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Principles of Morals and Legislation/15
the present case comes to the same thing) or (what comes again to the
same thing) to prevent the happening of mischief, pain, evil, or unhappi-
ness to the party whose interest is considered: if that party be the com-
munity in general, then the happiness of the community: if a particular
individual, then the happiness of that individual.
IV. The interest of the community is one of the most general expres-
sions that can occur in the phraseology of morals: no wonder that the
meaning of it is often lost. When it has a meaning, it is this. The commu-
nity is a fictitious body, composed of the individual persons who are
considered as constituting as it were its members. The interest of the
community then is, what is it?—the sum of the interests of the several
members who compose it.
V. It is in vain to talk of the interest of the community, without
understanding what is the interest of the individual. A thing is said to
promote the interest, or to be for the interest, of an individual, when it
tends to add to the sum total of his pleasures: or, what comes to the same
thing, to diminish the sum total of his pains.
VI. An action then may be said to be conformable to then principle
of utility, or, for shortness sake, to utility, (meaning with respect to the
community at large) when the tendency it has to augment the happiness
of the community is greater than any it has to diminish it.
VII. A measure of government (which is but a particular kind of
action, performed by a particular person or persons) may be said to be
conformable to or dictated by the principle of utility, when in like man-
ner the tendency which it has to augment the happiness of the commu-
nity is greater than any which it has to diminish it.
VIII. When an action, or in particular a measure of government, is
supposed by a man to be conformable to the principle of utility, it may
be convenient, for the purposes of discourse, to imagine a kind of law or
dictate, called a law or dictate of utility: and to speak of the action in
question, as being conformable to such law or dictate.
IX. A man may be said to be a partizan of the principle of utility,
when the approbation or disapprobation he annexes to any action, or to
any measure, is determined by and proportioned to the tendency which
he conceives it to have to augment or to diminish the happiness of the
community: or in other words, to its conformity or unconformity to the
laws or dictates of utility.
X. Of an action that is conformable to the principle of utility one
may always say either that it is one that ought to be done, or at least that

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it is not one that ought not to be done. One may say also, that it is right
it should be done; at least that it is not wrong it should be done: that it is
a right action; at least that it is not a wrong action. When thus inter-
preted, the words ought, and right and wrong and others of that stamp,
have a meaning: when otherwise, they have none.
XI. Has the rectitude of this principle been ever formally contested?
It should seem that it had, by those who have not known what they have
been meaning. Is it susceptible of any direct proof? it should seem not:
for that which is used to prove every thing else, cannot itself be proved:
a chain of proofs must have their commencement somewhere. To give
such proof is as impossible as it is needless.
XII. Not that there is or ever has been that human creature at breath-
ing, however stupid or perverse, who has not on many, perhaps on most
occasions of his life, deferred to it. By the natural constitution of the
human frame, on most occasions of their lives men in general embrace
this principle, without thinking of it: if not for the ordering of their own
actions, yet for the trying of their own actions, as well as of those of
other men. There have been, at the same time, not many perhaps, even
of the most intelligent, who have been disposed to embrace it purely and
without reserve. There are even few who have not taken some occasion
or other to quarrel with it, either on account of their not understanding
always how to apply it, or on account of some prejudice or other which
they were afraid to examine into, or could not bear to part with. For
such is the stuff that man is made of: in principle and in practice, in a
right track and in a wrong one, the rarest of all human qualities is con-
sistency.
XIII. When a man attempts to combat the principle of utility, it is
with reasons drawn, without his being aware of it, from that very prin-
ciple itself. His arguments, if they prove any thing, prove not that the
principle is wrong, but that, according to the applications he supposes
to be made of it, it is misapplied. Is it possible for a man to move the
earth? Yes; but he must first find out another earth to stand upon.
XIV. To disprove the propriety of it by arguments is impossible;
but, from the causes that have been mentioned, or from some confused
or partial view of it, a man may happen to be disposed not to relish it.
Where this is the case, if he thinks the settling of his opinions on such a
subject worth the trouble, let him take the following steps, and at length,
perhaps, he may come to reconcile himself to it.
1. Let him settle with himself, whether he would wish to discard this

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principle altogether; if so, let him consider what it is that all his reason-
ings (in matters of politics especially) can amount to?
2. If he would, let him settle with himself, whether he would judge
and act without any principle, or whether there is any other he would
judge an act by?
3. If there be, let him examine and satisfy himself whether the prin-
ciple he thinks he has found is really any separate intelligible principle;
or whether it be not a mere principle in words, a kind of phrase, which at
bottom expresses neither more nor less than the mere averment of his
own unfounded sentiments; that is, what in another person he might be
apt to call caprice?
4. If he is inclined to think that his own approbation or disapproba-
tion, annexed to the idea of an act, without any regard to its conse-
quences, is a sufficient foundation for him to judge and act upon, let him
ask himself whether his sentiment is to be a standard of right and wrong,
with respect to every other man, or whether every man’s sentiment has
the same privilege of being a standard to itself?
5. In the first case, let him ask himself whether his principle is not
despotical, and hostile to all the rest of human race?
6. In the second case, whether it is not anarchial, and whether at this
rate there are not as many different standards of right and wrong as
there are men? and whether even to the same man, the same thing, which
is right to-day, may not (without the least change in its nature) be wrong
to-morrow? and whether the same thing is not right and wrong in the
same place at the same time? and in either case, whether all argument is
not at an end? and whether, when two men have said, “I like this,” and
“I don’t like it,” they can (upon such a principle) have any thing more to
say?
7. If he should have said to himself, No: for that the sentiment which
he proposes as a standard must be grounded on reflection, let him say
on what particulars the reflection is to turn? if on particulars having
relation to the utility of the act, then let him say whether this is not
deserting his own principle, and borrowing assistance from that very
one in opposition to which he sets it up: or if not on those particulars, on
what other particulars?
8. If he should be for compounding the matter, and adopting his
own principle in part, and the principle of utility in part, let him say how
far he will adopt it?
9. When he has settled with himself where he will stop, then let him

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