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Updated: May 31, 2025
Whatever might be the suspicions of their antagonists, they could only be accused of a tendency. The book amounts to an admission that the suspicions were well founded. Utilitarianism, the Utilitarians clearly recognised, logically implied the rejection of all theology.
We should be logically compelled to acquiesce in the vociferations of some continental utilitarians, who would banish altogether the senseless words "duty" and "merit;" and then, one important influence which has aided human progress being withdrawn, we should be reduced to hope that in this case the maxim cessante causa cessat ipse effectus might through some incalculable accident fail to apply.
In philosophy as in politics, the Utilitarians boasted of being thoroughgoing Radicals, and hated compromises which to them appeared to be simply obstructive. I need not elaborate a point which will meet us again.
Each of the ancient sects of philosophy held some tenet on this subject which served for a distinguishing badge. The summum bonum of the Utilitarians, as far as we can judge from the passage which we are now considering, is the not being hanged. That it is an unpleasant thing to be hanged, we most willingly concede to our brother.
Utilitarians have attempted to show that the human conscience commends precisely those actions which tend to secure general happiness and that the notions of justice and virtue prevailing in any age vary with its social economy and the prizes it is able to attain.
A similar assumption that a rough sketch of a science is the same thing as its definite constitution is characteristic of the Utilitarians in general. A scientific spirit is most desirable; but the Utilitarians took a very short cut to scientific certainty. Though appealing to experience, they reach formulæ as absolute as any 'intuitionist' could desire. What is the logical process implied?
With such frigid utilitarians it would be vain to argue; but this question, at least, may be put in return: Why should the ancient glories of Greece and Rome form a large portion of the academic studies of our youth? why should the evidences of their arts and their arms be held precious in museums, and similar evidences of ancient cultivation be despised because they pertain to another nation?
Beneath the political controversies there was therefore a set of problems to be answered; and the Utilitarian answer defines their distinction from Radicals of a different and, as they would have said, unphilosophical school. What, then, was the view really taken by the Utilitarians of these underlying problems?
The younger Utilitarians regarded it, says J. S. Mill, as 'a masterpiece of political wisdom'; while Macaulay taunts them for holding it to be 'perfect and unanswerable. This famous article is a terse and energetic summary of the doctrine implied in Bentham's Works, but there obscured under elaboration of minute details.
The favourite doctrine of association, by which the Utilitarians explained unselfishness, is only admissible as accounting for modifications, such as are due to education and example, but 'presupposes the existence of certain principles which are common to all mankind. The evidence of such principles is established by a long and discursive psychological discussion.
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