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Updated: April 30, 2025
The remedy, according to the Utilitarians, is to raise the sense of individual responsibility, to make a man dependent upon his own exertions, and to give him security that he will enjoy their fruit. Let government give education on one hand and security on the other, and equality will follow in due time.
Almost the whole civilised world has now adopted the secret Ballot; so that it would seem that Mill was wrong, and that he was wrong in spite of the fact that, as against the consistent utilitarians, his description of average human motive was right.
The Reason must be restored to its rightful supremacy over the Understanding, which had been working its wicked will since the days of Locke and eighteenth century. The problem is a wide one. I must be content to remark the inevitable antithesis. Whether enemies or allies, the Utilitarians and their antagonists were separated by a gulf which could not be bridged for the time.
Meanwhile, let utilitarians never cease to claim the morality of self-devotion as a possession which belongs by as good a right to them, as either to the Stoic or to the Transcendentalist. The utilitarian morality does recognise in human beings the power of sacrificing their own greatest good for the good of others. It only refuses to admit that the sacrifice is itself a good.
The very children, grimy little utilitarians like their parents, only went abroad in the flood of golden sunshine, in order to rifle the hill pastures of their wild strawberries. Virginia was no longer a child to ignore all this. It was an embittering, imprisoning thought from which she could not escape even in the most radiant vision of May woods.
The systematic reticence which the Utilitarians held to be necessary prevented this contrast from showing itself distinctly on the surface. The Utilitarians, however, though they avoided such outspoken scepticism as would startle the public, indicated quite sufficiently to the initiated their essential position.
One does not hate as long as one disesteems, but only when one esteems equal or superior. Ye Utilitarians ye, too, love the UTILE only as a VEHICLE for your inclinations, ye, too, really find the noise of its wheels insupportable! One loves ultimately one's desires, not the thing desired. The vanity of others is only counter to our taste when it is counter to our vanity.
But no matter how heroic the poet may prove himself to be, in his character of soldier, or how efficient as a man of affairs, this does not settle his quarrel with the utilitarians, for they are not to be pacified by a recital of the poet's avocations. They would remind him that the world claims the whole of his time.
That Mr. Spencer's theory could not account for the intuitional sacredness now attached to individual moral rules and principles, without accounting a fortiori for the general claim of the greatest happiness principle over us as the final moral intuition -which is conspicuously contrary to the fact, as not even the utilitarians themselves plead any instinctive or intuitive sanction for their great principle.
Agreeing with Utilitarians in the belief that happiness is the end, and that the conduct called moral is simply the best means of attaining it, he of course does not assert that there is a morality which is absolute in the sense of being true out of relation to human existence.
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