They are desired and desirable in and for themselves besides being means, they are a part of the end. The principle of utility does not mean that any given pleasure, as music, for instance, or any given exemption from pain, as for example health, is to be looked upon as means to a collective something termed happiness, and to be desired on that account. The ingredients of happiness are very various, and each of them is desirable in itself, and not merely when considered as swelling an aggregate. This opinion is not, in the smallest degree, a departure from the Happiness principle. Whatever may be the opinion of utilitarian moralists as to the original conditions by which virtue is made virtue, however they may believe (as they do) that actions and dispositions are only virtuous because they promote another end than virtue, yet this being granted, and it having been decided, from considerations of this description, what is virtuous, they not only place virtue at the very head of the things which are good as means to the ultimate end, but they also recognize as a psychological fact the possibility of its being, to the individual, a good in itself, without looking to any end beyond it and hold, that the mind is not in a right state, not in a state conformable to Utility, not in the state most conducive to the general happiness, unless it does love virtue in this manner-as a thing desirable in itself, even although, in the individual instance, it should not produce those other desirable consequences which it tends to produce, and on account of which it is held to be virtue. It maintains not only that virtue is to be desired, but that it is to be desired disinterestedly, for itself. Happiness has made out its title as one of the ends of conduct, and consequently one of the criteria of morality.īut does the utilitarian doctrine deny that people desire virtue, or maintain that virtue is not a thing to be desired? The very reverse. This, however, being a fact, we have not only all the proof which the case admits of, but all which it is possible to require, that happiness is a good, that each person's happiness is a good to that person, and the general happiness, therefore, a good to the aggregate of all persons. No reason can be given why the general happiness is desirable, except that each person, so far as he believes it to be attainable, desires his own happiness. If the end which the utilitarian doctrine proposes to itself were not, in theory and in practice, acknowledged to be an end, nothing could ever convince any person that it was so. In like manner, I apprehend, the sole evidence it is possible to produce that anything is desirable, is that people do actually desire it. The only proof that a sound is audible, is that people hear it and so of the other sources of our experience. The only proof capable of being given that an object is visible, is that people actually see it.
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