he does sacrifice his own good to the general good; they only hold that he will be acting equally rightly, if he does not. But there are some philosophers who seem to hold that it must always be an agent’s positive duty to do what is best for himself—always, for instance, to do what will conduce most to his own “perfection,” or his own salvation, or his own “self-realisation”; who imply, therefore, that it would be his duty so to act, even if the action in question did not have the best possible consequences upon the whole.
Now the question, whether this view is true, in either of these two different forms, would, of course, be of no practical importance, if it were true that, as a matter of fact, every action which most promotes the general good always also most promotes the agent’s own good, and vice versa. And many philosophers have taken great pains to try to show that this is the case: some have even tried to show that it must necessarily be the case. But it seems to me that none of the arguments which have been used to prove this proposition really do show that it is by any means universally true. A case, for instance, may arise in
