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Updated: May 25, 2025
We can all force ourselves to express interest in the tastes and idiosyncrasies of others, we can ask questions, we can cultivate relations. The one way in which we can all of us improve, is to commit ourselves to a course of action from which we shall be ashamed to draw back. Many people who would otherwise drift into self-regarding ways do this when they marry.
To some persons the analysis of conduct, on which the whole doctrine of liberty rests, seems metaphysical and arbitrary. They are reluctant to admit there are any self-regarding acts at all. This reluctance implies a perfectly tenable proposition, a proposition which has been maintained by nearly all religious bodies in the world's history in their non-latitudinarian stages.
The rudimentary growth of moral sentiment must now have received a definite direction. As already observed, with the beginnings of infancy in the animal world there came the genesis in the parents of feelings and actions not purely self-regarding.
Our spirit of personal sovereignty and the rightful independence of the individual in all matters mainly self-regarding would indeed not tolerate any of the legal interferences with the private practices of individuals so common in your day. But the women would not find force necessary to correct the manners of the men.
Pleasures caused by persons indirectly correspond first to the 'popular or moral sanction, and are pleasures of 'amity, caused by the goodwill of individuals, and of a 'good name, caused by the goodwill of people in general; secondly, to 'political sanction, namely pleasures of 'power'; and thirdly, to the 'religious sanction, or pleasures of 'piety. All these are 'self-regarding pleasures. The pleasures caused directly by the pleasure of others are those of 'benevolence, and of malevolence.
We preach insurance to our neighbors as the core of self-regarding duty, and, if ever we feel a twinge of uneasiness, it is lest we, too, may have omitted in some particular to practice what we preach. The significance of this is unmistakable.
When in the conflict of two motives the will is thrown on the side of one of them and we make a volitional decision, we in some way add to the energy with which the idea of the one desired end maintains itself in opposition to its rival. The idea of the self, or self-consciousness, is able to play its great role in volition only in virtue of the self-regarding sentiment.
Government should, of course, give to the individual all such rights as are 'useful'; but it does not follow, without a reference to utility, that men should not be restrained even in 'self-regarding' conduct. Some men, women, and children require to be protected against the consequences of their own 'weakness, ignorance, or imprudence. Bentham adheres, that is, to the strictly empirical ground.
Intermediate between these two groups of feelings, the purely self-regarding and the purely sympathetic, and derived probably from the interaction of both, is another group, which may be called the semi-social group.
II. His division of the feelings is into calm and turbulent, each of these being again divided into self-regarding and benevolent. He affirms the existence of pure Disinterestedness, a calm regard for the most extended well-being. There are also turbulent passions of a benevolent kind, whose end is their simple gratification.
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