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

to the amount of general intelligence; for whether there be any
other ground of moral obligation than the general happiness or not,
men do desire happiness; and however imperfect may be their own
practice, they desire and commend all conduct in others towards
themselves, by which they think their happiness is promoted. With
regard to the religious motive, if men believe, as most profess to do,
in the goodness of God, those who think that conduciveness to the
general happiness is the essence, or even only the criterion of
good, must necessarily believe that it is also that which God
approves. The whole force therefore of external reward and punishment,
whether physical or moral, and whether proceeding from God or from our
fellow men, together with all that the capacities of human nature
admit of disinterested devotion to either, become available to enforce
the utilitarian morality, in proportion as that morality is
recognised; and the more powerfully, the more the appliances of
education and general cultivation are bent to the purpose.

So far as to external sanctions. The internal sanction of duty,
whatever our standard of duty may be, is one and the same- a feeling
in our own mind; a pain, more or less intense, attendant on violation
of duty, which in properly cultivated moral natures rises, in the more
serious cases, into shrinking from it as an impossibility. This
feeling, when disinterested, and connecting itself with the pure
idea of duty, and not with some particular form of it, or with any
of the merely accessory circumstances, is the essence of Conscience;
though in that complex phenomenon as it actually exists, the simple
fact is in general all encrusted over with collateral associations,
derived from sympathy, from love, and still more from fear; from all
the forms of religious feeling; from the recollections of childhood
and of all our past life; from self-esteem, desire of the esteem of
others, and occasionally even self-abasement. This extreme
complication is, I apprehend, the origin of the sort of mystical
character which, by a tendency of the human mind of which there are
many other examples, is apt to be attributed to the idea of moral
obligation, and which leads people to believe that the idea cannot
possibly attach itself to any other objects than those which, by a
supposed mysterious law, are found in our present experience to excite
it. Its binding force, however, consists in the existence of a mass of
feeling which must be broken through in order to do what violates
our standard of right, and which, if we do nevertheless violate that
standard, will probably have to be encountered afterwards in the
form of remorse. Whatever theory we have of the nature or origin of
conscience, this is what essentially constitutes it.

The ultimate sanction, therefore, of all morality (external
motives apart) being a subjective feeling in our own minds, I see
nothing embarrassing to those whose standard is utility, in the
question, what is the sanction of that particular standard? We may
answer, the same as of all other moral standards- the conscientious
feelings of mankind. Undoubtedly this sanction has no binding efficacy