tarian
morality does recognise in human beings the power of sacrificing their
own greatest good for the good of others. It only refuses to admit that
the sacrifice is itself a good. A sacrifice which does not increase, or
tend to increase, the sum total of happiness, it considers as wasted.
The only self-renunciation which it applauds, is devotion to the
happiness, or to some of the means of happiness, of others; either of
mankind collectively, or of individuals within the limits imposed by the
collective interests of mankind.

I must again repeat, what the assailants of utilitarianism seldom have
the justice to acknowledge, that the happiness which forms the
utilitarian standard of what is right in conduct, is not the agent's own
happiness, but that of all concerned. As between his own happiness and
that of others, utilitarianism requires him to be as strictly impartial
as a disinterested and benevolent spectator. In the golden rule of Jesus
of Nazareth, we read the complete spirit of the ethics of utility. To
do as one would be done by, and to love one's neighbour as oneself,
constitute the ideal perfection of utilitarian morality. As the means of
making the nearest approach to this ideal, utility would enjoin, first,
that laws and social arrangements should place the happiness, or (as
speaking practically it may be called) the interest, of every
individual, as nearly as possible in harmony with the interest of the
whole; and secondly, that education and opinion, which have so vast a
power over human character, should so use that power as to establish in
the mind of every individual an indissoluble association between his own
happiness and the good of the whole; especially between his own
happiness and the practice of such modes of conduct, negative and
positive, as regard for the universal happiness prescribes: so that not
only he may be unable to conceive the possibility of happiness to
himself, consistently with conduct opposed to the general good, but also
that a direct impulse to promote the general good may be in every
individual one of the habitual motives of action, and the sentiments
connected therewith may fill a large and prominent place in every human
being's sentient existence. If the impugners of the utilitarian morality
represented it to their own minds in this its true character, I know not
what recommendation possessed by any other morality they could possibly
affirm to be wanting to it: what more bea