Description
Utilitarianism
CHAPTER I.
GENERAL REMARKS.
There are few circumstances among those which make up the present
condition of human knowledge, more unlike what might have been expected,
or more significant of the backward state in which speculation on the
most important subjects still lingers, than the little progress which
has been made in the decision of the controversy respecting the
criterion of right and wrong. From the dawn of philosophy, the question
concerning the _summum bonum_, or, what is the same thing, concerning
the foundation of morality, has been accounted the main problem in
speculative thought, has occupied the most gifted intellects, and
divided them into sects and schools, carrying on a vigorous warfare
against one another. And after more than two thousand years the same
discussions continue, philosophers are still ranged under the same
contending banners, and neither thinkers nor mankind at large seem
nearer to being unanimous on the subject, than when the youth Socrates
listened to the old Protagoras, and asserted (if Plato’s dialogue be
grounded on a real conversation) the theory of utilitarianism against
the popular morality of the so-called sophist.
It is true that similar confusion and uncertainty, and in some cases
similar discordance, exist respecting the first principles of all the
sciences, not excepting that which is deemed the most certain of them,
mathematics; without much impairing, generally indeed without impairing
at all, the trustworthiness of the conclusions of those sciences. An
apparent anomaly, the explanation of which is, that the detailed
doctrines of a science are not usually deduced from, nor depend for
their evidence upon, what are called its first principles. Were it not
so, there would be no science more precario