 4. Of what sort of proof the principle of utility is susceptible? It has already been remarked that questions of ultimate ends do not admit of proof in the ordinary acceptance of the term. To be incapable of proof by reasoning is common to all first principles to the first premises of our knowledge as well as to those of our conduct. But the former, being matters of fact, may be the subject of a direct appeal to the faculties which judge of fact, namely, our senses and our internal consciousness. Can an appeal be made to the same faculties on questions of practical ends? Or by what other faculty is cognizance taken of them? Questions about ends are, in other words, questions what things are desirable. The utilitarian doctrine is that happiness is desirable and the only thing desirable as an end. All are the things being only desirable as means to that end. What ought to be required of this doctrine? What conditions is it requisite that the doctrine should fulfill to make good its claim to be believed? The only proof capable of being given that an object is visible is that people actually see it. The only proof that a sound is audible is that people hear it, and so of the other sources of our experience. In like manner, I apprehend, the sole evidence it is possible to produce that anything is desirable is that people do actually desire it. If the end which the utilitarian doctrine proposes to itself were not, in theory and in practice, acknowledged to be an end, nothing could ever convince any person that it was so. No reason can be given why the general happiness is desirable, except that each person, so far as he believes it to be attainable, desires his own happiness. This, however, being a fact, we have not only all the proof which the case admits of, but all which it is possible to require. That happiness is a good, that each person's happiness is a good to that person, and the general happiness, therefore, a good to the aggregate of all persons. Happiness has made out its title as one of the ends of conduct, and, consequently, one of the criteria of morality. But it does not, by this alone, proved itself to be the sole criterion. To do that, it would seem, by the same rule, necessary to show, not only that people desire happiness, but that they never desire anything else. Now, it is palpable that they do desire things which, in common language, are decidedly distinguished from happiness. They desire, for example, virtue and the absence of vice, no less really than pleasure and the absence of pain. The desire of virtue is not as universal, but it is as authentic a fact as the desire of happiness. And hence the opponents of the utilitarian standard deem that they have a right to infer that there are other ends of human action besides happiness, and that happiness is not the standard of approbation and disapprobation. But does the utilitarian doctrine deny that people desire virtue, or maintain that virtue is not a thing to be desired, the very reverse? It maintains not only that virtue is to be desired, but that it is to be desired disinterestedly for itself. Whatever may be the opinion of utilitarian moralists as to the original conditions by which virtue is made virtue, however they may believe, as they do, that actions and dispositions are only virtuous because they promote another end than virtue. Yet this being granted, and it having been decided from considerations of this description what is virtuous, they not only place virtue at the very head of the things which are good as means to the ultimate end, but they also recognize as a psychological fact the possibility of its being to the individual a good in itself, without looking to any end beyond it, and hold that the mind is not in a right state, not in a state conformable to utility, not in the state most conducive to the general happiness, unless it does love virtue in this manner as a thing desirable in itself, even although in the individual instance it should not produce those other desirable consequences which it tends to produce, and on account of which it is held to be virtue. This opinion is not, in the smallest degree, a departure from the happiness principle. The ingredients of happiness are very various, and each of them is desirable in itself and not merely when considered as swelling and aggregate. The principle of utility does not mean that any given pleasure, as music for instance, or any given exemption from pain, as for example health, is to be looked on as means to a collective something termed happiness, and to be desired on that account. They are desired and desirable in and for themselves, besides being means they are a part of the end. Virtue, according to the utilitarian doctrine, is not naturally and originally part of the end, but it is capable of becoming so, and in those who live it disinterestedly it has become so, and is desired and cherished not as a means to happiness, but as a part of their happiness. To illustrate this further we may remember that virtue is not the only thing originally a means, and which, if it were not a means to anything else, would be and remain indifferent, but which, by association with what it is a means to, comes to be desired for itself, and that too with the utmost intensity. What, for example, shall we say of the love of money? There is nothing originally more desirable about money than about any heap of glittering pebbles. It's worth a solely that of the things which it will buy, the desires for other things than itself, which it is a means of gratifying. Yet the love of money is not only one of the strongest moving forces of human life, but money is, in many cases, desired in and for itself. The desire to possess it is often stronger than the desire to use it, and goes on increasing when all the desires which point to ends beyond it, to be compassed by it, are falling off. It may then be truly said that money is desired not for the sake of an end, but as part of the end. From being a means to happiness it has come to be itself a principal ingredient of the individual's conception of happiness. The same may be said of the majority of the great objects of human life, power, for example, or fame. Except that, to each of these, there is a certain amount of immediate pleasure annexed, which has at least the semblance of being naturally inherent in them, a thing which cannot be said of money. Still, however, the strongest natural attraction, both of power and of fame, is the immense aid they give to the attainment of our other wishes. And it is the strong association thus generated between them and all our objects of desire, which gives to the direct desire of them the intensity it often assumes, so as in some characters to surpass in strength all other desires. In these cases the means have become a part of the end, and a more important part of it than any of the things which they are means to. What was once desired as an instrument for the attainment of happiness has come to be desired for its own sake. In being desired for its own sake it is, however, desired as part of happiness. The person is made, or thinks he would be made, happy by its mere possession, and is made unhappy by failure to obtain it. The desire of it is not a different thing from the desire of happiness any more than the love of music or the desire of health. They are included in happiness. They are some of the elements of which the desire of happiness is made up. Happiness is not an abstract idea, but a concrete whole, and these are some of its parts. And the utilitarian standard sanctions and approves their being so. Life would be a poor thing, very ill provided with sources of happiness. If there were not this provision of nature by which things originally indifferent, but conducive to, or otherwise associated with, the satisfaction of our primitive desires, become in themselves sources of pleasure more valuable than the primitive pleasures, both in permanency, in the space of human existence that they are capable of covering, and even in intensity, virtue, according to the utilitarian conception, is a good of this description. There was no original desire of it or motive to it save its conduciveness to pleasure, and especially to protection from pain. But through the association thus formed it may be felt a good in itself, and desired as such with as great intensity as any other good, and with this difference between it and the love of money, of power or of fame, that all of these may and often do render the individual noxious to the other members of the society to which he belongs, whereas there is nothing which makes him so much a blessing to them as the cultivation of the disinterested love of virtue. And consequently the utilitarian standard, while it tolerates and approves those other acquired desires up to the point beyond which they would be more injurious to the general happiness than promotive of it, enjoins and requires the cultivation of the love of virtue up to the greatest strength possible, as being above all things important to the general happiness. It results from the preceding considerations that there is in reality nothing desired except happiness. Whatever is desired otherwise than as a means to some end beyond itself, and ultimately to happiness, is desired as itself a part of happiness, and is not desired for itself until it has become so. Those who desire virtue for its own sake desire it either because the consciousness of it is a pleasure, or because the consciousness of being without it is a pain, or for both reasons united. As in truth, the pleasure and pain seldom exist separately, but almost always together, the same person feeling pleasure in the degree of virtue attained and pain in not having attained more. If one of these gave him no pleasure and the other no pain, he would not love or desire virtue, or would desire it only for the other benefits which it might produce to himself or to persons whom he cared for. We have now then an answer to the question of what sort of proof the principle of utility is susceptible. If the opinion which I have now stated is psychologically true, if human nature is so constituted as to desire nothing which is not either a part of happiness, or a means of happiness, we can have no other proof, and we require no other, that these are the only things desirable. If so, happiness is the sole end of human action, and the promotion of it, the test by which to judge of all human conduct. From once it necessarily follows that it must be the criterion of morality since a part is included in the whole. And now to decide whether this is really so, whether mankind do desire nothing for itself, but that which is a pleasure to them, or of which the absence is a pain. We have evidently arrived at a question of fact and experience, dependent, like all similar questions, upon evidence. It can only be determined by practiced self-consciousness and self-observation, assisted by observation of others. I believe that these sources of evidence, impartially consulted, will declare that desiring a thing and finding it pleasant, aversion to it, and thinking of it as painful, are phenomena entirely inseparable or, rather, two parts of the same phenomenon. Instrictness of language, two different modes of naming the same psychological fact, that to think of an object as desirable unless for the sake of its consequences, and to think of it as pleasant, are one and the same thing, and that to desire anything except in proportion as the idea of it is pleasant, is a physical and metaphysical impossibility. So obvious does this appear to me that I expect it will hardly be disputed, and the objection made will be not that desire can possibly be directed to anything ultimately except pleasure and exemption from pain, but that the will is a different thing from desire, that a person of confirmed virtue or any other person whose purposes are fixed carries out his purposes without any thought of the pleasure he has in contemplating them, or expects to derive from their fulfillment, and persists in acting on them, even though these pleasures are much diminished by changes in his character or decay of his passive sensibilities, or are outweighed by the pains which the pursuit of the purposes may bring upon him, all this I fully admit and have stated it elsewhere as positively and emphatically as any one. Will, the active phenomenon, is a different thing from desire, the state of passive sensibility, and though originally an offshoot from it, may in time take root, and detach itself from the parent stock, so much so that in the case of a habitual purpose, instead of willing the thing because we desire it, we often desire it only because we will it. This, however, is but an instance of that familiar fact, the power of habit, and is no wise confined to the case of virtuous actions. Many indifferent things which men originally did from a motive of some sort they continue to do from habit. Sometimes this is done unconsciously, the consciousness coming only after the action, at other times with conscious volition, but volition which has become habitual, and is put in operation by the force of habit, in opposition perhaps to the deliberate preference as often happens with those who have contracted habits of vicious or hurtful indulgence. Third and last comes the case in which the habitual act of will in the individual instance is not in contradiction to the general intention prevailing at other times, but in fulfillment of it, as in the case of the person of confirmed virtue, and of all who pursue deliberately and consistently any determinate end. The distinction between will and desire thus understood is an authentic and highly important psychological fact, that the fact consists solely in this, that will, like all other parts of our constitution, is amenable to habit, and that we may will from habit, what we no longer desire for itself, or desire only because we will it. It is not the less true that will in the beginning is entirely produced by desire, including in that term the repelling influence of pain as well as the attractive one of pleasure. Let us take into consideration no longer the person who has a confirmed will to do right, but him in whom that virtuous will is still feeble, conquerable by temptation, and not to be fully relied on. By what means can it be strengthened? How can the will to be virtuous, where it does not exist in sufficient force, be implanted or awakened? Only by making the person desire virtue, by making him think of it in a pleasurable light, or of its absence in a painful one. It is by associating the doing right with pleasure, or the wrong with pain, or by eliciting and impressing and bringing home to the person's experience the pleasure naturally involved in the one, or the pain in the other, that it is possible to call forth that will to be virtuous which, when confirmed, acts without any thought of either pleasure or pain. Will is the child of desire, and passes out of the dominion of its parent only to come under that of a habit, that which is the result of habit affords no presumption of being intrinsically good, and there would be no reason for wishing that the purpose of virtue should become independent of pleasure and pain, were it not the influence of the pleasurable and painful associations, which prompt to virtue is not sufficiently to be depended on for unerring constancy of action until it has acquired the support of habit. Both in feeling and in conduct, habit is the only thing which imparts certainty, and it is because of the importance to others of being able to rely absolutely on one's feelings and conduct, and to oneself, of being able to rely on one's own, that the will to do right ought to be cultivated into this habitual independence. In other words, this state of will is a means to good, not intrinsically a good, and does not contradict the doctrine that nothing is a good to human beings but insofar as it is either itself pleasurable or a means of attaining pleasure or reverting pain. But if this doctrine be true, the principle of utility is proved, whether it is so or not, must now be left to the consideration of the thoughtful reader, and chapter four, this recording is in the public domain, Utilitarianism chapter five, this is a LibriVox recording, all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Utilitarianism by John Stuart Mill. Chapter five, On the Connection Between Justice and Utility. Part one. In all ages of speculation, one of the strongest obstacles to the reception of the doctrine that utility or happiness is the criterion of right and wrong has been drawn from the idea of justice. The powerful sentiment and apparently clear perception, which that word recalls with a rapidity and certainty resembling an instinct, have seemed to the majority of thinkers to point to an inherent quality in things, to show that the just must have an existence in nature as something absolute, generically distinct from every variety of the expedient and, in idea, opposed to it, though, as is commonly acknowledged, never in the long run disjoined from it in fact. In the case of this, as of our other moral sentiments, there is no necessary connection between the question of its origin and that of its binding force. That a feeling is bestowed on us by nature does not necessarily legitimate all its promptings. The feeling of justice might be a peculiar instinct and might yet require, like our other instincts, to be controlled and enlightened by a higher reason. If we have intellectual instincts leading us to judge in a particular way, as well as animal instincts that prompt us to act in a particular way, there is no necessity that the former should be more infallible in their sphere than a latter in theirs. It may as well happen that wrong judgments are occasionally suggested by those, as wrong actions by these. But though it is one thing to believe that we have natural feelings of justice, and another to acknowledge them as an ultimate criterion of conduct, these two opinions are very closely connected in point of fact. Mankind are always predisposed to believe that any subjective feeling, not otherwise accounted for, is a revelation of some object of reality. A present object is to determine whether the reality to which the feeling of justice corresponds is one which needs any such special revelation, whether the justice or injustice of an action, is a thing intrinsically peculiar and distinct from all its other qualities, or only a combination of certain of those qualities presented under a peculiar aspect. For the purpose of this inquiry it is practically important to consider whether the feeling itself of justice and injustice is sui generis, like our sensations of color and taste, or a derivative feeling formed by a combination of others. And this it is the more essential to examine, as people are in general pulling enough to allow that objectively the dictates of justice coincide with a part of the field of general expediency, but in as much as the subject of mental feeling of justice is different from that which commonly attaches to simple expediency, and, except in the extreme cases of the latter, is far more imperative in its demands. People find it difficult to see injustice only a particular kind or branch of general utility, and think that its superior binding force requires a totally different origin. To throw light upon this question it is necessary to attempt to ascertain what is the distinguishing character of justice, or of injustice. What is the quality, or whether there is any quality, attributed in common to all modes of conduct designated as unjust, for justice, like many other moral attributes, is best defined by its opposite, and distinguishing them from such modes of conduct as are disapproved, but without having that particular epithet of disapprobation applied to them. If in everything which men are accustomed to characterize as just or unjust, some one common attribute or collection of attributes is always present. We may judge whether this particular attribute or combination of attributes would be capable of gathering around it a sentiment of that peculiar character and intensity by virtue of the general laws of our emotional constitution, or whether the sentiment is inexplicable and requires to be regarded as a special provision of nature. If we find the former to be the case, we shall, in resolving this question, have resolved also the main problem. If the latter, we shall have to seek for some other mode of investigating it. To find the common attributes of a variety of objects, it is necessary to begin by surveying the objects themselves in the concrete. Let us therefore advert successively to the various modes of action and arrangements of human affairs which are classed by universal or widely spread opinion as just or as unjust. The things well known to excite the sentiments associated with those names are of a very multifarious character. I shall pass them rapidly in review without studying any particular arrangement. In the first place, it is mostly considered unjust to deprive anyone of his personal liberty, his property, or any other thing which belongs to him by law. Here, therefore, is one instance of the application of the terms just and unjust in a perfectly definite sense, namely, that it is just to respect unjust to violate the legal rights of anyone. But this judgment admits of several exceptions arising from the other forms in which the notion of justice and injustice present themselves. For example, the person who suffers the deprivation may, as the phrase is, have forfeited the rights which he is so deprived of, a case to which we shall return presently. But also, secondly, the legal rights of which he is deprived may be rights which ought not to have belonged to him. In other words, the law which confers on him these rights may be a bad law. When it is so, or when, which is the same thing for our purpose, it is supposed to be so, opinions will differ as to the justice or injustice of infringing it. Some maintain that no law, however bad, ought to be disobeyed by an individual citizen. That his opposition to it, if shown at all, should only be shown an endeavoring to get it altered by competent authority. This opinion, which condemns many of the most illustrious benefactors of mankind, and would often protect pernicious institutions against the only weapons which, in the state of things existing at the time, have any chance of succeeding against them, is defended by those who hold it on grounds of expediency, principally on that of the importance to the common interest of mankind of maintaining inviolate the sentiment of submission to law. Other persons, again, hold the directly contrary opinion that any law judged to be bad may blamelessly be disobeyed, even though it be not judged to be unjust, but only inexpedient. While others would confine the license of disobedience to the case of unjust laws, but again, some say that all laws which are inexpedient are unjust. Since every law imposes some restriction on the natural liberty of mankind, which restriction is an injustice unless legitimated by tending to their good. Among these diversities of opinion, it seems to be universally admitted that there may be unjust laws, and that law, consequently, is not the ultimate criterion of justice, but may give to one person a benefit or impose on another an evil which justice condemns. When, however, a law is thought to be unjust, it seems always to be regarded as being so in the same way in which a breach of law is unjust, namely, by infringing somebody's right, which, as it cannot in this case be a legal right, receives a different appellation and is called a moral right. We may say, therefore, that a second case of injustice consists in taking or withholding from any person that to which he has a moral right. Thirdly, it is universally considered just that each person should obtain that, whether good or evil, which he deserves, and unjust, that he should obtain a good or be made to undergo an evil which he does not deserve. This is, perhaps, the clearest and most emphatic form in which the idea of justice is conceived by the general mind. As it invokes the notion of dessert, the question arises, what constitutes dessert? Speaking in a general way, a person is understood to deserve good if he does right, evil if he does wrong, and in a more particular sense to deserve good from those to whom he does or has done good, and evil from those to whom he does or has done evil. The precept of returning good for evil has never been regarded as a case of the fulfillment of justice, but as one in which the claims of justice are waived in obedience to other considerations. Fourthly, it is confessedly unjust to break faith with anyone to violate an engagement either expressed or implied or disappoint expectations raised by your own conduct. At least, if we have raised those expectations knowingly and voluntarily, like the other obligations of justice already spoken of, this one is not regarded as absolute, but as capable of being overruled by a stronger obligation of justice on the other side, or by such conduct on the part of the person concerned as is deemed to absolve us from our obligation to him and to constitute a forfeiture of the benefit which he has been led to expect. Fifthly, it is by universal admission inconsistent with justice to be partial, to show favor or preference to one person over another in matters to which favor and preference do not properly apply. Impartiality, however, does not seem to be regarded as a duty in itself, but rather as instrumental to some other duty, for it is admitted that favor and preference are not always censurable, and indeed the cases in which they are condemned are rather the exception than the rule. A person would be more likely to be blamed than applauded for giving his family or friends no superiority in good offices over strangers when he could do so without violating any other duty. And no one thinks it unjust to seek one person in preference to another as a friend, connection, or companion. Impartiality, where rights are concerned, is of course obligatory, but this is involved in the more general obligation of giving to everyone his right. A tribunal, for example, must be impartial because it is bound to award without regard to any other consideration a disputed object to the one of two parties who has the right to it. There are other cases in which impartiality means being solely influenced by desert, as with those who, in the capacity of judges, preceptors, or parents, administer reward and punishment as such. There are cases, again, in which it means being solely influenced by consideration for the public interest, as in making a selection among candidates for a government employment. Impartiality, in short, as an obligation of justice, may be said to mean being exclusively influenced by the considerations which it is supposed ought to influence the particular case in hand, and resisting solicitation of any motives which prompt to conduct different from what those considerations would dictate. Nearly allied to the idea of impartiality is that of equality, which often enters as a component part, both into the conception of justice and into the practice of it, and, in the eyes of many persons, constitutes its essence. But in this, still more than any other case, the notion of justice varies in different persons, and always conforms in its variations, to their notion of utility. Each person maintains that equality is the dictate of justice, except where he thinks that expediency requires inequality. The justice of giving equal protection to the rights of all is maintained by those who support the most outrageous inequality in the rights themselves. Even in slave countries, it is theoretically admitted that the rights of the slave, such as they are, ought to be as sacred as those of the master, and that a tribunal which fails to enforce them with equal strictness is wanting injustice, while, at the same time, institutions which leave to the slave scarcely any rights to enforce are not deemed unjust because they are not deemed inexpedient. Those who think that utility requires distinctions of rank do not consider it unjust, that riches and social privileges should be unequally dispensed, but those who think this inequality inexpedient think it unjust also. Whoever thinks that government is necessary sees no injustice in as much inequality as is constituted by giving to the magistrate powers not granted to other people, even among those who hold leveling doctrines. There are differences of opinion about expediency. Some communists consider it unjust that the produce of the labor of the community should be shared on any other principle than that of exact equality. Others think it just that those should receive most whose wants are greatest, while others hold that those who work harder or who produce more or whose services are more valuable to the community may justly claim a larger quota in the division of the produce, and the sense of natural justice may be plausibly appealed to in behalf of every one of these opinions. Among so many diverse applications of the term justice, which yet is not regarded as ambiguous, it is a matter of some difficulty to seize the mental link which holds them together, and on which the moral sentiment adhering to the term essentially depends. Perhaps in this embarrassment some help may be derived from the history of the word, as indicated by its etymology. In most, if not in all languages, the etymology of the word, which corresponds to just, points distinctly to an origin connected with the ordinances of law. Justum is a form of usum that which has been ordered. Dichion comes directly from Dike, a suit at law. Chrest, from which came right and righteous, is synonymous with law. The courts of justice, the administration of justice, are the courts and the administration of law. La justice, in French, is the established term for judicature. I am not committing the fallacy, imputed, with some show of truth, to horn took, of assuming that word must still continue to mean what it originally meant. Etymology is slight evidence of what the idea now signified is. But the very best evidence of how it sprang up, there can, I think, be no doubt that the idémer, the primitive element in the formation of the notion of justice, was conformity to law. It constituted the entire idea among the Hebrews, up to the birth of Christianity, as might be expected in the case of a people whose laws attempted to embrace all subjects on which precepts were required, and to believe those laws to be a direct emanation from the supreme being. But other nations, and in particular the Greeks and Romans, who knew that their laws had been made originally and still continued to be made by men, were not afraid to admit that those men might make bad laws, might do by law the same things and from the same motives which have done by individuals without the sanction of law, would be called unjust. And hence, the sentiment of injustice gained to be attached, not to all violations of law, but only to violations of such laws as ought to exist, including such as ought to exist, but do not, and to laws themselves if supposed to be contrary to what ought to be law. In this manner, the idea of law and of its injunctions was still predominant in the notion of justice, even when the laws actually in force ceased to be accepted as the standard of it. It is true that mankind consider the idea of justice and its obligations as applicable to many things which neither are nor it is desired that they should be regulated by law. Nobody desires that laws should interfere with a whole detail of private life, yet everyone allows that in all daily conduct a person may and does show himself to be either just or unjust. But even here, the idea of the breach of what ought to be law still lingers in a modified shape. It would always give us pleasure, and chime in with our feelings of fitness, that acts which we deem unjust should be punished. Though we do not always think it expedient that this should be done by the tribunals, we forego that gratification on account of incidental inconveniences. We should be glad to see just conduct enforced and injustice repressed, even in the minutest details. If we were not, with reason, afraid of trusting the magistrate with so unlimited an amount of power over individuals. When we think that a person is bound injustice to do a thing, it is an ordinary form of language to say that he ought to be compelled to do it. We should be gratified to see the obligation enforced by anybody who had the power. If we see that its enforcement by law would be inexpedient, we lament the impossibility. We consider the impunity given to injustice as an evil, and strive to make amends for it by bringing a strong expression of our own and the public disapprobation to bear upon the offender. Thus the idea of legal constraint is still the generating idea of the notion of justice, though undergoing several transformations before that notion as it exists in an advanced state of society becomes complete. The above is, I think, a true account, as far as it goes, of the origin and progressive growth of the idea of justice. But we must observe that it contains as yet nothing to distinguish that obligation from moral obligation in general. For the truth is that the idea of penal sanction, which is the essence of law, enters not only into the conception of injustice but into that of any kind of wrong. We do not call anything wrong unless we mean to imply that a person ought to be punished in some way or other for doing it. If not by law, by the opinion of his fellow creatures, if not by opinion, by the reproaches of his own conscience. This seems the real turning point of the distinction between morality and simple expediency. It is a part of the notion of duty in every one of its forms that a person may rightfully be compelled to fulfill it. Duty is a thing which may be exacted from a person as one exacts a debt. Unless we think that it may be exacted from him, we do not call it his duty. Reasons of prudence or the interest of other people may militate against actually exacting it. But the person himself, it is clearly understood, would not be entitled to complain. There are other things, on the contrary, which we wish that people should do, which we like or admire them for doing, perhaps dislike or despise them for not doing, but yet admit that they are not bound to do. It is not a case of moral obligation. We do not blame them. That is, we do not think that they are proper objects of punishment. How we come by these ideas of deserving and not deserving punishment will appear, perhaps, in the sequel. But I think there is no doubt that this distinction lies at the bottom of the notions of right and wrong. That we call any conduct wrong or employ, instead, some other term of dislike or disparagement. According as we think that the person ought, or ought not, to be punished for it. And we say it would be right to do so and so, or merely that it would be desirable or laudable. According as we would wish to see the person whom it concerns compelled, or only persuaded and exhorted, to act in that manner, footnote. See this point enforced and illustrated by Professor Bain, in an admirable chapter, entitled The Ethical Emotions or The Moral Sense, of the second of the two treatises composing his elaborate and profound work on the mind, and footnote. This, therefore, being the characteristic difference which marks off not justice, but morality in general, from the remaining provinces of expediency and worthiness, the character is still to be sought, which distinguishes justice from other branches of morality. Now, it is known that ethical writers divide moral duties into two classes, denoted by the ill-chosen expressions, duties of perfect and of imperfect obligation. The latter being those in which, though the act is obligatory, the particular occasions of performing it are left to our choice, as in the case of charity, or beneficence, which we are indeed bound to practice, but not toward any definite person, nor at any prescribed time. In the more precise language of philosophic jurists, duties of perfect obligation are those duties in virtue of which a correlative right resides in some person or persons. Duties of imperfect obligation are those moral obligations which do not give birth to any right. I think it will be found that this distinction exactly coincides with that which exists between justice and the other obligations of morality. In our survey of the various popular acceptations of justice, the term appeared generally to involve the idea of a personal right, a claim on the part of one or more individuals. Like that what the law gives when it confers a proprietary or other legal right, whether the injustice consists in depriving a person of a possession, or in breaking faith with him, or in treating him worse than he deserves, or worse than other people who have no greater claims. In each case the supposition implies two things, a wrong done and some assignable person who is wronged. Injustice may also be done by treating a person better than others, but the wrong in this case is to his competitors, who are also assignable persons. It seems to me that this feature in the case, a right in some person, correlative to the moral obligation, constitutes the specific difference between justice and generosity or beneficence. Justice implies something which it is not only right to do and wrong not to do, but which some individual person can claim from us as his moral right. No one has a moral right to our generosity or beneficence because we are not morally bound to practice those virtues towards any given individual. And it will be found with respect to this, as to every correct definition, that the instances which seem to conflict with it are those which most confirm it. For if a moralist attempts, as some have done, to make out that mankind generally, though not any given individual, have a right to all the good we can do them, he at once, by that thesis, includes generosity and beneficence within the category of justice. He is obliged to say that our utmost exertions are due to our fellow creatures, thus assimilating them to a debt, or that nothing less can be a sufficient return for what society does for us. Thus classing the case as one of gratitude, both of which are acknowledged cases of justice. Wherever there is right, the case is one of justice and not of the virtue of beneficence. And whoever does not place the distinction between justice and morality in general, where we have now placed it, will be found to make no distinction between them at all, but to merge all morality and justice. Having thus endeavored to determine the distinctive elements which enter into the composition of the idea of justice, we are ready to enter on the inquiry whether the feeling which accompanies the idea is attached to it by a special dispensation of nature, or whether it could have grown up by any known laws out of the idea itself. And in particular, whether it can have originated in considerations of general expediency. And part one. Chapter five. This recording is in the public domain. Utilitarianism. Chapter five. Part two. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Utilitarianism by John Stuart Mill. Chapter five. On the connection between justice and utility. Part two. I conceive that the sentiment itself does not arise from anything which would commonly or correctly be termed an idea of expediency, but that, though the sentiment does not, whatever is moral in it does. We have seen that the two essential ingredients in the sentiment of justice are the desire to punish a person who has done harm, and the knowledge or belief that there is some definite individual or individuals to whom harm has been done. Now it appears to me that the desire to punish a person who has done harm to some individual is a spontaneous outgrowth from two sentiments, both in the highest degree natural, and which either are or resemble instincts. The impulse of self-defense, and the feeling of sympathy. It is natural to resent and to repel or retaliate, any harm done or attempted against ourselves or against those with whom we sympathize. The origin of this sentiment, it is not necessary here to discuss. Whether it be an instinct or a result of intelligence, it is we know common to all animal nature. For every animal tries to hurt those who have hurt or who it thinks are about to hurt itself or its young. Human beings on this point only differ from other animals in two particulars. First, in being capable of sympathizing, not solely with their offspring or, like some of the more noble animals, with some superior animal who is kind to them, but with all human and even with all sentient beings. Secondly, in having a more developed intelligence which gives a wider range to the whole of their sentiments, whether self-regarding or sympathetic. By virtue of his superior intelligence, even apart from his superior range of sympathy, a human being is capable of apprehending a community of interest between himself and the human society of which he forms apart, such that any conduct which threatens the security of the society generally is threatening to his own and calls forth his instinct, if instincted be, of self-defense. The same superiority of intelligence joined the power of sympathizing with human beings generally enables him to attach himself to the collective idea of his tribe, his country, or mankind, in such a manner that any act hurtful to them raises his instinct of sympathy and urges him to resistance. The sentiment of justice in that one of its elements which consists of the desire to punish is thus, I conceive, the natural feeling of retaliation or vengeance rendered by intellect and sympathy applicable to those injuries, that is, to those hurts which wound us through or in common with society at large. This sentiment in itself has nothing moral in it. What is moral is the exclusive subordination of it to the social sympathies, so as to what the human people wait on and obey their call. For the natural feeling would make us resent indiscriminately whatever anyone does that is disagreeable to us. But when moralized by the social feeling, it only acts in the directions conformable to the general good. Just persons resenting a hurt to society, though not otherwise a hurt to themselves, and not resenting a hurt to themselves, however painful, unless it be of the kind which society has a common interest with them in the repression of. It is no objection against this doctrine to say that when we feel our sentiment of justice outraged, we are not thinking of society at large or of any collective interest but only of the individual case. It is common enough, certainly, though the reverse of commendable, to feel resentment merely because we have suffered pain. But a person whose resentment is really a moral feeling, that is, who considers whether an act is blamable before he allows himself to resent it. Such a person, though he may not say expressly to himself that he is standing up for the interest of society, certainly does feel that he is asserting a rule which is for the benefit of others as well as for his own. If he is not feeling this, if he is regarding the act solely as it affects him individually, he is not consciously just. He is not concerning himself about the justice of his actions. This is admitted even by anti-utilitarian moralists. When Kant, as before remarked, propounds as the fundamental principle of morals, so act that thy rule of conduct might be adopted as a law by all rational beings, he virtually acknowledges that the interest of mankind collectively, or at least of mankind indiscriminately, must be in the mind of the agent when conscientiously deciding on the morality of the act. Otherwise he uses words without a meaning, for that a rule, even of utter selfishness, could not possibly be adopted by all rational beings, that there is any insuperable obstacle in the nature of things to its adoption, cannot be even plausibly maintained. To give any meaning to Kant's principle, the sense put upon it must be that we ought to shape our conduct by a rule which all rational beings might adopt with benefit to their collective interest. To recapitulate, the idea of justice supposes two things, a rule of conduct and a sentiment which sanctions the rule. The first must be supposed common to all mankind and intended for their good. The other, the sentiment, is a desire that punishment may be suffered by those who infringe the rule. There is involved in addition the conception of some definite person who suffers by the infringement, whose rights, to use the expression appropriated to the case, are violated by it. And the sentiment of justice appears to me to be the animal desire to repel or retaliate a hurt or damage to oneself or to those with whom one sympathizes, widened so as to include all persons by the human capacity of enlarged sympathy and the human conception of intelligent self-interest. From the latter elements the feeling derives its morality. From the former its peculiar impressiveness and energy of self-assertion. I have throughout treated the idea of a right residing in the injured person and violated by the injury. Not as a separate element in the composition of the idea and sentiment, but as one of the forms in which the other two elements clothe themselves. These elements are hurt to some assignable person or persons on the one hand and to demand for punishment on the other. An examination of our own minds I think will show that these two things include all that we mean when we speak of a violation of a right. When we call anything a person's right. We mean that he has a valid claim on society to protect him in the possession of it. Either by the force of law or by that of education and opinion. If he has what we consider a sufficient claim on whatever account to have something guaranteed to him by society we say that he has a right to it. If we desire to prove that anything does not belong to him by right we think this done as soon as it is admitted that society ought not to take measures securing it to him but should leave him to chance or to his own exertions. Thus a person is said to have a right to what he can earn in fair professional competition because society ought not to allow any other person to hinder him from endeavouring to earn in that manner as much as he can. But he has not a right to 300 a year though he may happen to be earning it because society has not called on to provide that he shall earn that sum. On the contrary if he owns 10,000 pounds 3% stock he has a right to 300 a year because society has come under an obligation to provide him with an income of that amount. To have a right then is I conceive to have something which society ought to defend me in the possession of. If the objector goes on to ask why it ought I can give him no other reason than general utility. If that expression does not seem to convey a sufficient feeling of the strength of the obligation nor to account for the peculiar energy of the feeling it is because there goes to the composition of the sentiment not a rational only but also an animal element the thirst for retaliation and this thirst derives its intensity as well as its moral justification from the extraordinarily important and impressive kind of utility which is concerned. The interest involved is that of security to everyone's feelings the most vital of all interests. All other earthly benefits are needed by one person not needed by another and many of them can if necessary be cheerfully foregone or replaced by something else but security no human being can possibly do without on it we depend for all our immunity from evil and for the whole value of all and every good beyond the passing moment since nothing with the gratification of the instant could be of any worth to us if we could be deprived of everything next instant by whoever was momentarily stronger than ourselves. Now this most indispensable of all necessaries after physical nutriment cannot be had unless the machinery for providing it is kept unintermittedly in active play. Our notion therefore of the claim we have on our fellow creatures to join in making safe for us the very groundwork of our existence gathers feelings around it so much more intense than those concerned in any of the more common cases of utility that the difference in degree as is often the case in psychology becomes a real difference in kind. The claim assumes the character of absoluteness that apparent infinity and incommensurability with all other considerations which constitute the distinction between the feeling of right and wrong and that of ordinary expediency and inexpediency. The feelings concerned are so powerful and we count so positively on finding a responsive feeling in others all being alike interested that ought and should grow into must and recognized indispensability becomes a moral necessity analogous to physical and often not inferior to it in binding force. If the preceding analysis or something resembling it be not the correct account of the notion of justice if justice be totally independent of utility and be a standard per se which the mind can recognize by simple introspection of itself it is hard to understand why that internal oracle is so ambiguous and why so many things appear either just or unjust according to the light in which they are regarded. We are continually informed that utility is an uncertain standard which every different person interprets differently and that there is no safety but in the immutable ineffacable and unmistakable dictates of justice which carry their evidence in themselves and are independent of the fluctuations of opinion. One would suppose from this that on questions of justice there could be no controversy that if we take that for our rule its application to any given case could leave us in as little doubt as a mathematical demonstration. So far is this from being the fact that there is as much difference of opinion and as much discussion about what is just as about what is useful to society. Not only have different nations and individuals different notions of justice but in the mind of one and the same individual justice is not some one rule principle or maxim but many which do not always coincide in their dictates and in choosing between which he is guided either by some extraneous standard or by his own personal predilections. For instance there are some who say that it is unjust to punish anyone for the sake of example to others that punishment is just only one intended for the good of the sufferer himself. Others maintain the extreme reverse contending that to punish persons who have attained years of discretion for their own benefit is despotism and injustice since if the matter to issue is solely their own good no one has a right to control their own judgment of it but that they may justly be punished to prevent evil to others this being the exercise of the legitimate right of self-defense. Mr. Owen again affirms that it is unjust to punish at all for the criminal did not make his own character his education and the circumstances which surrounded him have made him a criminal and for these he is not responsible. All these opinions are only plausible and so long as the question is argued as one of justice simply without going down to the principles which lie under justice and are the source of its authority I am unable to see how any of these reasoners can be refuted. For in truth every one of the three builds upon rules of justice confessedly true. The first appeals to the acknowledged injustice of singling out an individual and making him a sacrifice without his consent for other people's benefit. The second relies on the acknowledged justice of self-defense and the admitted injustice of forcing one person to conform to another's notions of what constitutes his good. The Owenite invokes the admitted principle that it is unjust to punish anyone for what he cannot help. Each is triumphant so long as he is not compelled to take into consideration any other maxims of justice than the one he has selected. But as soon as there are several maxims are brought face to face each disputant seems to have exactly as much to say for himself as the others. No one of them can carry out his own notion of justice without trampling upon another equally binding. These are difficulties. They have always been felt to be such. And many devices have been invented to turn rather than to overcome them. As a refuge from the last of the three many imagined what they called the freedom of the will fancying that they could not justify punishing a man whose will is in a thoroughly hateful state unless it be supposed to have come into that state through no influence of interior circumstances. To escape from the other difficulties of favorite contrivance has been the fiction of a contract whereby at some unknown period all the members of society engaged to obey the laws and consented to be punished for any disobedience to them. Thereby giving to their legislators the right which it is assumed they would not otherwise have had of punishing them either for their own good or for that of society. This happy thought was considered to get rid of the whole difficulty and to legitimate the inflection of punishment in virtue of another received maxim of justice Vol. non fit injuria that is not unjust which is done with the consent of the person who is supposed to be hurt by it. I need hardly remark that even if the consent were not a mere fiction this maxim is not superior in authority to the others which it is brought in to supersede. It is on the contrary an instructive specimen of the loose and irregular manner in which supposed principles of justice grow up. This particular one evidently came into use as a help to the coarse exigencies of courts of law which are sometimes obliged to be content with very uncertain presumptions on account of the greater evils which would often arise from any attempt on their part to cut finer. But even courts of law are not able to adhere consistently to the maxim for they allow voluntary engagements to be set aside on the ground of fraud and sometimes on that of mere mistake or misinformation. Again when the legitimacy of inflicting punishment is admitted how many conflicting conceptions of justice come to light in discussing the proper apportionment of punishments to offenses. No rule on the subject recommends itself so strongly to the primitive and spontaneous sentiment of justice as the Lex Talionis. An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. Though this principle of the Jewish and of the Muhammadan law has been generally abandoned in Europe as a practical maxim, there is, I suspect in most minds, a secret hankering after it, and one retribution accidentally falls on an offender in that precise shape. The general feeling of satisfaction evinced bears witness how natural is the sentiment to which this repayment in kind is acceptable. With many, the test of justice in penal inflection is that the punishment should be proportioned to the offense. Meaning that it should be exactly measured by the moral guilt of the culprit, whatever be their standard for measuring moral guilt. The consideration what amount of punishment is necessary to deter from the offense having nothing to do with the question of justice in their estimation. While there are others to whom that consideration is all in all, who maintain that it is not just, at least for man, to inflict on a fellow creature whatever may be his offenses, any amount of suffering beyond the least that will suffice to prevent him from repeating, and others from imitating, his misconduct. To take another example from a subject already once referred to, in cooperative industrial association, is it just or not that talent or skill should give a title to superior remuneration? On the negative side of the question it is argued that whoever does the best he can deserves equally well, and ought not injustice to be put in a position of inferiority for no fault of his own. That superior abilities have already advantages more than enough in the admiration they excite, the personal influence they command, and the internal sources of satisfaction attending them, without adding to these a superior share of the world's goods, and that society is bound in justice rather to make compensation to the less favored for this unmerited inequality of advantages than to aggravate it. On the contrary side it is contended that society receives more from the more efficient laborer, that his services being more useful, society owes him a larger return for them, that a greater share of the joint result is actually his work, and not to allow his claim to it is a kind of robbery, that if he is only to receive as much as others he can only be justly required to produce as much, and to give a smaller amount of time and exertion proportioned to his superior efficiency. Who shall decide between these appeals to conflicting principles of justice? Justice has in this case two sides to it, which it is impossible to bring into harmony, and the two disputants have chosen opposite sides. The one looks to what it is just that the individual should receive, the other to what it is just that the community should give. Each, from his own point of view, is unanswerable, and any choice between them on grounds of justice must be perfectly arbitrary. Social utility alone can decide the preference. How many again, and how irreconcilable are the standards of justice to which reference is made in discussing the repetition of taxation? One opinion is that payment to the state should be in numerical proportion to pecuniary means. Others think that justice dictates what they term graduated taxation, taking a higher percentage from those who have more to spare. In point of natural justice a strong case might be made for disregarding means altogether, and taking the same absolute sum, whenever it could be got, from everyone, as the subscribers to a mess or to a club all pay the same sum for the same privileges, whether they can all equally afford it or not. Since the protection, it might be said, of law and government is afforded to and is equally required by all, there is no injustice in making all buy it at the same price. It is reckoned justice, not injustice, that a dealer should charge to all customers the same price for the same article, not a price varying according to their means of payment. This doctrine, as applied to taxation, finds no advocates, because it conflicts so strongly with man's feelings of humanity and of social expediency. But the principle of justice which it invokes is as true and as binding as those which can be appealed to against it. Accordingly, it exerts a tacit influence on the line of defense employed for other modes of assessing taxation. People feel obliged to argue that the state does more for the rich man than for the poor, as a justification for its taking more from them, though this is, in reality, not true. For the rich would be far better able to protect themselves in the absence of law or government than the poor, and indeed would probably be successful in converting the poor into their slaves. Others, again, so far defer to the same conception of justice as to maintain that all should pay an equal capitation tax for the protection of their persons, these being of equal value to all, and an unequal tax for the protection of their property, which is unequal. To this, others reply that the all of one man is as valuable to him as the all of another. From these confusions there is no other mode of extrication than the utilitarian. Is, then, the difference between the just and the expedient a merely imaginary distinction? Have mankind been under a delusion in thinking that justice is a more sacred thing than policy, and that the latter ought only to be listened to after the former has been satisfied? By no means. The exposition we have given of the nature and origin of the sentiment recognizes a real distinction, and no one of those who profess the most sublime contempt for the consequences of actions as an element in their morality attaches more importance to the distinction than I do. While I dispute the pretensions of any theory which sets up an imaginary standard of justice not grounded on utility, I account the justice which is grounded on utility to be the chief part, and incomparably, the most sacred and binding part, of all morality. Justice is a name for certain classes of moral rules which concern the essentials of human well-being more nearly, and are therefore of more absolute obligation than any other rules for the guidance of life, and the notion which we have found to be of the essence of the idea of justice, that of a right residing in an individual implies and testifies to this more binding obligation. The moral rules which forbid mankind to hurt one another, in which we must never forget to include a wrongful interference with each other's freedom, are more vital to human well-being than any maxims, however important, which only point out the best mode of managing some department of human affairs. They have also the peculiarity that they are the main element in determining the whole of the social feelings of mankind. It is their observance which alone preserves peace among human beings. If obedience to them were not the rule and disobedience the exception, everyone would see in everyone else an enemy against whom he must be perpetually guarding himself. What is hardly less important, these are the precepts which mankind have the strongest and the most direct inducements for impressing upon one another. By merely giving to each other prudential instruction or exhortation, they may gain, or think they gain, nothing. In inculcating on each other the duty of positive beneficence, they have an unmistakable interest, but far less in degree. A person may possibly not need the benefits of others, but he always needs that they should not do him hurt. Thus the moralities which protect every individual from being harmed by others, either directly or by being hindered in his freedom of pursuing his own good, are at once those which he himself has most at heart and those which he has the strongest interest in publishing and enforcing by word and deed. It is by a person's observance of these that his fitness to exist as one of the fellowship of human beings is tested and decided. For on that depends his being a nuisance or not to those with whom he is in contact. Now it is these moralities primarily which compose the obligations of justice, the most marked cases of injustice, and those which give the tone to the feeling of repugnance which characterizes the sentiment, are acts of wrongful aggression or wrongful exercise of power over someone. The next are those which consist in wrongfully withholding from him something which is his due. In both cases, inflicting on him a positive hurt, either in the form of direct suffering or of the privation of some good which he had reasonable ground, either of a physical or of a social kind for counting upon. The same powerful motives which command the observance of these primary moralities enjoin the punishment of those who violate them and as the impulses of self-defense of defense of others and of vengeance are all called forth against such persons, retribution or evil for evil, becomes closely connected with the sentiment of justice and is universally included in the idea. Good for good is also one of the dictates of justice and this, though its social utility is evident and though it carries with it a natural human feeling has not at first sight that obvious connection with hurt or injury which existing in the most elementary cases of just and unjust is the source of the characteristic intensity of the sentiment. But the connection, though less obvious, is not less real. He who accepts benefits and denies a return of them when needed inflicts a real hurt by disappointing one of the most natural and reasonable of expectations and one which he must at least tacitly have encouraged. Otherwise the benefits would seldom have been conferred. The important rank among human evils and wrongs of the disappointment of expectation is shown in the fact that it constitutes the principal criminality of two such highly immoral acts as a breach of friendship and a breach of promise. Few hurts which human beings can sustain are greater and none wound more than when that on which they habitually and with full assurance relied fails them in the hour of need and few wrongs are greater than this mere withholding of good. None excite more resentment either in the person suffering or in a sympathizing spectator. The principal, therefore, of giving to each what they deserve that is good for good as well as evil for evil is not only included within the idea of justice as we have defined it but is a proper object of that intensity of sentiment which places the just, in human estimation, above the simply expedient. Most of the maxims of justice current in the world and commonly appealed to in its transactions are simply instrumental to carrying into effect the principles of justice which we have now spoken of. That a person is only responsible for what he has done voluntarily or could voluntarily have avoided that it is unjust to condemn any person unheard that the punishment ought to be proportioned to the offense and the like. Our maxims intended to prevent the just principle of evil for evil from being perverted to the infliction of evil without that justification. The greater part of these common maxims have come into use from the practice of courts of justice which have been naturally led to a more complete recognition and elaboration than was likely to suggest itself to others. Of the rules necessary to enable them to fulfill their double function of inflicting punishment when due and of awarding to each person is right. That first of judicial virtues impartiality is an obligation of justice partly for the reason last mentioned as being a necessary condition of the fulfillment of other obligations of justice. But this is not the only source of the exalted rank among human obligations of those maxims of equality and impartiality which both in popular estimation and in that of the most enlightened are included among the precepts of justice. In one point of view they may be considered as corollaries from the principles already laid down. If it is a duty to do to each according to his desserts returning good for good as well as repressing evil by evil it necessarily follows that we should treat all equally well when no higher duty forbids who have deserved equally well of us and that society should treat all equally well who have deserved equally well of it that is who have deserved equally well absolutely. This is the highest abstract standard of social and distributive justice toward which all institutions and the efforts of all virtuous citizens should be made in the utmost possible degree to converge. But this great moral duty rests upon a still deeper foundation being a direct emanation from the first principle of morals and not a mere logical corollary from secondary or derivative doctrines. It is involved in the very meaning of utility or the greatest happiness principle. That principle is a mere form of words without rational signification unless one person's happiness supposed equal in degree with the proper allowance made for kind is counted for exactly as much as in others. Those conditions being supplied, Bentham's dictum, everybody to count for one, nobody for more than one, might be written under the principle of utility as an explanatory commentary. This implication in the first principle of the utilitarian scheme of perfect impartiality between persons is regarded by Mr. Herbert Spencer in his social statics as a disproof of the pretensions of utility to be a sufficient guide to write. Since, he says, the principle of utility presupposes the anterior principle that everybody has an equal right to happiness. It may be more correctly described as supposing that equal amounts of happiness are equally desirable, whether felt by the same or different persons. This, however, is not a presupposition, not a premise needful to support the principle of utility, but the very principle itself. For what is the principle of utility if it be not that happiness and desirable are synonymous terms? If there is any anterior principle implied, it can be no other than this, that the truths of arithmetic are applicable to the valuation of happiness as of all other measurable quantities, per-en. Mr. Herbert Spencer, in a private communication on the subject of the preceding note, objects to being considered an opponent of utilitarianism, and states that he regards happiness as the ultimate end of morality, but deems that end only partially attainable by empirical generalizations from the observed results of conduct, and completely attainable only by deducing from the laws of life and the conditions of existence what kinds of action necessarily tend to produce happiness, and what kinds to produce unhappiness. With the exception of the word necessarily, I have no dissent to express from this doctrine, and omitting that word, I am not aware that any modern advocate for utilitarianism is of a different opinion. Bentham, certainly, to whom in the social statics Mr. Spencer particularly referred, is least of all writers chargeable with unwillingness to deduce the effect of actions unhappiness from the laws of human nature and the universal conditions of human life. The common charge against him is overlying too exclusively upon such deductions, and declining altogether to be bound by the generalizations from a specific experience, which Mr. Spencer thinks that utilitarians generally can find themselves too. My own opinion, and as I collect Mr. Spencer's, is that in ethics, as in all other branches of scientific study, the conciliance of the results of both these processes, each corroborating and verifying the other, is requisite to give to any general proposition the kind and degree of evidence which constitutes scientific proof. End paren, end footnote. The equal claim of everybody to happiness in the estimation of the moralist and of the legislator involves an equal claim to all the means of happiness, except in so far as the inevitable conditions of human life and the general interest in which that of every individual is included, set limits to the maximum, and those limits ought to be strictly construed. As every other maximum of justice, so this is by no means applied or held applicable universally. On the contrary, as I have already remarked, it bends to every person's ideas of social expediency. But in whatever case it is deemed applicable at all, it is held to be the dictate of justice. All persons are deemed to have a right to equality of treatment, except when some recognized social expediency requires the reverse, and hence all social inequalities which have ceased to be considered expedient, assume the character not of simple inexpediency, but of injustice, and appear so tyrannical that people are apt to wonder how they ever could have been tolerated, forgetful that they themselves, perhaps, tolerate other inequalities under an equally mistaken notion of expediency, the correction of which would make that which they approve seem quite as monstrous as what they have at last learned to condemn. The entire history of social improvement has been a series of transitions by which one cost a more institution after another, from being a supposed primary necessity of social existence, has passed into the rank of a universally stigmatized injustice and tyranny. So it has been with the distinctions of slaves and freemen, nobles and serfs, patricians and plebeians, and so it will be, and in part already is, with the aristocracies of color, race, and sex. It appears from what has been said that justice is a name for certain moral requirements which, regarded collectively, stand higher in the scale of social utility, and are therefore of more paramount obligation than any others, though particular cases may occur in which some other social duty is so important as to overrule any one of the general maxims of justice. Thus, to save a life, it may not only be allowable, but a duty to steal or take by force the necessary food or medicine, or to kidnap and compel to officiate the only qualified medical practitioner. In such cases, as we do not call anything justice which is not a virtue, we usually say not that justice must give way to some other moral principle, but that what is just in ordinary cases is by reason of that other principle not just in the particular case, by this useful accommodation of language. The character of indefeasibility attributed to justice is kept up, and we are saved from the necessity of maintaining that there can be laudable injustice. The considerations which have now been reduced resolve, I conceive, the only real difficulty in the utilitarian theory of morals. It has always been evident that all cases of justice are also cases of expediency. The difference is in the peculiar sentiment which attaches to the former as contradistinguished from the latter. If this characteristic sentiment has been sufficiently accounted for, if there is no necessity to assume for it any peculiarity of origin, if it is simply the natural feeling of resentment moralized by being made co-extensive with the demands of social good, and if this feeling not only does but ought to exist in all the classes of cases to which the idea of justice corresponds, that idea no longer presents itself as a stumbling block to the utilitarian ethics. Justice remains the appropriate name for certain social utilities which are vastly more important and therefore more absolute and imperative than any others are as a class, though not more so than others may be in particular cases, and which therefore ought to be as well as naturally are guarded by a sentiment, not only different in degree but also in kind, distinguished from the milder feeling which attaches to the mere idea of promoting human pleasure or convenience, at once by the more definite nature of its commands and by the sterner character of its sanctions. End Chapter 5 and Utilitarianism by John Stuart Mill. This recording is in the public domain.