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 discover with regard to an action, which we are contemplating in the future, whether it would be right for us to do it, we have only to ask: Could I do anything else instead which would produce more pleasure? If I could, it will be wrong to do the action; if I could not, it will be right. Our theory does then, even in its first part, profess to give us an absolutely universal criterion of right and wrong; and similarly also an absolutely universal criterion of what ought or ought not to be done.

But though it does this, there is something else which it does not do. It only asserts, in this first part, that the producing of a maximum of pleasure is a characteristic, which did and will belong, as a matter of fact, to all right voluntary actions (actual or possible), and only to right ones; it does not, in its first part, go on to assert that it is because they possess this characteristic that such actions are right. This second assertion is the first which it goes on to make in its second part; and everybody can see, I think, that there is an important difference between the two assertions.