Utilitarianism

Передня обкладинка
Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts, and Green, 1864 - 120 стор.
We are continually informed that Utility is an uncertain standard, which every different person interprets differently, and that there is no safety but in the immutable, ineffaceable, and unmistakable dictates of justice, which carry their evidence in themselves, and are independent of the fluctuations of opinion. One would suppose from this that on questions of justice there could be no controversy; that if we take that for our rule, its application to any given case could leave us in as little doubt as a mathematical demonstration.

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Сторінка 53 - No reason can be given why the general happiness is desirable, except that each person, so far as he believes it to be attainable, desires his own happiness. This, however, being a fact, we have not only all the proof which the case admits of, but all which it is possible to require, that happiness is a good: that each person's happiness is a good to that person, and the general happiness, therefore, a good to the aggregate of all persons.
Сторінка 24 - 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.
Сторінка 10 - The creed which accepts as the foundation of morals Utility, or the Greatest Happiness principle, holds that actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness. By happiness is intended pleasure, and the absence of pain; by unhappiness, pain and the privation of pleasure.
Сторінка 13 - ... a sense of dignity, which all human beings possess in one form or other, and in some, though by no means in exact, proportion to their higher faculties, and which is so essential a part of the happiness of those in whom it is strong that nothing which conflicts with it could be otherwise than momentarily an object of desire to them.
Сторінка 22 - All the grand sources, in short, of human suffering are in a great degree, many of them almost entirely, conquerable by human care and effort; and though their removal is grievously slow— though a long succession of generations will perish in the breach before the conquest is completed, and this world becomes all that, if will and knowledge were not wanting, it might easily be made— yet every mind sufficiently intelligent and generous to bear a part, however small and unconspicuous, in the endeavour,...
Сторінка 89 - Thus the moralities which protect every individual from being harmed by others, either directly or by being hindered in his freedom of pursuing his own good, are at once those which he himself has most at heart, and those which he has the strongest interest in publishing and enforcing by word and deed. It is by a person's observance of these, that his fitness to exist as one of the fellowship of human beings, is tested and decided; for on that depends his being a nuisance or not to those with whom...
Сторінка 28 - In the case of abstinences indeed — of things which people forbear to do from moral considerations, though the consequences in the particular case might be beneficial — it would be unworthy of an intelligent agent not to be consciously aware that the action is of a class which, if practised generally, would be generally injurious, and that this is the ground of the obligation to abstain from it.
Сторінка 59 - ... and persists in acting on them, even though these pleasures are much diminished, by changes in his character or decay of his passive sensibilities, or are outweighed by the pains which the pursuit of the purposes may bring upon him.
Сторінка 12 - Few human creatures would consent to be changed into any of the lower animals, for a promise of the fullest allowance of a beast's pleasures : no intelligent human being would consent to be a fool, no instructed person would be an ignoramus, no person of feeling and conscience would be selfish and hase, even though they should be persuaded that the fool, the dunce, or the rascal is better satisfied with his lot than they are with theirs.
Сторінка 4 - Yet to support their pretensions there ought either to be some one fundamental principle or law, at the root of all morality, or if there be several, there should be a determinate order of precedence among them ; and the one principle, or the rule for deciding between the various principles when they conflict, ought to be self.evident.

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Про автора (1864)

John Stuart Mill, Classical economist, was born in 1806. His father was the Ricardian economist, James Mill. John Stuart Mill's writings on economics and philosophy were prodigious. His "Principles of Political Economy, With Some of Their Applications to Social Philosophy," published in 1848, was the leading economics textbook of the English-speaking world during the second half of the 19th century. Some of Mill's other works include "Considerations on Representative Government," "Auguste Comte and Positivism," "The Subjection of Women," and "Three Essays on Religion." John Mill died in 1873.

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