"Utilitarianism" - читать интересную книгу автора (Mill John Stuart)

similar sacrifices? Would it be made if he thought that his
renunciation of happiness for himself would produce no fruit for any
of his fellow creatures, but to make their lot like his, and place
them also in the condition of persons who have renounced happiness?
All honour to those who can abnegate for themselves the personal
enjoyment of life, when by such renunciation they contribute
worthily to increase the amount of happiness in the world; but he
who does it, or professes to do it, for any other purpose, is no
more deserving of admiration than the ascetic mounted on his pillar.
He may be an inspiriting proof of what men can do, but assuredly not
an example of what they should.

Though it is only in a very imperfect state of the world's
arrangements that any one can best serve the happiness of others by
the absolute sacrifice of his own, yet so long as the world is in that
imperfect state, I fully acknowledge that the readiness to make such a
sacrifice is the highest virtue which can be found in man. I will add,
that in this condition the world, paradoxical as the assertion may be,
the conscious ability to do without happiness gives the best
prospect of realising, such happiness as is attainable. For nothing
except that consciousness can raise a person above the chances of
life, by making him feel that, let fate and fortune do their worst,
they have not power to subdue him: which, once felt, frees him from
excess of anxiety concerning the evils of life, and enables him,
like many a Stoic in the worst times of the Roman Empire, to cultivate
in tranquillity the sources of satisfaction accessible to him, without
concerning himself about the uncertainty of their duration, any more
than about their inevitable end.

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. A sacrifice
which does not increase, or tend to increase, the sum total of
happiness, it considers as wasted. The only self-renunciation which it
applauds, is devotion to the happiness, or to some of the means of
happiness, of others; either of mankind collectively, or of
individuals within the limits imposed by the collective interests of
mankind.

I must again repeat, what the assailants of utilitarianism seldom
have the justice to acknowledge, that the happiness which forms the
utilitarian standard of what is right in conduct, is not the agent's
own happiness, but that of all concerned. As between his own happiness
and that of others, utilitarianism requires him to be as strictly
impartial as a disinterested and benevolent spectator. In the golden
rule of Jesus of Nazareth, we read the complete spirit of the ethics
of utility. To do as you would be done by, and to love your