An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation
London, 1789
Abstract
This work is an extended introduction to a system of morals and legislation. It begins by presenting the principle of utility, which argues that the standard of right and wrong is the tendency of an act to increase or diminish the happiness of the person or group whose interest is in question. The principle of utility is contrasted with a number of other principles, including asceticism, sympathy and antipathy, and the theological principle. The work then turns to the concept of ‘sanctions’, arguing that pleasures and pains issue from four sources – the physical, the political, the moral, and the religious. In a lengthy discussion, the work considers how pleasures and pains can be measured in terms of their intensity, duration, certainty, proximity, fecundity, and purity. The work then turns to human actions, classifying them according to their nature, their consequences, their intentionality, and their consciousness. A chapter is devoted to motives, arguing that there is no such thing as a sort of motive that is bad in itself. Another chapter treats human dispositions, arguing that an individual’s disposition is harmful when it makes him more likely to perform acts of a pernicious tendency than ones that are beneficial. A key idea in this discussion is that the strength of the temptation to perform a harmful act is the ratio between the force of the seducing motives and the force of the tutelary motives. The work concludes with a chapter that distinguishes between private ethics and legislation, arguing that legislation ought to focus on the general happiness of the community, while private ethics concerns the happiness of an individual, guided by the principles of prudence, probity, and beneficence. – AI-generated abstract.
Quotes from this work
In looking over the catalogue of human actions (says a partizan of this principle) in order to determine which of them are to be marked with the seal of disapprobation, you need but to take counsel of your own feelings: whatever you find in yourself a propensity to condemn, is wrong for that very reason. For the same reason it is also meet for punishment: in what proportion it is adverse to utility, or whether it be adverse to utility at all, is a matter that makes no difference. In that same proportion also is it meet for punishment: if you hate much, punish much: if you hate little, punish little: punish as you hate. If you hate not at all, punish not at all: the fine feelings of the soul are not to be overborne and tyrannized by the harsh and rugged dictates of political utility.
Intense, long, certain, speedy, fruitful, pure—
Such marks in pleasures and in pains endure.
Such pleasures seek if private be thy end:
If it be public, wide let them extend.
Such pains avoid, whichever be thy view:
If pains must come, let them extend to few.
[T]he dictates of utility are neither more nor less than the dictates of the most extensive and enlightened (that is well-advised) benevolence.
Under the Gentoo and Mahometan religions, the interests of the rest of the animal creation seem to have met with some attention. Why have they not, universally, with as much as those of human creatures, allowance made for the difference in point of sensibility? Because the laws that are have been the work of mutual fear; a sentiment which the less rational animals have not had the same means as man has of turning to account. Why ought they not? No reason can be given. If the being eaten were all, there is very good reason why we should be suffered to eat such of them as we like to eat: we are the better for it, and they are never the worse. They have none of those long-protracted anticipations of future misery which we have. The death they suffer in our ands commonly is, and always may be, a speedier, and by that means a less painful one, than that which would await them in the inevitable course of nature. If the being killed were all, there is very good reason why we should be suffered to kill such as molest us; we should be the worse for their living, and they are never the worse for being dead. But is there any reason why we should be suffered to torment them? Not any that I can see. Are there any why we should not be suffered to torment them? Yes, several. See B. I. tit (Cruelty to animals.) The day has been, I grieve to say in many places it is not yet past, in which the greater part of the species, under the denomination of slaves, have been treated by the law exactly upon the same footing, as, in England for example, the inferior races of animals are still. The day may come, when the rest of the animal creation may acquire those rights which never could have been withholen from them but by the hand of tyranny. The French have already discovered that the blackness of the skin is no reason why a human being should be abandoned without redress to the caprice of a tormentor. It may come one day to be recognized, that the number of the legs, the villosity of the skin, or the termination of the os sacrum, are reasons equally insufficient for abandoning a sensitive being to the same fate. What else is it that should trace the insuperable line? Is it the faculty of reason, or, perhaps, the faculty of discourse? But a full-grown horse or dog, is beyond comparison a more rational, as well as a more conversible animal, than an infant of a day, or a week, or even a month, old. But suppose the case were otherwise, what would it avail? The question is not, Can they reason? Nor, Can they talk? But, Can they suffer?