al laws all claiming independent authority, there is no common
umpire entitled to interfere between them; their claims to precedence
one over another rest on little better than sophistry, and unless
determined, as they generally are, by the unacknowledged influence of
considerations of utility, afford a free scope for the action of
personal desires and partialities. We must remember that only in these
cases of conflict between secondary principles is it requisite that
first principles should be appealed to. There is no case of moral
obligation in which some secondary principle is not involved; and if
only one, there can seldom be any real doubt which one it is, in the
mind of any person by whom the principle itself is recognized.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote A: The author of this essay has reason for believing himself
to be the first person who brought the word utilitarian into use. He did
not invent it, but adopted it from a passing expression in Mr. Galt's
_Annals of the Parish_. After using it as a designation for several
years, he and others abandoned it from a growing dislike to anything
resembling a badge or watchword of sectarian distinction. But as a name
for one single opinion, not a set of opinions--to denote the recognition
of utility as a standard, not any particular way of applying it--the
term supplies a want in the language, and offers, in many cases, a
convenient mode of avoiding tiresome circumlocution.]

[Footnote B: An opponent, whose intellectual and moral fairness it is a
pleasure to acknowledge (the Rev. J. Llewellyn Davis), has objected to
this passage, saying, "Surely the rightness or wrongness of saving a man
from drowning does depend very much upon the motive with which it is
done. Suppose that a tyrant, when his enemy jumped into the sea to
escape from him, saved him from drowning simply in order that he might
inflict upon him more exquisite tortures, would it tend to clearness to
speak of that rescue as 'a morally right action?' Or suppose again,
according to one of the stock illustrations of ethical inquiries, that a
man betrayed a trust received from a friend, because the discharge of it
would fatally injure that friend himself or some one belonging to him,
would utilitarianism compel one to call the betrayal 'a crime' as much
as if it had been done from the meanest motive?"

I submit, that he who saves another from drowning in order to kill him
by torture afterwards, does not differ only in m