Page:Philosophical Review Volume 3.djvu/432

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416
THE PHILOSOPHICAL REVIEW.
[Vol. III.

doctrine from which they follow, still less as a refutation of it; it would be ridiculous to do so. If any one finds those consequences immoral, or abominable, or any other hard name, it must be in some other sense of those words than the theory before him recognizes; it must be by an appeal to some other standard of goodness and morality than the one from which those consequences follow. He will find it bad in a sense in which it never claimed to be good, and inconsistent with a standard with which it has no business to be consistent. As a bit of science it will not suffer at his hands.

But it might be said that it is only by treating a part of the doctrine under consideration as if it were the whole that its logical outcome is made to appear to be a multiplicity of standards, with their bizarre, though not immoral, consequences. It is quite true, it may be said, that if the satisfaction of one of your desires is good for you, the satisfaction of that and another one of yours is for you still better. It is also quite true that if you do not care to have Jones gratified, the satisfaction of one of his desires, in addition to that of one of your own, will add nothing to your proper satisfaction, will be in nowise better for you. But it will be better for Jones, or rather will be better for you and Jones together. This belongs to the doctrine in hand quite as much as the part of it which was above given exclusive consideration. Neither you nor Jones, perhaps, will value the satisfaction of two desires more than that of one of them alone if the second desire is to belong to the other man; but the other man will value it, and its value to him, plus the value of the satisfaction of the first desire to the first man, amount to more than either of these values separately; if there are two satisfactions, either one alone is less than itself, plus another. But if so, the satisfaction of two desires is better than that of one, not alone when they belong to the same person, but generally; if the satisfaction of one desire is good, the satisfaction of more desires is better, and the ideal limit of this sort of thing, the best, is the satisfaction of all the desires of everybody. The satisfaction of all the desires of one person is good, but it can