ined it
because they are rules whose practice has, in the history of
the race, repeatedly been found to produce desirable results.
Even the conception of justice, which has by so many thinkers
been held to be absolute, to inhere somehow in the nature
of things, is by Mill demonstrated at length to be merely a
particularly highly regarded utility:

It appears ... 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 where 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.[2]

[Footnote 2: Mill: _Utilitarianism_ (London, 1907), p. 95.]

Indeed it is clear, that in the processes of natural selection
those tribes would survive whose rules of morality did in
general promote welfare. And it is the business of reflection,
says the Empiricist, not to accept either his own conviction
or those of others on ethical questions, but in cases of ambiguity
to establish, after inquiry, a standard the practice of
which promises the widest benefits in human happiness.

ETHICS AND LIFE. All ethical theories are more or less
deliberately intended as definitions of the good, and as instruments
for its attainment. They must, therefore, be immediately
tested by their fruits in life. An ethical theory
that is only verbally concerned with the good, but does not
in practice promote human welfare, is futile pedantry or worse.
Reflection upon conduct arises in man's attempt to control
the nature which is his inheritance in the interests of his
happiness. Men have learned through experience that to
follow each impulse without forethought brings them pain,
misery, and sometimes destruction. They have found that
to achieve happiness some harmony must be established
between competing desires, and that only by balances,
adjustment, and control, can they make the most of the nature
which is theirs inescapably. This nature consists, as we have
seen, in certain specific tendencies to action. Men are natively
endowed with instincts to love, to fight, to be curious,
to long for and enjoy the companionship of their fellows, to
wish pri