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nant character ; to obey him is represented as the height of wicked ness and folly ; equally silly and wicked would it be to obey the will of the Supreme Deity , were he , like Satan , to prescribe conduct whose issue was suffering-. If God be not benevolent , devotion is a crime . When man is regarded as the subject of Providence , our criterion , therefore , still remains the same . Now
these three positions of a human being , —the solitary , the social , the religious , —exhaust all his possible conditions . The virtues to which each gives rise are characterised by the same quality , — the tendency to happiness . This , then , being essential and peculiar to virtue , may be taken as its defining property , and applied to all voluntary actions and states as the measure of their moral character .
There is , however , no reason a priori , why virtue should have only one peculiar and discriminating quality . As a triangle or a circle has exclusive possession of many properties ^ any one of which will serve to define it ; as an herbivorous quadruped may be known either by its feet or by its teeth ; as a member of parliament may be described , either as a person who votes in the
legislature , or as one who franks letters , or as a man that may get into debt without going to prison ; so may virtue comprise a group of co-ordinate qualities , all equally fitted to supply its definition . It is not impossible , therefore , that there may be other accounts of virtue , quite as correct as the foregoing ; because the Utilitarian
is right , it does not follow that they are wrong ; nor has he , antecedently to examination of their systems , any greater title to despise them , than has a geometer , who defines a triangle by its three sides , to deride another who defines it by its three angles . The intolerant scorn with which Mr . Bentham thinks it incumbent
upon him to treat all schemes of morality different from his own , —a scorn greatly exceeding in offensiveness of expression anything which we recollect in modern scientific controversy , —is unworthy of his character as an acute and original philosopher , and , what is worse , every pungent phrase of unjust derision will entail a further delay in the diffusion of his great principle . lie appears
actually to have persuaded himself , that from the time of the Greek sophists to the present day , there has existed among the moralists a sort of hereditary conspiracy to delude and enthral mankind . He seems to have entertained an idea more lively than the occasion required , of the alarm and shame into which all
philosophers would be thrown by his exposure of them . In a relenting moment , indeed , he appears to have conceived it possible that some of the professors of the craft might not be hypocrites ; but then they were dupes . In the limits of one disjunctive proposition he imprisons them all , impostors or fools . The Greek philosophers , having the misfortune to belong to Mr . Bent ham ' s doting old enemy , antiquity , come in for the nardest blows ; it is impossible to keep terms with the Murnmum bonum , and it is
Untitled Article
Bentham'i Deontology . 615
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Sept. 2, 1834, page 615, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2637/page/11/
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