ABSTRACT
The ‘Utilitarians’, (a word which is not English, and a name disclaimed we believe by some of those who once gloried in bearing it, and who did it the greatest honour) are a set who only exist as separated from 557the rest of mankind by virtue of a blunder. If many of them had not employed the word utility in two senses, and hopped from one to the other as best suited their momentary convenience, they never would have appeared as either so singular or so important as some people for a year or two were inclined to hold them. Utility in its popular, and as we believe, its legitimate sense, means nothing more than applicability to the practical and ordinary affairs of life, as distinguished from its enjoyments and its higher duties. As the foundation of a moral theory, it signifies that the only standard of right and wrong, is the view taken by the agent, of the consequences of his actions in the production of pleasure and pain. The few persons who maintain that utility in the former of these senses, is alone or chiefly worthy of attention, assume a ground so narrow and repulsive, that they have little chance of converting the world. The others announce as the basis of a system of morals, a notion, which, in truth, excludes all real morality, arising from the operation of the conscience. It is, however, in this larger signification, that utility has been employed as a watchword by the ablest of those who have shouted it among the astonished vulgar. We have of course a very firm conviction, that they profess a grievous and most pernicious error; but we are far from thinking that all those who do so are consciously unprincipled; and the very article before us, the first in the XXIIIrd number of the Westminster Review, is an evidence of more than average honesty in the writer.
