on this account, he holds that "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[1]." He
holds that there are such limits to veracity. He even thinks--though
here he is not quite correct--that such limits have been acknowledged
by all moralists[2]. He would have been correct if he had said that
they had been acknowledged by moralists of all schools: the admission
of these limits is not peculiar to Utilitarians. But he vigorously
defends the validity of the general rule, and maintains that, in
considering any possible exception, we have to take account not merely
of the present utility of the falsehood, but of its effect upon the
sanctity of the general principle in the minds of men. The Utilitarian
doctrine is expressly used by him to confirm the ordinary general laws
of the moral consciousness. Nay, these rules--such as the duties of
being temperate and just and benevolent--were, according to Mill,
themselves the result of experiences of utility on the part of our
predecessors, and from them handed down to us by the tradition of the
race. No doubt in this Mill is applying a theoretical view too easily
to a question of history. It is one thing to maintain, as he does,
that utility is the correct test of morality; it is another thing
altogether to say that our ordinary moral rules are the records or
expressions of earlier judgments of utility. The former statement
is made as a controversial statement which is admitted to be so
far doubtful that most men need to be convinced of it. The latter
statement could only be true if nobody had ever doubted the former--if
everybody in past ages had accepted utility as the standard of
morality. But, for our present purpose, his attitude to this question
is of interest only as bringing out the point that the different
schools of ethical thought during last century had a large basis of
common agreement, and that this basis of common agreement was their
acknowledgment of the validity of the moral rules recognised by the
ordinary conscience.

[Footnote 1: Utilitarianism, p. 34.]

[Footnote 2: Ibid., p. 33.]

The Utilitarians no m