Page:The Dial (Volume 75).djvu/134

108 We defined a virtue as a habit which tends to produce a good community, and a vice as one which tends to produce a bad community. In thus judging by results, we agreed in one important respect with the utilitarian school of moralists, among whom Bentham and the two Mills were the most eminent. The traditional view is different; it holds that certain specified classes of actions are vicious, and that abstinence from all these is virtue. It is wicked to murder or steal (except on a large scale); it is wicked to speak ill of those in power, from the Deity to the policeman; above all, it is wicked to have sexual intercourse-outside marriage. These prohibitions may, in our degenerate age, be defended by utilitarian arguments, but in some cases—e. g. refusal of divorce for insanity—the utilitarian arguments are very far-fetched, and are obviously not what is really influencing the minds of those who use them. What is influencing their minds is the view that certain classes of acts are "wicked," quite independently of their consequences. I regard this view as superstitious, but it would take us too far from our theme to argue the question here. I shall therefore assume, without more ado, that actions are to be judged by the results to be expected from actions of that kind, and not by some supposed a priors moral code. I do not mean—what would be obviously impracticable—that we should habitually calculate the effects of our actions. What I mean is that, in deciding what sort of moral instruction should be given to the young, or what sort of actions should be punished by the criminal law, we should do our best to consider what sort of actions will promote or hinder the general well-being. It might also seem as if this were a platitude. Yet a tremendous change would be effected if this platitude were acted upon. Our education, our criminal law, and our standards of praise and blame, would become completely different from what they are at present. How they would be altered, I shall now try to show.

Let us consider one by one the four kinds of excellence which we mentioned, beginning with instinctive happiness.

I mean by this the sort of thing that is diminished by ill-health and destroyed by a bad liver, the kind of delight in life which one finds always more strongly developed in the young of any mammalian species than in the old. I doubt whether there is anything else that makes as much difference to the value of life from the point of view of the person who has to