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

It is truly a whimsical supposition that, if mankind were agreed
in considering utility to be the test of morality, they would remain
without any agreement as to what is useful, and would take no measures
for having their notions on the subject taught to the young, and
enforced by law and opinion. There is no difficulty in proving any
ethical standard whatever to work ill, if we suppose universal
idiocy to be conjoined with it; but on any hypothesis short of that,
mankind must by this time have acquired positive beliefs as to the
effects of some actions on their happiness; and the beliefs which have
thus come down are the rules of morality for the multitude, and for
the philosopher until he has succeeded in finding better. That
philosophers might easily do this, even now, on many subjects; that
the received code of ethics is by no means of divine right; and that
mankind have still much to learn as to the effects of actions on the
general happiness, I admit, or rather, earnestly maintain. The
corollaries from the principle of utility, like the precepts of
every practical art, admit of indefinite improvement, and, in a
progressive state of the human mind, their improvement is
perpetually going on.

But to consider the rules of morality as improvable, is one thing;
to pass over the intermediate generalisations entirely, and
endeavour to test each individual action directly by the first
principle, is another. It is a strange notion that the
acknowledgment of a first principle is inconsistent with the admission
of secondary ones. To inform a traveller respecting the place of
his. ultimate destination, is not to forbid the use of landmarks and
direction-posts on the way. The proposition that happiness is the
end and aim of morality, does not mean that no road ought to be laid
down to that goal, or that persons going thither should not be advised
to take one direction rather than another. Men really ought to leave
off talking a kind of nonsense on this subject, which they would
neither talk nor listen to on other matters of practical
concernment. Nobody argues that the art of navigation is not founded
on astronomy, because sailors cannot wait to calculate the Nautical
Almanack. Being rational creatures, they go to sea with it ready
calculated; and all rational creatures go out upon the sea of life
with their minds made up on the common questions of right and wrong,
as well as on many of the far more difficult questions of wise and
foolish. And this, as long as foresight is a human quality, it is to
be presumed they will continue to do. Whatever we adopt as the
fundamental principle of morality, we require subordinate principles
to apply it by; the impossibility of doing without them, being
common to all systems, can afford no argument against any one in
particular; but gravely to argue as if no such secondary principles
could be had, and as if mankind had remained till now, and always must
remain, without drawing any general conclusions from the experience of
human life, is as high a pitch, I think, as absurdity has ever reached
in philosophical controversy.