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that which created their original value , would still continue to confer happiness ; they are dissevered from the parent branch , and obtain a growth and vitality of their own . Various good things are conferred by the approbation of others ; and benevolent acts procure their approbation . In conformity with the
foregoing principles , a man who has completed his experience of this connexion , will love approbation more than all which it can bring , and benevolent acts far more than approbation ; and so far from measuring the value of these ,, objects by their results of reward , the idea of their results may never occur to him , and
they will be as truly separate principles of enjoyment , as if they were original instincts of his nature . They are objects of disinterested affection , full of intrinsic happiness : and to resist the practical exercise of such an affection in any case which invites it , is a positive suffering . The fallacies which may find their way into any moral system which takes no notice of a considerable class of these secondary
desires are , beyond calculation , serious . It is from this cause , that Mr . Bentham refuses to take any cognizance of the relation of a volition to the disposition which gave it birth , and contemplates it exclusively in connexion with its extrinsic history . He insulates every human action , in order to take its valuation , and treats it as if it proceeded from a kind of prospective intellectual machine , from a being exclusively drawn by views into the future , and incapable of impulse which has been accumulated from the
past . States of mind considered as causes of action , have no place in his morality . If bad dispositions produce good actions , so much the better for society ; and if bad actions flow from good dispositions , they are none the better for that . This principle of the equal value of all possible motives from which the same volition may arise , though important in its applications to penal jurisprudence , is in ethics a mischievous paradox . In consistency with his fondness for it , Mr . Bentharn seems to recognise no
general rules of conduct , but to try each occasion of action on its own merits ; at least , he would multiply exceptions without the least compunction , when the specific results of such deviations appeared to promise well . Never mind the disposition ; only point the action right , is the spirit of his advice . It is inconceivable how he could so completely have failed to perceive the two points of view , in which mental states or habits of feeling are important to the nio * ~ list ; first , they are themselves , and ,
independentl y of their practical efficiency , sources of an incalculable amount of happiness or misery ; and , secondly , they are , and by a necessity of nature always must be , the most powerful cause of action , often sweeping away , with resistless force , the arithmetic p f outward consequences tq which the Utilitarian patriarch would in trust all the moralities of life . Hence no sound ethical philo-^ phy can exist , till the inherent pleasures and pains of digposi-
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Bentham $ Deontology . 621
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No . 93 . 2 Y
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Sept. 2, 1834, page 621, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2637/page/17/
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