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

immediately useful to ourselves or others, to tell a lie. But inasmuch
as the cultivation in ourselves of a sensitive feeling on the
subject of veracity, is one of the most useful, and the enfeeblement
of that feeling one of the most hurtful, things to which our conduct
can be instrumental; and inasmuch as any, even unintentional,
deviation from truth, does that much towards weakening the
trustworthiness of human assertion, which is not only the principal
support of all present social well-being, but the insufficiency of
which does more than any one thing that can be named to keep back
civilisation, virtue, everything on which human happiness on the
largest scale depends; we feel that the violation, for a present
advantage, of a rule of such transcendant expediency, is not
expedient, and that he who, for the sake of a convenience to himself
or to some other individual, does what depends on him to deprive
mankind of the good, and inflict upon them the evil, involved in the
greater or less reliance which they can place in each other's word,
acts the part of one of their worst enemies. Yet that even this
rule, sacred as it is, admits of possible exceptions, is
acknowledged by all moralists; the chief of which is when the
withholding of some fact (as of information from a malefactor, or of
bad news from a person dangerously ill) would save an individual
(especially an individual other than oneself) from great and unmerited
evil, and when the withholding can only be effected by denial. But
in order that the exception may not extend itself beyond the need, and
may have the least possible effect in weakening reliance on
veracity, it ought to be recognised, and, if possible, its limits
defined; and if the principle of utility is good for anything, it must
be good for weighing these conflicting utilities against one
another, and marking out the region within which one or the other
preponderates.

Again, defenders of utility often find themselves called upon to
reply to such objections as this- that there is not time, previous to
action, for calculating and weighing the effects of any line of
conduct on the general happiness. This is exactly as if any one were
to say that it is impossible to guide our conduct by Christianity,
because there is not time, on every occasion on which anything has
to be done, to read through the Old and New Testaments. The answer
to the objection is, that there has been ample time, namely, the whole
past duration of the human species. During all that time, mankind have
been learning by experience the tendencies of actions; on which
experience all the prudence, as well as all the morality of life,
are dependent. People talk as if the commencement of this course of
experience had hitherto been put off, and as if, at the moment when
some man feels tempted to meddle with the property or life of another,
he had to begin considering for the first time whether murder and
theft are injurious to human happiness. Even then I do not think
that he would find the question very puzzling; but, at all events, the
matter is now done to his hand.