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'It is really amazing, as was said by Franklin or somebody else of his fashion of utilitarianism, 'that one of the passions which it is hardest to develop in man is the passion for his own material comfort and temporal well-being. Emerson has put on record this mental intoxication of the progressive people around him, with a pungency that might satisfy the Philistines themselves.
So simple a thing as a spur-rowel, in our days of utilitarianism, would seem to be incapable of variety, or at least unworthy to receive much attention. It was not so in past times, when workmen even delighted to adorn their own tools. The animals on one side, and in foliated scrolls, connect the design across the summit of the implement with a totally new composition on the opposite side.
"One hopes," Sogrange murmured, "that before they progress any further in utilitarianism, they will find some artist, one of themselves, to express all this." "In the meantime," Peter interrupted, "the waiter would like to know what we are going to drink. I've eaten such a confounded jumble of things of your ordering that I should like some champagne." "Who shall say that I am not generous!"
Later it led to any idealization of existing institutions as themselves the embodiment of reason. The purely internal morality of "meaning well," of having a good disposition regardless of what comes of it, naturally led to a reaction. This is generally known as either hedonism or utilitarianism.
Mr. J.S. Mill examines the basis of Ethics in a small work entitled Utilitarianism. This creed holds that actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness. By happiness is intended pleasure, and the absence of pain; by unhappiness, pain, and the privation of pleasure.
The charge of utilitarianism, which has been so broadly made, is, on the contrary, unjust.
So Utilitarianism defined goodness in terms of happiness and gave to conduct generally a grasping, greedy quality for which we have paid over and over again in the disappointments and disillusionments of an age, which, supposing itself to have discovered the true secret of well-being, found too much of its seeming happiness only Dead Sea fruit. They Bear a Bitter Fruit: the Reactions Against Them
But the real answer to this aristocratic argument which seeks to identify democracy with a drab utilitarianism may be found in action such as that of the Hungarian Commune whose name I decline to repeat. This Commune did just one of those acts that prove that a separate people has a separate personality; it threw something away. A man can throw a bank note into the fire.
But I am not an assailant of this description. Inasmuch as there undeniably are very many and very various kinds of pleasure, I of course allow Utilitarianism credit for common sense enough to acknowledge that those kinds are most worthy of pursuit which, from whatever cause, possess most value that those which are most precious are those most to be prized.
There is but one way in which Utilitarianism can even temporarily rebut the charge of fallacy, of which otherwise it must here stand convicted, and that is by renouncing all claim to be a new system of ethics, and not pretending to be more than a new system of nomenclature. And even so, it could not help contradicting, and thereby refuting itself.
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