property or life of another,
he had to begin considering for the first time whether murder and
theft are injurious to human happiness. Even then I do not think
that he would find the question very puzzling; but, at all events, the
matter is now done to his hand.